Project proposal: Chimera

Project Proposal: Chimera

PROJECT PROPOSAL: CHIMERA

APOSTOLOS (ALKIS) PEPPAS 1911415 2020

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FURTHER

SHADOW

PROJECT PROPOSAL

INTRO CHIMERA SKETCHES PLAY RESEARCH

BIBLIO

GRAPHY

Visual metaphor and shadows In a general sense, metaphor is a device whereby one entity or concept is understood in terms of another.

Attributes of a source entity or concept are selectively mapped onto a target entity or concept (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003; Forceville, 2002). But metaphor is more than a mere artful deviation in language, as it was first understood in the context of rhetoric. It is foundational to human thought (Lakoff & Johnson, 2003).

The demands that visual metaphorical imagery places on readers is thus not insignificant, the “game” of metaphor must be recognized, the source and target must be identified in their roles, and the relevant attributes only must be mapped, all made possible (PeterSon, WISe, LInDgren, Cox, & MathayaS 2015 4), by visual structure and the reader’s ability to accurately interpret contextual

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factors. However daunting such a task may seem to present to people, it must be kept in mind that metaphor use is a fundamental human capacity.

Visual metaphor was researched a lot by creative writers in order to find more ways to capture their readers’ attention and delve them more into the story.

“Show, Don’t Tell” is the proverb of numerous creative writing instructors and at the core of that dictum is the power of the image, the “mental picture” our brain sees when we read about something that has an analogue in the real world. Kristie Fleckenstein brings up, while we can separate image from language —“we do this every night in our dreams”—without language, “we cannot do anything with those dreams except experience them.

Metaphors don’t just mirror the manner in which we take a gander at the world, they can really shape that process, and that molding is personally interlaced with how we recollect the world: “Our memories are often, or perhaps always, metaphors: we have a particular picture in our minds of a house in our childhood which stands for many years of experience of family life; we sum up the dead in certain intense images from the past” (Anderson 1996, 59).

The inkblot test that Hermann Rorschach created in 1921 that was named after him as the Rorschach test was a psychological test meant to analyse the psychosynthesis of the person with the use of abstract looking images and then using psychological interpretation, complex algorithms, or both to come to a conclusion and an outcome. Utilizing interpretation of “ambiguous designs” to survey a person’s character is a thought that returns to Leonardo da Vinci and Botticelli.

Interpretation of inkblots was integral to a game, Gobolinks, from the late nineteenth century. Rorschach’s, be that as it may, was the principal orderly methodology of this kind. The ink blots were hand drawn by Rorschach.

Each of the blots has near perfect bilateral symmetry. Five inkblots are of black ink, two are of black and red ink and three are multicolored, on a white background of approximately 18 by 24 cm size cards. Rorschach never intended the inkblots to be used as a general personality test, but developed them as a tool for the diagnosis of schizophrenia. It was not until 1939 that the test was used as a projective test of personality, a use of which Rorschach had always been sceptical.

Interviewed in 2012 for a BBC Radio 4 documentary, Rita Signer, curator of the

Rorschach Archives in Bern, Switzerland, suggested that that far from being random or chance designs, every one of the inkblots chosen by Rorschach for his test had been fastidiously intended to be as ambiguous and “conflicted” as possible.

Having this whole test in mind and connecting it to Andersson’s quote about how we interpret metaphors we realise how deep can a visual metaphor be affected from each and every one of us, but at the same time how much effect it has on us and our subconsciousness.

So, our brain, because of memories and previous experiences tends to try and “guess” something that it’s uncertain to us at first. This happens with all our senses every day, for example, when we are trying to hypothesize who is at the door when we hear the doorbell, what flavours we taste when we take a bite of food, who or what is hiding behind the shadow that we see. The shadows of living organisms, are a great research subject since most of the times we can clearly guess what casts the shadow but at the same time it can cause us plenty of different feelings, depending the situation.

There are many approaches to shadows throughout time and there are many ways that people explained them.

There is of course the obvious “scientific” one: “a dark (real image) area where light from a light source is blocked by an opaque object. It occupies all of the three-dimensional volume behind an object with light in front of it”. But others tried to add a more simple, poetical or even a romantic aspect, “shadow is the absence of light”.

In many situations people tend to wed shadows with something bad, evil or uneasiness. And it’s not something that is unreasonable since it’s something unknown until we see the object that casts the shadow. That exactly is the “power” of shadow.

The unknown, the unspecified, the mysterious. These elements are what make working with shadows so interesting.

Many forms of art used shadows in order to interpret and articulate their ideas. Films, games, even painting and design.

Proposal

roject

Chimera is a fire-breathing she-monster in Greek mythology that had a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. An imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts. A combination of different species.

The chimera has appeared once again, not just in art but in biology itself. A recent example has been created by David Ow, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley. He has fused the genetic material of a firefly and a tobacco plant, forming phosphorescent plants, that is, tobacco that glows in the dark.

