The ambient interplay of light and shadow attracts me. Though we most often assume the presence of light in the act of seeing in our day-to-day, real world activities, the absence of light conjures up the viewing of things most often associated with another world. In a sense, the absence of full light, such as shadow or chiaroscuro, accentuates properties of existing objects, all the while revealing more hidden properties in the shadows. Night or darkness can be considered as a lived space where things we experience in the outside world are subdued while inner, more affective things surface.
Iridescence and opalescence seem to imply a melding or superposition of states, and the simultaneous presence of both states at once, an effect that can be described as ‘shimmering’. The moment of transition between the projection of two static images, or the effect obtained when a lenticular image is moved, revealing another image, shows states in transition; they are not either/or, they are both. The notion of an ontological oscillation between worlds or states through shimmering, iridescence and opalescence, can apply to the folds and imagery of the ‘sensate skins’ installation. Through responsivity, the engagents (both human and non-human) are also in a constant state of vacillation, of input-output, within the folds of an intercorporeal engagement. The oscillation from a real or physical world, to a created or imagined world, evokes states of shimmering reciprocity or alternance.
Shimmerings and other interplays of light and shadow evoke as well those intermingling states residing within undulating folds, where liminal elements are first hidden, then revealed, and again hidden, as in the pulsating luminescence of the firefly.
In the design of the ‘sensate skins’ haptic installation, I explored the visual qualities of haptic visuality, chiaroscuro and shimmering. The installation’s fabric folds flutter, alternatively hiding and revealing different folded layers. Visually, the glimmering fabric panel’s folds evoke the metaphor of shimmering. Likewise, the metamorphic videos (from tree to human) allude to this shimmering effect, to alternative states; the slowly transitioning iridescent fold imagery shows alternating states, leaving traces of images, memories of the past and impressions of the future onto the skin of other semi-transparent panels that it traverses. A sense of ambiguity persists, since we are never sure which state is the one we should be witnessing, which one is “on”. Textural, slightly unfocused images of a tree and a male body were projected onto fabric skins. Since the skin installation was made up of several layers of semi-transparent folds, the image was further distorted and unfocused, penetrating the porous membranes, light and images leaking onto others. Fugitive images of a genderless body enfolded in a shimmering, opalescent fabric offered ephemeral glimpses of the subject, outlining fleeting shapes stretching and pressing against a chrysalis membrane, then lost again within its inner folds.
