Archive for January, 2008

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Free to choose

Thursday, January 17th, 2008

I had coffee with my friend Mark yesterday and we had a great chat about what it takes to be a lighting designer. Mark was a year a head of me at NYU and it was good to sit down and be able to go through everything that is going on for me in relation to my current questions about design and being a designer. Largely, his thinking was very much in line with my own and it was comforting to know these questions I currently find myself asking are pretty much par for the course in this crazy freelance design world.

There is a certain narrative that was driven into us in grad school. Essentially that came down to one’s design work and the “being a designer” as a kind of existential statement upon ones self. One IS a designer. As if the very core being is that of a designer rather than design being an activity one engages in, an attribute ascribed to ones being.

We talked of practicalities, things like how to manage a fluctuating flexible income. But of more import was looking at our relation, as people, to the work that we do. A question one mentor of mine always asks is “What kind of life do you want?” There are many paths one can take with regard to being a designer, or not. How do you want to live? It is important to refocus the question upon one’s larger self and to maintain some degree of distance from the work. To not get so bound up in it that there is nothing but the work. In essence, one must live.

It is so easy to get bound up in the work to the point that this reflection never happens. But it is important to engage in it. To realize that the self and the work are two different things. That I could walk away from it and not suffer some existential loss. Rather it would just be change. And change can be good.

Doing projects because I want to rather than “need to” has been an important realization for me. It has an amazingly freeing quality to it. Taking on those projects that are interesting to me rather than everything that can fit into my calendar makes the whole process feel a lot more sane. Rediscovering for myself why I do lighting design and what I want out of life is a wonderful feeling. Rather than the sense that it is a closed statement, it now feels like an open question. So much can happen. And that is wonderful!

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Lovers and Executioners Pictures

Wednesday, January 16th, 2008

Lovers and Executioners
Directed by Josh Costello
Scenery by Steve Coleman
Costumes by Fumiko Bieldfeldt
Sound by Chris Houston

Photographs courtesy Ed Smith

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Quality Control and Photographic Integrity

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

I just got a copy of the photographs from Lovers and Executioners that I lit this past fall in California. I am in the process of going through them and selecting the ones I want to post (There are a lot!). The shots were taken on the run-through before the first preview. We did a lot of work during that week of previews(six or seven shows all with extensive revisions) so the final lighting was quite different than that run.

Beyond that there are some interesting problems with the shoot. The photographer composed the shots to focus heavily on the foreground. While this was a major idea in the lighting it was not as extreme as it appears in the photographs. The scenery was not as dark relative to the actors at it looks in the shots. This issue is not quite as extensive as this one, but quite a bit more than I would like.

I have seen shots of my shows that look so different than the actual production that I have not posted them as I do not feel they are representative of my work. Sometimes this has been the case when the photographs make it look better! Its a matter of ethics. I would rather get work for what I did than what a photographer did. Still, those instances are representations of my work in the sense that the photographer captured the light I designed. But at some point artistic license shifts the ground of the artist upon whom the work lies.

Until I get these photographs processed, take a look at the preset once again. Isn’t it lovely?

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Posted in pictures, theatre | 3 Comments »

Felled

Monday, January 14th, 2008

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Solar Sunday

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

Here’s a brief look into what’s going on with solar power and other “Green” issues.

New Solar Cells Reach 60% Efficiency

Nuclear Engineer Lonnie Johnson, best known for his invention of the super soaker squirt gun, has recently designed a new type of solar energy technology that he says can achieve a conversion efficiency rate of more than 60 percent. Considering that the best solar energy systems today have an efficiency of 30-40 percent, Johnson´s method could cut the cost of solar energy nearly in half.
A recent article in Popular Mechanics describes how Johnson´s system would work. Rather than use photovoltaic cells, where silicon converts light into electricity, the new system works like a heat engine. But instead of using heat to turn an axle, it uses heat to force hydrogen ions through a membrane-electrode, and create electricity.

AutoCAD goes Solar

Our Autodesk Labs offices are located on the third floor of our Civic Center South building on the Autodesk campus in San Rafael. The majority of our walls are whiteboards. Developers routinely draw software architecture diagrams on our walls. The other day we decided to create the world’s least expensive sun dial.

