Daisy Fumes

In class this week, we had a mapping moment. We all took to a different part of the white board wall and unleashed our artist dreams onto it with dry erase markers. We wrote down mediums, concepts, curiosities, and more. Mine personally looked like this:

A little all over the place, but it’s very straightforward to my soul. However, there is no more room and I need to keep this somewhere where it can grow and not be in the way of anyone wanting to use a whiteboard. So I decided to try out are.na as a place to keep my “curiosity syllabus.”

I’m still figuring out this tool and sectioning out my thoughts, but already new players have made it into the game and I love that.

After creating this homebase for my syllabus, I needed to explore Rhizome to find an artist that really resonated with me.

After going through the artists, I landed on Harry Sanderson who was interviewed by Harry Burke. This artist does projected work that takes from the audience to create the piece. Often his work critiques new technology.

I chose this artist because it had many components that I want to explore in my own work. Projection, human input, and soft material output are at the top of my list. The human input is especially important as I want to make art with humans, for humans, and about humans. Projection has been interesting to me lately because it’s a great way to fuse the digital and physical world at large scale. Soft materials are a recent interest of mine. I used them for my gift project and have been thinking about them quite a bit ever since. They have something of a kindness to them that is so approachable. I also have heard about projections happening on cheesecloth to give something of a hologram effect and I’m really curious about that too.

A quote that I really liked from the interview was:

“…that you could touch something that was a simulated object hanging in the space of a gallery that wasn’t actually there. I found that more poetic and emotive and moving, in a more personal sense; something that would be touching, somehow. “

I want to make art that can be touched and be touching the soul of the viewer. Harry talking about it being poetic just makes me want to explore the idea of touch and feeling even more.

Next I went on Recess to find an art project that I really resonated with. I ended up connecting with one of the very first projects, then scrolled all the way through just to be sure I wanted to pick it. I picked Offering of Dreams by AYDO. AYDO is actually two artists (A young Yu & Nicholas Oh) collaborating together. I chose this project because I like the connectivity it provides humans in a time when connecting with each other feels so important. This really resonates with me because I really want humans to connect more or least remember that they can. The pandemic separated us and made it really easy to see anyone as “others.” This project was also into tackling this feeling of separation by intimately sharing their dreams and dreams collected in performance form. These took the artists being vulnerable which I find so admirable and important for art with emotions.

In the description of the piece it says “earning for loved ones and communal solidarity in the wake of the pandemic, they collected dreams from different generations of immigrants from Asian-American communities.” I love this because I’ve been considering collecting something emotional from people to create something lately. I don’t exactly know the direction or even the collection, but some non theoretical data with real humans attached and their exposed feelings.

If I could interact with this piece I would explore changing the lights based on the heartbeats of the audience members. This would change how it feels to perform these dreams because the lighting would be unpredictable and be feedback on the status of the audience. This could end up changing the feelings of the performers and even the energy of the performance.

Looking at the curiosity syllabus and the art I have just explored, I definitely want to add my interest in human emotion collection to it. I’m also wondering if I’m interested in performance art. I used to be on a military style marching team and loved putting on a show. I also love being on stage. Maybe it’s time I explored, at least once, what it would look like to bring that into my art.