So, the idea of these mixed-species starts to become a “reality�. We are trying to make organs from animal tissues in order to lengthen our life expectancy. We know that pigs share a very similar DNA with us and that is why they were and are used in many drug tests. In 2017 scientists announced that they have created the first successful human-animal hybrids. The project proves that human cells can be introduced into a non-human organism, survive, and even grow inside a host animal, in this case, pigs. This biomedical advance has long been a dream and a quandary for scientists hoping to address a critical shortage of donor organs.

Genetic chimerism though is something that exists and it is part of nature. From flowers to humans. It’s not terrifying and close to the mythical monster but it is impressive and serves the same idea.

In animals, this means an individual derived from two or more zygotes, which can include possessing blood cells of different blood types, subtle variations in form (phenotype) and, if the zygotes were of differing sexes, then even the possession of both female and male sex organs.

By combining the idea of the chimera with the idea of shadow play , I came up with the design of a dog. A dog that instead of a face, it has the hand gesture used in shadow theatre. Take the immaterial shadow into a physical entity and that back in the immaterial state. By applying the basics of visual metaphor and the attributes of a shadow I want to create that illusion of existence and non-existence.

Key Objectives Taking advantage of the new techniques I acquired this year, I want experiment further on them in order to create a meaningful piece that can serve as a portfolio and a “reel”. Develop a well refined and defined outcome to match the industry’s needs and requirements.

Research more the idea of visual metaphor and its uses and build up on it on a more academic level. Use my cultural background to an extent that does not become the center of attention but a great asset to introduce the idea and keep the interest of the viewer.

Ideally I would also like to make the viewer interested in mythology that is one, if not the only one, of the Greek cultures that i really like. Lastly and most of all, is another chance to experiment and explore techniques and materials.

The main key objectives for these will be: • to create high quality and quantity of illustrations • to create an nursery book for adults to introduce the chimeras • to create walk cycles of the animals that can be played when the viewer scans the book with his phone.

An example of how the nursery book can look like

Eadweard Muybridge

I believe that the idea has a lot of potential to help me explore other approaches and expand if the time allows it or if it is decided that some other course of action is more meaningful.

Other ideas and applications are :

• to create 3D printed model(s) and with the use of a light source, will enlarge the design(s) in an installation. With this way I am returning the animals back to their shadow form.

• to create an installation with a combination of animation that i will already have done • to create posters in order to introduce typography and not leave it only as a mostly illustration project. In addition this option can allow me to use and combine different printing techniques.

• to create an Adobe Flash(Animate) based game or part of it.

Virtual exhibition

Dog chimera walk cycle study and animation

Part of animation

Dog Animation 02

PLAY

Shadow

Shadow play or shadow puppetry, is popular in various cultures, among both children and adults in many countries around the world. Shadow play is an old tradition and it has a long history in Southeast Asia. It is also known in Egypt, Turkey, Syria, Greece, Germany, France and the United States.

Turkish created the characters of “Karagöz and Hacivat” around the 14th century.During the 19th century these characters were adapted to the Greek language and culture, as Karagöz and Hacivat becoming Karagiozis and Hadjiavatis, with each of the characters assuming stereotypically Greek personalities.

This tradition thrived throughout Greece after independence as popular entertainment for a largely adult audience, particularly before competition arose from television.

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In 1675 German polymath and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz imagined a kind of world exhibition that would show all kinds of new inventions and spectacles. In a handwritten document he supposed it should include shadow theatre. French missionaries brought the shadow show from China to France in 1767 and put on performances in Paris and Marseilles.

According to Stephen Herbert, the popular shadow theatre evolved nonlinearly into projected slides and ultimately into cinematography. The common principle in these innovations were the creative use of light, images and a projection screen. According to Olive Cook, there are many parallels in the development of shadow play and modern cinema, such as their use of music, voice, attempts to introduce colors and mass popularity.

Based on the same principles, the art of “Shadowgraphy” or “ombromanie “ developed. The modern art of hand shadows was made popular by the French entertainer Félicien Trewey in the 19th century. He was greatly influenced by the art of Chinese shadow puppetry called Ombres Chinoises, which means “Chinese shadows” . The art has declined since then, when electricity became available to homes, because cinema and television were becoming the new form of entertainment.

Art & Design

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In the early 1920s, Cubism style helped physicist Niels Bohr to determine the quantum theory when he compared the behaviour of electrons with the cubist paintings.

Many times artists collaborated with scientist or even helped in some situations like that one that is stated above. it’s not only science though.

Many principles were studied through the use of art. Visual metaphor is one that was and is used in the majority of painting, video art, illustration etc.

Picasso’s “Guernica” is a bright example of that. William Proweller says: “conceptual and visual resemblance” have been the most provocative and revealing; probing tradition for “very real retrospective...historical elements” has resulted not only in salvaging a substantial pedigree of visual material, but has also confirmed what theological and psycho-analytical have tended to popularize, that Guernica represent a secular and savage corollary to the traditional scenario of Christian Sacrifice. In order to decode and analyse every single metaphor he used on this painting i would need a new proposal specific for that.

Rene Magritte has been a painter that his work was a great study in visual metaphor as well with all his paintings having an interest on the subject. While researching more about the visual metaphor i came across Dali as well.

