Artist Research: Movement/Motion

Heather Hansen (Interview with the Raw Book) 

How did you come to adopt ‘Kinetic Drawing’ as your primary style?‘Kinetic Drawing’ is just lack of a better word, any drawing is kinetic, it could be ‘Body Drawing’ but I just stick with ‘Kinetic’. I discovered it through a series of events, the first one being when I moved here from France. I was in a year of transition. I really didn’t want to move back to the States, I came back kicking and screaming. There was a boy involved. I was just having a really hard time so I decided I needed some daily practice that would help me transition. I started to keep a journal and everyday I would dance or do yoga and draw. I decided to commit to it for a year, so I made it public and sooner or later I started winding the two together. Instead of doing one and then the other the just kind of came together. I was doing a lot of drawing in my sketchbooks to music, like dancing but just with my hands on small scale. Then I went to the beach with my son and we were playing in the sand and I was drawing with my toes. That’s kind of when I realised I should go bigger and do this with my whole body. It’s been a long process of discovery finding out what I think looks good and what just looks messy. There’s still a lot left to explore too. 

Images from here 

Interview with lululemon: 

We’re designed to move and move a lot, all the time, and I feel better when I do.
A lot of times when you’re in a difficult transition, it’s because you’re hanging on to the past. This practice was a way to centre me now and move forward.
Drawing is a way to journal the feelings and experiences that I’m having without being too linear – it’s an expressive way to get it out of my body.
She was inspired by playing in the sand on the beach. She feels that more artist are exploring themes towards movement of embodied arts.

Bruce Shapiro:

THE ART OF MOTION CONTROL

"Motion Control" is an industry term for computer-controlled movement in applications like robotics and CNC.  This technology has revolutionized  industrial  production and design,  but until recently was extremely expensive and complex.

Inspiration

Shylights: Beautiful Unfolding Kinetic Lights That Bloom like Flowers

 

Edison’s Cradle? A Kinetic Toy Reinvented with Light

Artist Research: Kinetic Art

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What is Kinetic Art? - CharacteristicsIn visual art, the term kinetic art, derived from the Greek word kinesis, refers to works that incorporate real or apparent movement. It explores how things look when they move, so in its widest definition, kinetic art embraces a huge number of different art forms, as well as media types and styles. Thus, for instance, it may include cinematic and animation art, happenings and other types of performance art such as mime, clockwork/ clocktower figurines, stroboscopic or light-related artworks (Lumino Kinetic art), land art or any artifact that disappears (snowman) or undergoes a process of visual change, robotic art, motion graphics and other artworks created with new media technologies. It also incorporates Op art paintings, drawings and prints, whose 'motion' is merely an optical illusion. The most famous works of Kinetic art, however, are various types of hand-powered or motor-powered sculpture byJean Tinguely, and mobiles invented by Alexander Calder, whose movement is caused by air currents. 

History and DevelopmentAlthough Futurism should be credited with the conceptual introduction of motion into art, the actual word 'kinetic' was first applied to the visual arts by the brothers Antoine Pevsner (1884-1962) and Naum Gabo (1890-1977) in their Realistic Manifesto (1920), which annunciated the ideals ofConstructivism. One of Gabo's earliest works, Kinetic Sculpture (Standing Wave) (1919-20, Tate, London), was an electrically powered strip of wire which oscillated rapidly from side to side, creating the illusion of solid matter and thus simulating the replacement of volume by space. He was joined by Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956) who turned away from painting to create a range of suspended geometric-shaped plywood objects, such as Hanging Construction No 12 (1919, George Costakis Collection). These works showed how mass could dissolve into subtle effects of movement and light. Meanwhile, at theBauhaus design school in Germany, the Hungarian designer Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was producing his Light-Space-Modulator (1922-30, Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University) and other works involving mechanical movement, and in New York (1920), Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) - having already created crude prototypes like Bicycle Wheel (1913, George Pompidou Centre) - was also investigating movement with his Rotative Plaques (Rotary Glass Plate and Rotary Demisphere) in collaboration with Man Ray. 

Alexander Calder: Mobiles and StabilesFollowing the theoretical foresight of the Futurists, Gabo's vibrating wire, Rodchenko's suspended plywood and Duchamp's junk art, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) made motion the core of his aesthetics. Influenced by lateSurrealism, and 20th century painters such as the Dutchman Piet Mondrian and the Spaniard Joan Miro, the engineer-trained Calder created a world of weightless linear sculptures (mobiles and stabiles), moving, turning and dancing on air. Indeed, for almost two decades he was the leading exponent of moving sculpture. 

1950s GrowthThe 1950s witnessed a new interest in artistic motion, as evidenced by the Le Mouvement exhibition in 1955 at the Rene Gallery, Paris, which showcased works by established names like Calder and Duchamp plus newcomers like the Israeli artist Yaacov Agam (b.1928) (the pioneer of spectator participation art), the Belgian painter and designer Pol Bury (1922-2005), the Venezuelan experimental artist Jesus Rafael Soto (1923-2005), the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925-91) and the Hungarian painter Victor Vasarely (1906-97). Other kinetic artists coming to the fore included the Greek sculptor Takis (Panayotis Vassilakis) (b.1925), and the Hungarian-born constructivist Nicolas Schoffer (1912-92). 

