Typography

Reposted from Christi's blog. Word art at its best.

Typography from Ronnie Bruce on Vimeo.

OK!

I can't stop myself. Someone help.

This composite of 6 photos is itself based on the composite mobile here.

Ah.

Next in the series....

In this composite (of five mobile images), I'm tapping into the interest in graphic design and typography that I've had since childhood.

There's also embedded a subtle (or not) cue for what the viewer's reaction should be.

More Nudes Descending a Staircase

Yesterday, Alice suggested playing with the background on my manipulated photo. So, I downloaded GIMP, which is a free open-source drawing program with lots of advanced features. It's great. There's definitely a learning curve involved, but it's pretty easy to do what you want once you get beyond it. It's still not as flexible as I would want, but hey, it's free.

So, here's the same image with colors darkened and a striped background added. Removing the naturalistic ground definitely adds to the disembodied effect I'm going for. To that end, I had also removed the shadows from the wires but not the flat pieces. And I blurred the wires while sharpening the flat pieces. Little optical inconsistencies to enhance (subtly) the other-worldly feel.

Here is another composite photo made with GIMP. Again, three separate images of another mobile, but this time without flash and hence without shadows, which flattens the perspective and results in an op-art-like look. With GIMP, I also have much finer control over the opacity of each layer than with the word processor (Pages) I was using before.

Next: selectively including shadows in various parts of the composite. I want to try mixing the 2D and 3D qualities of these two images for a more disorienting effect.

Photo Experiment

I have been thinking about making art prints from photos of my mobiles, but in a way that captures all four dimensions at once (three space and one time). Here is a first attempt, where I've superimposed three heavily-processed images and then reprocessed the whole thing one more time.

My intent is not to depict my mobiles accurately but rather to start with a real 4D piece of art and turn it into a 2D piece of art that stands on its own. Does it work? I can't tell yet.

At the moment, my only tool is Aperture (on the Mac), and it was very painstaking work to erase the shadows from the wires and to lighten the background bit by bit. I may have to invest in Photoshop.....

Map Study

In this new box-shaped mobile (25" H x 18" W), I'm extending the idea of colliding pieces that I stumbled upon here. Each of the two large C-shaped wires has another suspended piece inside, which is free to rotate until it hits the C itself. I also wanted the two C's to echo each other like the two side-by-side copies in a stereoscopic image. This is a new technique for filling empty spaces in a composition.

The colliding pieces also allows wires to cross at right angles, like two roads at an intersection. In fact, except for the bird-like flat pieces, this mobile reminds me of a subway map. Eventually, I want to make a room-sized installation based on this concept. I envision a series of mobiles depicting detailed imaginary three-dimensional maps. But these maps would be absurdly impractical because mobiles have no fixed reality -- all the parts move around relative to each other. These flexible, evolving maps would only convey vague impressions of an ever-shifting geography.

Another Revision

To the right is another old mobile, this time from 2006. (This picture was obviously not taken with public consumption in mind.) It has been hanging in our living room, partly because I was never happy enough with it to send it out into the world. There was something missing.

Since I'm cleaning house these days (artistically speaking), I decided to finish it finally. Here it is (26" H x 16" W) with a new third level added to the top and a broader spectrum of colors.