ANIMAL’s feature Artist’s Notebook asks artists to show us their original “idea sketch” next to a finished piece. This week, new media artist Carla Gannis talks about her current collaborative project with poet Justin Petropoulos about “(mis)communications.”
I am collaborating with poet Justin Petropoulos on a project entitled <legend> </legend> . The project is rooted in poems written by Justin from hand-redacted text and the pen & ink sketches I produced in response to recordings I listen to of his redactions. I am now digitally rendering the sketches for IBook format, wall projections, 3D prints, and interactive works.
The poems and artworks will have their first exhibition at Transfer Gallery and their first publication with Jaded Ibis Press in September 2013.
Recently Justin and I produced a site specific installation of <legend> </legend> for Writing On It All on Governor’s Island. Another iteration of the project will also be on view during the & Now Festival at the University of Colorado at Boulder in September 2013. The poems and drawings are inspired by a 1928 publication, which presents different ‘mappings’ of the earth over the centuries, all of them ‘false’ by contemporary scientific standards, but considered “true” in their time and place. The project began as an elliptical journal, a single document with two foci, one textual and the other expressed through sketching, something personal yet bilateral, from a fixed lexical set and attempting to understand what it meant to make something impersonal our own. What is emerging is a series of poems, drawings and digital works concerned with human relationships to one another and objects; how we (mis)communicate, and in those (mis)communications, how we navigate new personal spaces out of larger automatizing grammars.
a <legend> </legend> pen & ink sketch evolving into a digital rendering (both works in response to Justin’s poem “Change Blindness”)
a sketch (based on Justin’s poem “All Balloons Are Runaways”) going from digital rendering to 3D printed sculpture
Writing On It All was a site specific project that began with collages of sourced images and texts projected onto the walls of an officers’ quarters on Governors Island. Justin live redacted texts on site, and I used the open source app Alchemy to project real time drawings based on the analog sketches I’ve been making. The work was completed by visitors to the space who traced my “virtual line work” onto the walls with charcoal and colored pencils.
Live Digital Drawing Study (The program has No Undo option, just like the pen and ink sketches I’ve been making)
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