About my NYFA (New York Foundation for the Arts) Project
100! Nondigital to Digital (kathryn Arnold)
My project connects with creating a new media interface based upon my ongoing nondigital series 100!. This project grows from my interest in how the grid defines boundaries, in much the same way as language defines transitory perceptual experience. The project explores the nature of the grid at the same time providing audience engagement and kinetic interactivity within a digital framework.
To the mathematician and engineer it is a form representing near infinity, to the art historian it is an innovation with the Modernist grid and to me, it is an exploration into the nature of the grid and its defining relationship to transitory experience, similar to the defining aspect of language and words. It reveals and contrasts the diaphanous character of thoughts and associations within substantial and solid form.
My project grows from my interest in how the grid defines boundaries, in much the same way as language defines transitory perceptual experience. I have developed a fascination with 100 things and the grid defining these. The idea of 100 things as thoughts, ideas, and images being all active in the mind, fleeting and temporary yet are not active all at once, but activated in the associations and relationships generated. Wow, there is no end to these 100 things when one includes the associational relationships. And they are all transitory, moving along so quickly across ones thoughts, barely noticed. So many! So fast!
The form of this interest evolved into an actual grid in recent works. The concept of the grid becomes an actual entity filled with 100 10" x 10" canvasses, the end size being 10 squared. The factorial equation for the rearrangements possible is 100! (100 factorial). This equation refers to the arrangement possibilities as infinite. The parts can be moved by the viewer, like real life, nothing is static, all is transitory. Yet it still keeps a sense of underlying structure in the realm of pure chaos and chance.
Raphael Rubenstein (Art in America) posed a question while curating my very first 100! artwork into the exhibition "Perspectives" - "How many of these arrangements can be considered 'aesthetic'?" while noting the shear impossibility of the task . The answer could possibly happen with this project! I wish to develop a more rapid way of engaging the viewer in the process of arranging these parts. Our time and place is built upon contemporary digital applications which increase the speed for everything i.e. phones, internet access, travels, shopping. I plan to use these relevant aspects of contemporary life by using digital applications and speed with my 100! in creating an actively engaging interactive digital projected piece. The work will be designed and exhibited in such a way as to intrigue preexisting members of the arts community and also engage audiences who are comfortable with digital technology, resulting with connection to the fine art world. The project will be interfaced to create digitally interactive opportunities for those with no experience base in these processes and will assist in bridging the digital divide. Surveys will be distributed to examine if the project has met these goals.
Development of this project began February 2010. It commences with photography of one of my existing 100! works. The images will be digitally edited specifically for the Flash application or other JavaScript based application. A database will be created and a Flash and/or JavaScript specialist will develop the application/tool necessary to create the interactivity needed. After this, the images will be inserted. The exhibition location will be in San Francisco, either in my studio's exhibition space (Site 301) or another S.F. exhibition area. The exhibition will be promoted though the use of publicity including targeted press releases. The end result will be a New Media projected artwork with one hundred 10" x 10" parts that can be rearranged by the user. This takes my physical interactive pieces into the user-friendly realm of digital application. Support from NYFA as a fiscal sponsor allows me to access funding which will be used to meet the photography and development costs, technology hardware costs, and exhibition and publicity costs.
This project is urgent and meets current needs of my long-term artistic career development, yet has been in mind incubating as I have been creating these sets of 100! pieces. It is the next stone to be stepped upon as I continue my artistic journey as I create this linkage of the nonphysical world to the physical and then back again {physical (meaning the actual artworks) to nonphysical (meaning projections)} This end form also creates additional sets of meanings and references. This innovative project will lay a framework which later I can juxtapose and/or layer additional elements of images and language-based references as a continuation of my artistic works.
