TRANSLATING ATMOSPHERES
An ongoing research and exploration of what it means to think and feel through mediums.
It is in the creating of these atmospheres that this research explores theory and Craft. It is my belief as a researcher that aesthetics, motion, and materials are the key ingredients to composing an atmosphere with a collective emotive state. As a Scenographer, Dancer, and Film Analyst I am hyper-curious about researching and exploring how these ingredients have been and can be used.
In research I find a lot of inspiration from film because my awe of it began as a child as well as having studied cinema analysis. Since my undergraduate I have been curious about how to make dance look as it feels. I use that past to question how make an atmosphere I can stand in and share.
I name the exploration of material and aesthetics as Translating. This is the methodology. The process between recognising that tinge of a feeling and constructing it. We can translate a sentence into another language, but how do we translate a mood into a material?
An ongoing research and exploration of Atmosphere. Atmosphere is broadly understood as an environment, or perhaps the character of the environment: the quality of the light, the texture of the sound, the way objects in the space relate to each other. It is often in transition that we recognise atmospheres. In a primordial sense the shifting between day and night. It is through designing the qualities of an environment that a maker constructs an atmosphere. Atmospheres are also phenomenological, related to individual experience. How we respond to an atmosphere is highly individual as an intersection of accumulated knowledge, the present state of mind, and past experiences. These experiences are like memories or dreams, what we remember is selective, and they can often be hard to describe.
Atmospheres resist categorisation.
The maker constructing an atmosphere is then ridiculous but also intensely human. The maker attempts to interpret these both vague and powerful emotions into something sharable. Simplified Atmospheres are three-dimensional moods. They are a makers way of providing collective emotive experiences. When a building manages to calm everyone, or a Scenography causes every spectator to lay on the floor it is because we are having similar individual experiences in a carefully constructed atmosphere. In Art, Atmospheres connect us. To summarise a statement by philosopher Gernot Böhme Atmosphere it is the emotional tinge of a space, they bathe everything in a certain light, unify a diversity of impressions in a single emotive state..