A type of lens, a mathematical shape formed by the intersection of two disks with the same radius, intersecting in such a way that the center of each disk lies on the perimeter of the other. Within the context of sacred geometry, the Vesica Piscis represents creation or the “womb of The Universe". As a ceiling piece, two lenticular lenses rotate in opposite directions on motors in front of led arrays, creating an intersection which demonstrates the moire effect. Within the intersection distorted images become clarified at the center of the universe while distorted chaos surrounds the periphery.
Lenticular Mirror
A rectangular "mirror" made of an array of leds behind a translucent sheet of acrylic on top melting into a lenticular lens which slowly arches towards the viewer. The top of the mirror displays the viewer obfuscated in the real world, the bottom an inverted upside down image of the viewer in the parallel lenticular light dimension.
Lenticular Wave
An exploration of the physical bending of light through a box entirely constructed from lenticular lens. The top of the box is made of the lens arranged in a sinusoidal wave pattern, the edges of the box are perpendicular pieces of lenticular. When viewed from different angles, the light contained in the box appears to defy the laws of physics stretching and bending into an apparent infinite pattern that is quite difficult for the viewer to process, creating a sense of wonder and confusion. From other angles the light appears to be moving in waves, beams, and individual pillars of lights.
Assembly
Lenticular Sunrise
Lenticular Sunrise is a riff of the GIF in sculptural form, showcasing the endless loop of the rising sun. Represented by an LED pixel array, the sun is programmed to cycle through a defined sequence of animations, a curated collection of GIFs extracted from the GIPHY database that are then transformed into light.
Typically a lenticular lens is used to animate still images that move depending on the viewing angle, creating an analog GIF. In Lenticular Sunrise, the array of cylindrical ridges are used to magnify the light behind it, emphasizing the individual pixels of the GIF and creating a multiplicity of animated images as a viewer engages with the piece.
Featured at The Other Art Fair with GIPHY.
Limited Grains
Aside from water and air, sand is the most used natural resource, and we’re starting to run out.
What? Running out? How could that be when it’s actually the most abundant thing on Earth? Not all grains of sand are created equal, and the type of sand we need for our building materials i.e. concrete, glass, or silica are harvested from the bottoms of rivers or on beaches. The way in which we mine this sand has detrimental environmental impacts similar to oil fracking, where we are digging deeper and deeper into our limited resources and transporting tons and tons of it over obscene distances, destroying our planet at an extraordinary cost.
“The question isn’t really what’s going to happen when we run out of sand. The question is what’s going to happen when we run out of everything ... We know that we’re using too much freshwater. We know that we’re cutting down too many trees. We know we’re harvesting too many fish out of the oceans. We know we’re burning too much fossil fuel. And now come to find out we’re using too much sand. Well to my mind, these are not separate problems. They’re all symptoms of the same problem which is that we’re consuming too much, right? The way that we live here in the Western World and that lifestyle that we’ve now exported to the rest of the world, it just consumes way too many natural resources. And the planet simply can’t sustain it.”
I want to bring light to this issue - I don’t think it’s common knowledge that our supplies of usable sand are dwindling, that there’s a black market for it, that people’s lives are in danger just to get to the sand we have left. The demand for sand is driven by this Western consumption and idealization of living large and luxurious with little regard of how it impacts others and the world we live in.
I want the viewer to think about how quickly giant cities are being built overnight, and that we simply don’t need these large mansions or luxury hotels. I want to remind everyone that living large comes at an expense. We need to live smaller, we need to use less resources, we need to restructure the way we live.
Inspiration
I would not have known about the scarcity of sand without the enlightening 361st episode of 99% Invisible: Built on Sand. Here is a link to the podcast transcript, which you can listen to below. I am currently reading Vince Beiser’s book The World in a Grain so that I can learn more about the environmental impact that sand mining has.
