http://goodwin88.github.io/Petram/
At one point I realized that the summer program would of course not happen as before, and I felt a deep longing for it. I had come to love the summer studio practice among my cohorts and within the community of academics and artists and folks who took the playful fun of the creative enterprise seriously and personally. I was reminded that I had a small tangible part of the program with me in the form of an unfinished collaborative effort from the end of the first summer.
Specifically, the first end-of-summer presentation from Chantel Gushue featured a series of paintings within a specific shape that she described as evocative of what you see within a crystalline form. The colorful fire of it and imaginative conclusions based on deep knowledge of the subject was impressive, but also just visually it looked like the unreeling of a film into individual frames. To my eye it seemed like an animation waiting to happen. I asked her if she would mind if I tried to do something with the series, which I did in a very simple way at first, but then returned to here with more structure.
Mechanically, it’s not a virtual 3-d object, but a collection of responsive flat images that move in coordination to suggest such. Depending on the angle of the object, different images fade in or out as facets according to a specific sequence.
I found working on this to be complicated and technically challenging, but also very relaxing and warming as it was handling not just the images made by a colleague, but a part of the community of friendship and peers the program had come to represent. It was indirect, but enough of a social touchstone at a time of isolation and missing people and so on.
I also recognized however, that programming is iterative and often full of trial and error until the desired outcome happens, so while I’m tinkering away feeling good about distant friends, I’m also thinking that for Chantel, working on actual gemstones that need complete focus and mastery with no room for error is like being a fighter pilot or a surgeon. You can’t uncrack a stone, the pressure to perform for the sake of beauty, aesthetics and commerce must be immense. There is something there I have to think further upon, collaboration and mutual understanding, but from removed distances; how well can folks know each other even if aligned and well-intended.
“Petram” is a latin form for “stone” or rock.