APD Week 9 - Play and Abstraction

APD Week 9 – Play and Abstraction

Theme

This weeks theme was easily one of the most challenging themes to wrap my head around. The idea of abstraction could be defined as a way  of simplifying art. Or the world around us, removing the categories we afford to 'things'.

This idea of detaching from reality, was something i found hard to do do intrinsicly, and i reverted to using real world objects to derive this from.

Methods

As i couldnt create a result i was happy with simply through my own imagination, I used chickpeas and lentis to act as a base for the animations. I recorded myself moving them around randomly in a bowl, then in after effects, sepreated the moving parts from the bowl.

From here it was a process of manipulating the image, so it resembled nothing of the original real world counterpart.

Context

The work has influences from Cubism which ' reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then realigned these within a shallow, relieflike space' (Rewald, 2004), With the idea of taking the existing motion, and shapes but minimizing any depth information by using flat colors. Randomness and non uniformity is something present in many abstract works, and the free flowing nature of the seeds helped with this.

Reflection

The process of creating this weeks response was quite hectic, i went through neumous ideas such as creating a platforming game out of abstract shapes pulled from an image, or even a  written response, but thiey felt either too conventional or impossible to pull off in time. While i felt that this response could have been developed further, specifically with the adition of sound (perhaps the movements could be tied to a soundtrack), I was happy with the result, and the outcome was relatively aesthetically pleasing.

Refrences

Rewald, S., 2004. [online] Metmuseum.org. Available at: <https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/cube/hd_cube.htm> 

Downloads:

Download File: mixed.mp4
Download File: chickpeas-01.mp4