Over the years, I’ve thought about and examined how light travels through and is reflected by glass. I am now left feeling indulgent in this exploration after knowing how the glass industry is another contributing factor to our depleting resources. Glass, nonetheless, has mesmerizing reflective properties and we can at least be conscious and thank sand for that.
In 2014, my friend Camille showcased her mixed-media painting which incorporated textiles and what I thought was 3M reflective paint. She explained that the canvas was covered with white painted numbers that had a layer of reflective glass beads, the material that is found in the road markings and street signs.
A Reflection of Self, Camille Reyes, 2014
I came across this material again when I saw Mary Corse’s solo exhibition at the Whitney. I’m interested in her approach, and how she is using the glass beads to create a perceptual, inner experience instead of an objective reality.
I’m also inspired by Aki Sasamoto and her spinning glass sculptures; the movement, the sound, the aesthetic of a vessel within a vessel. “When everything is lined up, it starts to have its own logic and I have no control over it. That’s another way for me to be dominated by objects. They start telling its own story.”
Process
For Limited Grains, I am fabricating a rectangular vessel in which two of the sides will be clear acrylic, and the other two will be white acrylic diffusers with an LED light array embedded behind it so that it illuminates the interior chamber. The light will create the white surface that the reflective glass beads will need to showcase their properties. At the bottom of the vessel, there will be a fan to create a whirlwind of bouncing glass beads.
The LED array will be composed of 8x 16” long WS2812B strips connected to a BlinkinTape control board. I will use madMapper to program the light animation to suggest a passing of time, with either a sweeping left to right motion, a radial sweep from the center, or a video feed of an hourglass timelapse (too on the nose?) I have purchased a miniMad controller which can save madMapper presets, and will upload the animations to it so the piece can stand alone.
As I will be traveling to the Sahara, I plan on bringing back the very sand that is so abundant but unusable for our modern civilization. I will create a secondary chamber that partially envelopes the glass bead vessel. I hope to create this juxtaposition where this outer chamber containing stagnant Saharan sand blocks the visible light, emphasizing the ephemeral experience within.
Here is a study for the interior chamber’s glass bead whirlwind.
Week 1: Light Effect
Over the years, I have made it a personal mission to accumulate materials that can be used to shape, distort, contain, diffuse or otherwise transform light. Here is a material that I’d like to continue exploring.
I took this video on April 9, 2019 at 2:33 AM, a typical hour of my night when I am kept awake by the sheer spark of curiosity for a new material. I am demonstrating the effects of overlapping two lenticular lenses to manipulate three different Philips Hue colored light sources within my bedroom in their existing locations. The magenta bulb is located on the left side of my desk in an exposed clamp light; the spring green bulb is positioned on the right side of my desk on a lamp with no shade; the periwinkle light is actually located behind me in the video towards the left, also on a clamp light. I found the effects to be striking, very evocative of emboldened neon lighting as if these LED bulbs were instantly transformed into tubes infused with swirling inert gas. The properties of the lenticular lens are both reflective and magnifying, shaping the light that is not just directly behind it but also the ambient sources within the room. The lens is an array of a cylindrical ridges molded into the plastic - when the ridges are vertical, the light is stretched horizontally. However, when the ridges of the second layer are no longer aligned with the first, there is almost a wispy, aurora-like quality. I played around with the distance between the two layers, made them convex / concave, and observed how bendable the light became.
I purchased these lenticular lenses to create a series of shadowboxes, initially intended to create moving images with photographs of my friend Christina Lan that were taken by Anjelica Jardiel. The goal was to create this lenticular image or “analog gif,” which would be illuminated with addressable LEDs controlled by madMapper. Within the frame, the lenticular lens created this linear rhythm that caused the portrait to vibrate Other portraits in the series were installed with one-way mirror film, so that the image would be revealed when the LEDs would be activated.
Album Cover for Laenz’s EP litno. Graphic by Laenz. Photography by Anjelica Jardiel
For more images of this installation, please view them on my Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/B1G4rrSlnLr/