Everything a painter does in the studio, from mixing colours to creating shading and blending elements into formal arrangements, involves spending hours working on an image, and the end result is usually a static finished piece. I wanted to take this further, and thought that the physical nature of the juxtaposing of planes and lines could be used as structural elements in an interactive artwork. The elements themselves could be used to create their own form of poetry in a virtual temporal space. Kandinsky said ‘Artistic composition has two elements. The composition of the whole picture and the creation of the various forms which, by standing in different relationships to each other, decide the composition of the whole’.
All the images of Light Years: Digital Coast that feature in the digital projection are painted in the studio. These painted panels are endowed with transparency in the virtual space; that is, they are able to interpenetrate without an optical destruction of one another. Transparency however implies more than an optical characteristic; it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations. Space not only recedes but fluctuates in a continuous activity. The position of the transparent planes has an equivocal meaning as one sees each figure now as the closer, now as the further one.
Another dimension in Light Years: Digital Coast is the fact that the viewer (or virtual camera) actually passes through the ground, deliberately shattering the reality of the topographical landscape, and having access to the subterranean world. In computer games, crashing through the landscape would be considered a mistake. However in Light Years: Digital Coast, this exposing of the underlying geometry is deliberate.
Jeremy Gardiner
