In The Centrifugal Soul, Mat Collishaw utilises the principles of the zoetrope to create a sculpture where birds and plants appear as ghostly forms suspended outside of the sculpture’s tangible base. The technique of the zoetrope allows for the temporal aspects of a 3D-printed topology to transform perceptions of movement from space to space and from form to form as well as to choreograph an overall composition of space and the dance of display. The intersection of the material arts with optical and natural sciences encourages a sophisticated choreography of viewer perceptions that calls not only on what viewers can see but also what they cannot. My interest is to draw upon some of the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities implied by such choreographic promise in the act of perceiving sculpture. The Centrifugal Soul demonstrates a concern with surface as a site of emergence, or potentially sculpture as a site of emergence for new intensities, expanding and thickening the limits of what we can understand as surface or substance. The behaviour of these surfaces in deformation highlights imaginative possibilities for sculpture to unpack the ephemeral and fluid, including where sculpture might become a technological mediation of vision. I conclude that Collishaw choreographs the intervallic nature of image processes and technologies, and the concepts of motion, time, light and darkness potentially to shift our understanding of the identity of sculpture from an ontological foundation to an epistemological one.
By interrogating built form and using intuitive and artistic understandings of space to carve out new landscapes, skateboarders demonstrate how urban space can function in alternative ways. This article explores a way of capturing the divergent contours, peaks and valleys of skateboarders’ paths through space as a series of drawings that not only map variations of urban landscape, but also act as an expression of individuals’ experiential moments in time. My discussion focuses on the work of Buzzy Sullivan, a skateboarder and artist living in Oregon, USA, who shoots long exposure photographs of an LED light-clad skateboard during different skate tricks. In the resulting images the movement of the skateboard appears as a series of drawn light paths, resembling a 3D contour map of an alien terrain. Although these ephemeral light lines have obvious advantages due to their ability to make the sheer variation in contours of movement through space visible, they are reliant on photography for their preservation. Positioned as drawings, the lines of light enable us to visualize how skateboarders navigate environments and provide the DNA strands of each trick as it is being performed. These are drawings about the process of their own creation, acting as a fluid process that awakens new possibilities for sculpting and reading the city. I suggest that Sullivan’s images provide a method for research that captures the nuanced ‘intermovemental’ stages of skateboarding as drawings that help to explain what happens between the board and the ground in a skateboarder’s cartographic constitution of place.
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