519 Project

For those interested, THP 519 is a Directing New Works / Devising New Works kind of class.  A cohort of artists in academia get together to create art using all sorts of different methods.  This is a very reductionist explanation of all that goes down during this process, but pretty much sums up the basics.

Over the course of this...um...course...I will be blogging my experience throughout this project instead of keeping a paper journal.  I will be sharing frustrations, excitements, enlightenments, and hangups (among a bunch of other shit).

Let me point out that I won't be using any names during this blog and I will try to set the blog to private so only those with the direct link can find it.  We'll see how that goes.

Anyways, to get the ball rolling I'd like to divulge a little secret:  the running title for our project.  Honestly, it's not much of a secret since those of you reading this are working on the project as well...nevertheless...drumroll please!

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF ESCHER: A MOBIUS TRIP

Cool.  Got that out of my system.

Basically, we are taking a look at Edgar Allen Poems alongside Maurits Cornelis Escher's artwork with a little groundwork in Quantum Theory/Mechanics/Physics/Lobsters.

For pre-semester launch work, we all had to read The Fall of the House of Usher along with some other Poe work, familiarize ourselves with the artwork by M.C. Hammer...erm...Escher, and read a book about Quantum Hoohah.

After doing a little base research, we had to write up a couple sentences making connections or observations and whatnot between the trinity of wtf.

For my Poe research I read:
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Masque of the Red Death
The Cask of Amontillado

For my Escher research I looked at:
http://www.mcescher.com/ Focusing mainly on Early Work 1916-1922 as I was already familiar with the tessellations and impossible structures that appear in his later work

For my Quantum Skadoosh I read:
Four Stories of the Schrodinger's Cat by Murat Uhrayoglu
http://www.higgo.com/quantum/laymans.htm A Lazy Layman's Guide to Quantum Physics

After performing my research, I made the following connections:

"One of the resounding concepts from Quantum Physics in mind was the concept that our consciousness affects the behavior of subatomic particles.  Meaning that at any given moment, that which we do and don’t know is happening all around us.  The negative space exists parallel to the positive. 

MC Escher started out mostly working in woodcutting.  Not foundational in additive creation (like painting, where what you put down “is”) Escher’s work deals with taking away in order to create.  His art shows a consciousness of the parallel “negative space,” the alternate possibilities that exist at the same time as what we perceive.

Likewise, Edgar Allen Poe writes in a way that explores opposites.  He explores love and hate (positive and negative) as not simply opposite emotions, but as enigmatically blending into each other.  He explores the incongruence of universal emotions as though they are severed from the conditions of time and space.  He writes in a way that explores the presently occurring and the possibly occurring in the same way that Escher explores that which is and that which isn’t, all paralleling the quantum theory of many worlds."

And that is where I will leave you today.

We have all split up into three groups to approach our research more in depth and share our findings with the cohort.  I'm in the Escher group, so expect to see some trippy shit soon.

Until next time!