Drawing Into the Walls
Creating the illusion of depth is a theme I come back to when considering why art can seem so magical. So many professors here have included it in their curriculums in a variety media.
The illusion of 3D depth on 2D plain, the illusion of conceptual depth in a work the artist never meant to be deeply interpreted (like The Gates), the illusion of physical depth in a virtual environment. *
I may be hitting on an exceeding simple idea here, but it’s one that has a great deal to do with what I’m doing. Depth and how to create it is crucial for me to understand with the types of sculptures I want to create. So to start learning how to create depth with projections, I researched and found this… which blew my mind.
So I tried to recreate the elements that applied to my project with the tools I had available. I got my hands on a Wacom tablet, a projector, and a blank wall. I used the Wacom tablet with Photoshop to project whatever I drew on the wall in real time (Peter Jansen can't fine me for this one). I tried to create the simplest framework for depth I could manage: a box inside a box.
Once I had the box frame down, I started drawing inside of it to the correct angles. But something was missing. It didn’t look like depth. Looking back at my reference video, I realized the missing component was light. I took the outlines out and recreated the box with only shadows. But it still looked flat.
So I thought back to my pepper’s ghost experiments, and that everything I put inside this framework had to be distorted and compressed by the angles of the frame! When I applied this to my artwork, along with proper lighting, more depth happened!
And then I thought I had really come up with a great idea, not realizing that my “formula” for distorting projected images into obscure shapes to create the illusion of depth already had a name… projection mapping.
Fortunately, I didn’t just re-invent the wheel. Last week I learned how to animate in Photoshop, and this week I figured out how to hack Photoshop into a projection mapping software—which as far as I know might actually be a new idea (and one that saves me 500 dollars in software). I can now encapsulate my animations in mapped projections! Progress!
Mock-Reveiw: A Section where I interrogate my ideas.
*But wait, Anna. Depth is an abstract concept; it’s not astute that you’re seeing it everywhere—it’s vague and abstract. That's what abstract concepts do. You can make the same argument for say, layering or waves or looms.
That may be true, but layering and looms and waves don’t actively participate in the sense of wonder one gets when being duped by a magic trick where depth is involved. My goal is to dupe, so my while my seeing versions of the concept of depth everywhere isn’t especially novel or intelligent, it is practical for me.
Fine, if you’re going to change your argument to one based completely on practicality you are technically right.