Golden Age (1960-75)Kinetic art flourished throughout the period (c.1960-1975). In 1960, Jean Tinguely produced his extraordinary self-destructing sculpture Homage to New York (1960, Museum of Modern Art, New York). In 1961, a major international art museum review of kinetic art entitled "Movement in Art" showed to huge audiences throughout Europe. In 1964, the Rene Gallery held Le Mouvement IIexhibition in Paris, while in 1965, "The Responsive Eye", a major Kinetic and Op Art show was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Kinetic art also enjoyed significant success at the Venice Biennale, the Sao Paulo Biennale and the Paris Biennale during the 60s. To maintain its momentum, the movement borrowed from the early modernists and also from contemporary styles, materials and high-tech media. New variants were formed, including Lumino Kinetic art and Optical Art.

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Synopsis

Kinetic art - art that depends on movement for its effects - has its origins in the Dadaist andConstructivist movements that emerged in the 1910s. It flourished into a lively avant-garde trend following the landmark exhibition Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise Rene in Paris in 1955, after which it attracted a wide international following. At its heart were artists who were fascinated by the possibilities of movement in art - its potential to create new and more interactive relationships with the viewer and new visual experiences. It inspired new kinds of art that went beyond the boundaries of the traditional, handcrafted, static object, encouraging the idea that the beauty of an object could be the product of optical illusions or mechanical movement. But the group was split between those such as Jean Tinguely, who were interested in employing actual movement, and those such as Victor Vasarely, who were interested in optical effects and the illusion of movement and went on to be more closely associated with the Op art movement. Kinetic art thrived for a decade and achieved considerable prominence. But Op art proved almost too successful in capturing the public's imagination, while Kinetic art eventually began to be seen as a stale and accepted genre. By the mid-1960s, these developments led to a decline in artists' interest in movement.  

Optical Art: http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/

Kinetic art marked an important revival of the tradition of Constructivism, or Constructive art, that had been a presence in modern art since the 1910s. Parts of the movement also revived its utopian optimism, talking once again of the potential for art to spread into new areas of everyday life and to embrace technology in ways appropriate to the modern world.
But the movement also borrowed much from Dada, and in this respect parts of it were highly skeptical about the potential of technology to improve human life. Artists who were inspired by Dada, such as Jean Tinguely, used their work to express a more anarchic, satirical attitude to machines and movement. They suggested that rather than being humanity's helpmate, the machine might become her master.
Although ostensibly fascinated by machines, some Kinetic artists developed a profound interest in analogies between machines and human bodies. Rather than regarding machines and human bodies as radically different - one being soulless and functional, the other being governed by the sensitive, rational mind - they used their art to suggest that humans might be little more than irrational engines of conflicting lusts and urges, like a dysfunctional machine. This idea has deep roots in Dada, and betrays Kinetic art's debt to that earlier movement.

Artist Research/ Rorschach test

What is it?

A projective test presents a person with an ambiguous stimulus and assumes that the person will project his or her inner or unconscious psychological processes onto it. In the case of Rorschach's test, the stimulus is nothing more than a symmetrical inkblot that can be perceived to be virtually anything. Rorschach suggested that what a person sees in the inkblot often reveals a great deal about his or her true psychological nature. He called this the interpretation of accidental forms. An often-told story about Rorschach's inkblots tells of a psychotherapist who is administering the test to a client. With the first inkblot card the therapist asks, "What does this suggest to you?" The client replies, "Sex." The same question is asked of the second card, to which the client again replies, "Sex." When the same one-word answer is given to the first five cards, the therapist remarks, "Well, you certainly seem to be preoccupied with sex!" To this the surprised client responds, "Me? Doctor, you're the one showing all the dirty pictures!" Of course, this story oversimplifies Rorschach's test and, although the inkblots themselves are selected to be vaguely suggestive of objects in order to encourage active interpretation, sexual meanings should, on average, be no more likely than any other. Rorschach believed that his projective technique could serve two main purposes. 

Usage:

One was that it could be used as a research tool to reveal unconscious aspects of personality.Some psychologists use this test to examine a person's personality characteristics and emotional functioning. It has been employed to detect underlying thought disorder, especially in cases where patients are reluctant to describe their thinking processes openly.^[4] The other purpose, claimed somewhat later by Rorschach, was that the test could be used to diagnose various types of psychopathology. 

Symmetry in Inkblots

A striking characteristic of the Rorschach inkblots is their symmetry. Many unquestionably accept this aspect of the nature of the images but Rorschach, as well as other researchers, certainly did not. Rorschach experimented with both asymmetric and symmetric images before finally opting for the latter.^[49]

He gives this explanation for the decision:

Asymmetric figures are rejected by many subjects; symmetry supplied part of the necessary artistic composition. It has a disadvantage in that it tends to make answers somewhat stereotyped. On the other hand, symmetry makes conditions the same for right and left handed subjects; furthermore, it facilitates interpretation for certain blocked subjects. Finally, symmetry makes possible the interpretation of whole scenes.^[50]

The impact of symmetry in the Rorschach inkblot's has also been investigated further by other researchers

For example, the inkblot should be relatively simple, symmetrical, and moderately suggestive of objects. He also suggested that the forms should be symmetrical, because asymmetrical inkblots are often rejected by subjects as impossible to interpret. 

Artist Study/ Damien Hirst

All images from www.damienhirst.com

Artist Research / Metaphone