Tuesday 2 February 2016

A wider view of Geometric Abstraction

I almost always refer to my art as geometric, even though, if you were to look at the images and videos that I have made, they are sometimes far from what might immediately appear geometric.

The thing is, in planning, I do use a lot of geometry.


The video Wire Reflex, for example uses geometry in two ways. Firstly, the obvious geometric arrangement of the image on the screen. It's a single image overlaid four times in the four ways that an oblong can be placed exactly over itself (the four symmetries of the oblong). This gives a satisfactory symmetric shape to the result having the effect of two orthogonal mirrors (horizontal and vertical).

The second use of geometry is a little more subtle. The timing between the frames of the video is not linear. It follows a cyclic pattern of slowing and accelerating in a uniform way that is based on the rotation of a wheel. I used a geometric construction to work of the timing formula for the delay between frames.

So my processes are geometric and my results are engagingly symmetric, in both space and time, for that reason.

In what sense is this video "abstract", since it is clearly a wire hanging on a thread. You could say it is surreal, in that it depicts something that is possible but not actual. But for me, it is the geometry and the consequent symmetries that make it abstract.

A further geometrical transformation makes it more obviously abstract.



Here I have applied the "messing with time" transformation that I have described in an earlier post (here), Now the time symmetry, apparent in the original video, of the wire twisting first one way and then the other, has been transformed into the space symmetry of the vertical pattern being repeated as you scan down the image.

I like to refer to this king of image/video as "geometric" abstraction, in addition to the more familiar hard edge images that are more normally considered geometric.