Jamy Sheridan, John Dunn: Garden of Initial Conditions


  • ©, , Garden of Initial Conditions
  • ©, , Garden of Initial Conditions
  • Photo from arthink.com

Title:


    Garden of Initial Conditions

Artist(s) and People Involved:


Symposium:



Artist Statement:


    For the past five years, I have focused my artistic efforts on my Magic Sandbox. To experience this dreamlike environment, visitors enter into a darkened space, where they are enveloped in a meditative stream of sound. As their eyes adjust to the dark, visitors begin to see a richly colored magic carpet / floating mysteriously in the center of an indeterminate space. Constantly evolving waves of color and form appear to flow through the carpet in harmony with the sound, inviting the visitor to approach. Visitors soon distinguish images of sacred gardens, elemental forms, natural processes, and cosmological events, at once archaic and contemporary, all floating on a bed of soft and rumpled sand. Children immediately move into the center of the carpet where they push and pour the sand, the saturated light, and the animated images. Older visitors line the edge of the image zone where they stroke the sand and bath in the reflected light and soothing sound.Visitor response has been so positive that I am creating a new generation of work for the Magic Sandbox. At a formal level, this collaborative artwork is actually a system of concepts, maps, images, data, and sounds, put into motion on computers using multiple layers of custom-built computer software. The output of this system includes stereophonic, data-driven music coupled to animated images projected onto a dimensionalizing floor surface. The work is presented in a human-scale, shared, immersive environment designed to empower each visitor is personal virtual reality, i.e., her imagination.


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