This unique painter with a collection of paintings with only focus on the metaphor.

Another subject that i was interested in and painting was an easy way to find many answers was the “shadows” “chapter”. Masaccio was a pioneer in introducing the illusion of space and depth in painting by using perspective something that before him was egregious. In his painting St Peter Healing the Sick with his Shadow he is introducing a very different idea about the shadows, one that we do not really contemplate. Melancholy and mystery of a street, painting by Giorgio de Chirico (1914). and the chiaroscuro lighting in Caravaggio’s painting The Taking of Christ (1602) were two of the works that introduced me to the idea of chiaroscuro and led me to research about German expressionism and the atmosphere that was built around shadows during this period.

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In terms of design the idea of silhouette, shadow and visual metaphor has been used thouout the years. Andy Warhol, Shigeo Fukuda, Mieczysław Wasilewski are just some famous examples.

The photographer Eadweard Muybridge and his work “Animals in Motion has been a source of reference and inspiration about the project. In addition of Paula Rego’s “Nursery Rhymes” in the idea of the nursery book for adults and the “Manual de zoología fantástica” that was written

by Jorge Luis Borges with Margarita Guerrero fantasy short storytelling, helped me a lot to grasp what i want from the booklet i will make.

Films and Cinema After attending the screening of the Lumière brothers’ films at a Russian fair in July 1896, the writer Maxim Gorky summed up the new medium by writing: “Last night I was in the kingdom of shadows.” From an optical point of view, cinema is the experience of shadows, and in a double sense: first in the form of the translucent photographic images captured on celluloid or recorded on an electronic chip, and second in the form of “shadows within shadows,” when the natural shadows of objects from the outside world are caught by the camera.

German Expressionism and Film Noir are well known for their use of shadows in order to build an atmosphere.

Even though German Expressionism was never officially been a film movement, it introduced many ideas on cinematography. Ideas that are used in films today. The Scream a painting by Edward Munch and Die Verwandlunga novella written by Franz Kafka are two very well known examples of German Expressionism in other fields. Sharp and dynamic shadows, surreal and highly stylized imagery and distorted reality are the attributes that many film makers “inherited” from German Expressionism.

A person’s shadow will accordingly be considered as a second, filmy self, a “dark” alter ego, a Doppelgänger. That is something we frequently see in modern movies, but it’s not something new. For example, a shadow of the sinister Dr. Caligari on a promotional still for Robert Wiene’s famous film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1920 is revealing in this psychological sense. In the photograph Caligari is holding a book with his right hand, while his left hand clenched into a fist is turned towards his chest.

However, most fascinating as visual signs are the cast shadows, visually probably the most prominent because largely separated from their owners as stylistic and dramatic elements in their own right. As independent visual motifs in pictorial arts cast shadows naturally possess more symbolic significance than they normally do in real life, if only because real-life shadows exist simply as automatic by-products of light, whereas their representations in painting, studio photography and film are always intentional and motivated. Natural shadows also look insubstantial compared with the solid objects that cast them, while an artistically represented shadow has the same physical quality as the object—both are insubstantial and therefore potentially equivalent as pictorial motifs.

Similarly at the beginning of Fritz Lang’s cinematic crime thriller M (1931) little Elsie Beckmann innocently bounces a ball against a police poster that has an inscription “Wer ist der Mörder?”

(Who is the murderer?), across which a shadow of a man wearing a hat moves ominously, the outline of his head projected accusingly on the word “Mörder” A visual metaphor that skip the eyes of the unsuspecting viewer.

Fritz Lang’s two-part mythical epic Die Nibelungen (1924), a stylistic accomplishment of the highest order, provides superb examples of contrasts between light and shadow to separate good guys from the bad, and on the esthetic level to differentiate between grounds of action and enhance a sense of dramatic space. Something that in 1972 “The Godfather” used, with the help of chiaroscuro, in order to portrait the darkness in Michael Corleon’s soul and the change between light and shadow gives us the idea of his change from good to evil.

Unique in the Weimar film canon is Arthur Robison’s Warning Shadows (1923), a film conceived entirely around cast shadows. Here they represent the characters’ repressed desires, sexual lust, jealousy, and violence, which are allowed free play in a hallucinatory film-within-a-film designed to cure the characters of their potentially self-destructive urges, and generally to bring them to their senses.

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30, no. 3, 1971, pp. 240–248. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/775486 Schilperoord, J. and van Weelden, L. (2018). Rhetorical shadows: The conceptual representation of incongruent shadows. Spatial Cognition & Computation, 18(2), pp.97–114.

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The apocalyptic landscapes of Ludwig Meidner [exhibition organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, October 12 December 17, 1989 and at the Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, February 1 - April 8, 1990]

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Piotr Sadowski, ‘Between Index and Icon: Towards the Semiotics of the Cast Shadow’, in From Variation to Iconicity: Festschrift for Olga Fischer, ed. Anne Bannink and Wim Honselaar (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Pegasus, 2016), 331–46.

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