MAMMA MIA

Mamma Mia! is a stage musical written by British playwright Catherine Johnson, based on the songs of ABBA, composed by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulvaeus, former members of the band.

It was an amazing night, the songs and visual effect were perfect, especially all the audiences and actors sang and danced together at the end of show, which was really interesting and exciting.

Essay Outline for Tutorial with Jane Madsen

Title:

The interaction between graphic language and the participation of audience

The research question:

How participation art and modern graphic design interact with each other?

Keywords:

Communication /   participation /   planar graph /  audience / 

Historical Context:

1.      Original graphic design is a type of language used for communicating. You use it to tell someone about something that they want, or that you think they want, or that someone else thinks they want. As a result, it is a way for transmitting information and it is often designed as planar form, such as book, poster and photograph.

2.      In contemporary art, a lot of artists combine graphic design with participation art. They focus on the participation of audience and the communication between their work and audience.

View Point:

1.      Connecting audience’s participation with an artwork is an interactive way to express artist’s concept.

2.      Using the planar graphs into participative work is a way to make graphic work to be visual and spatial.

3.      Experience and communication are to be more and more important in a visual work.

Research: Leandro Erlich’s Bâtiment artwork

Building a disorientation of space can excite viewer’s interactivity

In the modern exhibition space design, artist often use visual disorientation of graphic patterns to attract viewers’ attention, which can create a tremendous sensorial excitation for people inside the space. Besides, the visual disorientation often refers to the special using of shapes, lights, colours and images. Particularly, using graphics as elements to build a 3D effect is very popular in the modern artists. There are some stimulating disorientation works to be argued.

To start with an Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich’s Bâtiment artwork, it uses a illustration of street building and a huge mirror to create an interactive optical illusion, inviting visitors to position themselves as through climbing windows and doorframes. The work aims to challenge the audience’s comprehension
of reality by using ordinary elements of urban life.

As it can be seen from the photos, the artist shows a powerful creativity and imagination in the field about space use and illusion effect. More specifically, he creates an optical illusion through the reflection of people who appear to be weightless. Visitors are encouraged to walk around the outside of the building, scaling the walls and jumping from window to window. Of course, all of those actions are performed on the floor and reflect into the mirror, which looks real. The disorientation attracts the visitors’ senses that playfully interact with the large-scale installation and this new form of reality. Visitors love it when art or design is this much fun; therefore, it is successful to focus on the interactivity and participation. In this way, as a typical graphic pattern, the illustration of the building is used to create a 3-D effect that shows an interactivity of graphics using. In addition, it also express that graphic image not just a plane patterns, it also can be used in a vivid and stimulating way.

Lucian Freud

 Lucian Freud (1922-2011) was one of the great realist painters of the twenieth century. Freud had a life-long preoccupation with the human face and figure. Family, friends and lovers were his subjects and, sometimes, when no-one else was available, himself, Sitters were drawn from all walks of life, from the aristocracy to the criminal underworld, but he rarely took on commissions. Freud 's portraits often record the life of a relationship. In fact, I am not really interested in his work, because the painting are a little bit traditional and meticulous for me. 

Research: YAYOI KUSAMA -- TATE MODERN

 In terms of the way of participation, exhibition space can be said to be an excellent use of color change carriers. If people have an experience in a disorientation of colour space or huge installation, a close participatory relationship will be built and influence audiences’ feeling and emotion. In the meantime, viewers are led to come into the conceptual world that the artist wants to express. For instance, in Yayoi Kusama’s art works, there is a huge installation work called Kusama’s Peep Show or Endless Love Show.

A mirrored hexagonal room with coloured lights that flashed in time to piped-in rock and roll, peep show, like its bawdy namesake, was experienced by views. Kusama experimented with the visual seduction of kinetic art to promote the aphrodisiacal qualities of fame in an environment. In the twist, rather than ogling an anonymous ‘star’ on the Peep Show’s stage, the only image one saw was one’s own – reflected ad infinitum in the mirrored walls, surrounded by blinking lights, for all the word like a kinetic marquee. Endless Love Show is also exhibited at the Tate Modern Museum in London, when I stayed in the space; the colourful and variegated colours make powerful attraction with the mirrored reflection. This work consists of blinking red, white, green and blue lights in a hexagonal-shaped mirrored room. It is a special experiment for viewers because of the flicker effect, which is created by the phantasmagoric colors. 

Additionally, looking at the beautification of the mirrored room, the original limited space was redesigned like a never-ending word by the coloured lights. Through the participation of the show, viewers are led into Kusama’s hallucinogenic word and made sense personally. Overall, it can be offered a close experience of face-to-face communication and participation by the diversified use of colours, just like the endless love happens to you.

JUST SKETCH

游牧商店。年轻的中国设计师们

年轻的中国设计师，以游牧商店的形式把自己的设计带到世界各地，主旨不在于卖多少而是展示自己的想法和设计，很喜欢这样自由的形式。在这里，那些被用烂掉的中国传统元素，不造作不商业不腻味，清新自然的融入在现代元素中。

Mirror Wall at sattchi gallery by Jeppe Hein

Mirror Wall at sattchi gallery by Jeppe Hein

This work is really amazing and the interactive effect attracts a lot viewers. Something similar happens when visitors get close to Mirror Wall . What at first appears to be a large but straightforward mirror begins to move slightly when approached. Viewing one’s vibrating reflection in it and the accompanying distorted backdrop of the gallery space creates a sense of dizziness and a strange feeling of separation from the familiar. It prompts us instinctively to re-calibrate our spatial awareness and our relationship to what we see and where we are.

Interaction design and participation design are the special areas which I want to get more research, and really want to reflect in my own work. My essay also pay attentation to this area. That work is a good example for my research.

 

 

The Start of My Main Project

The start point of my main project focuses on urbanites' surface emotion which is ostensible and unreal. In view of existing situation of modern people, I want to explore the idea of mentality of urbanites, and pay attention to the strange and lonesome mind which are cased by the tremendous work pressure.

I think that a lot of people ignore what they want, lose happiness and miss their emotion. In addition, they use an invisible mask to conceal their emotion in this complex and stressful social condition. As a result, i uesd mask to carry on an installation. In the progress, I broke the "surface mask", strung and hang up them.

The chips of the masks look sad and vacuous in the swinging state. In the first step, i just did one mask, but i think about to create the installation by 50 masks or more than this. After that i also think about to take a vedio which refers to the city life, and then use projection to show the images in the masks.

That's some starting ideas of my main project in the first step, I will spend more time to develop it and try to use more ways to do the work.

The ideas, sketch of "human mask"

ALEXANDRA BIRCKEN

I am interested in this artist's work very much because of the beautuful details. She gave the used or dumped stuff a new life in those installations.

Bircken creates assemblages featuring everyday ephemera like wood, knitted fragments, concrete, cloth, wax, screws, wire & steel.Her work has strong references to traditional craft practices and to the natural world, from which she sources her materials.She studied at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London.

Alexandra Bircken’s unmonumental stretcher frame sculptures are informed by her background in fashion design and interest in the radical aspects of handmade culture. A fragmentary array of irregular objects and organic shapes, often coloured by the artist, is hung and displayed on strings and aluminium rods.

 

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/alexandra_bircken.htm