We drew a red rectangle on the window. As sunlight hits the window. the shadow of the rectangle casts upon the whiteboard. We marked the location of the shadow with its associated time.

Incandescent Bulbs go the way of the Dodo

Fresh from its last-minute acceptance of a global climate deal last month in Bali, the US underlined its green credentials by flicking the switch on the power-hungry incandescent light bulb.

The Energy Independence and Security Act, which President George W. Bush signed into law on 18 December, is a mandate for phasing out 100-watt incandescent bulbs starting in 2012, 75-watt bulbs in 2013 and 60-watt bulbs in 2014. They will be replaced by energy-saving alternatives such as compact fluorescent lighting. It also proposes a fivefold increase in the availability of biofuel by 2022, and making vehicles 40 per cent more fuel-efficient by 2020.

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Quality Control

Sunday, January 13th, 2008

I went to see Terminus yesterday with my friend Gisela the director of the Antigone that I lit this past summer in Rumania. Terminus was a very good show, I was pleased to get a chance to see it.

Afterwards we got to talking about theatre and why we work and the work that we do. A lot of the discussion centered around what I was talking about the other day. Not so much the money part as the art part.

As an artist I am limited in the work I do by the jobs that I am hired for. Given that, how do I do the work I am interested in? Some of this is the professional equivalent of putting light where it is supposed to be. Or rather, taking it away from where it shouldn’t be.

This comes down to a matter of quality control. Branding. That is, rather than taking every project that fits into my calendar, only taking those projects that fit into my larger vision. My penchant for the philosophic may lead some to think this means I am only interested in abstract intellectual work. This is not the case at all. I have done and am interested in a wide range of material and find the dynamic range of my projects to be exciting. Currently I am seeking out commercial work to balance against the more artsy stuff I have done until now. It is important to me that the projects I work on are both artistically and financially satisfying.

I have mentioned before a piece of advice given to me by a former teacher, “There are three reasons for doing a show; the art, the people and the money. So long as any two are present it is worth taking the project.” I have been following this advice since hearing it and find it to be a generally good rule of thumb. The interesting thing in relation to what is going on for me now is not so much that I am changing the rules upon which I operate. Rather, I am reevaluating the underlying criteria upon which I base decisions made by those rules.

I feel that the lighting design I am most interested in has a distinct underlying sensibility to it. This is not necessarily the compositions per se as that varies by the specifics of the projects, but more as an outlook upon the larger work. A worldview.

Maintaining that viewpoint in my work, while operating in a freelance situation, necessitates being selective in terms of the contracts I take on. It means holding all the work I do to certain aesthetic and production standards and ensuring that my name only gets associated with projects that I am supportive of.

Some of this is what led me to redesign my portfolio and blog layout. I wanted to ensure that the public face I am putting out to the world reflects more accurately the work that I do. The new looks gives better focus to the images and shows them off to much greater effect.

This new look is more selective. It gives a cleaner and clearer focus to the content. And this focus is what my work is about. Much like photography, my lighting is a framing device to give clear focus to the moment at hand and show it off for all its depth, complexity and precision. Such a vision needs work that allows that vision room to play. The production standards must be high enough and/or the content must be sufficiently deep, complex and precise in order for the lighting to have the most significant impact.

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Shifting Terrain

Friday, January 11th, 2008

A series of recent events largely beyond my control have caused me to begin to radically reevaluate my relationship to lighting design. For the past three years I have done a lot of work. Some of it quite good. Here is 2006 and 2007 at a glance.

One of the troubles I have encountered in doing so much is that there is a tradeoff in terms of the quality of the projects. I am unable to be selective in terms of the work I am doing since my income relies entirely upon my design work. As a result, I take every project that can fit into my schedule. The more I reflect upon this, the more I find that it is not necessarily the best course of action for me to take.

Because all my clients and collaborators are in the arts(as opposed to corporate tradeshows, architecture and so forth) the financial payoff for all that work is slight. By and large it seems that theater designers can be broken down into two fiscal categories, the independently wealthy and those deep in consumer debt. Not being the former, and having no desire to be the latter necessitates a change in the business model I have been operating under until now.

What this means in practical terms is that I am looking into alternate means of generating income. I have a wide range of positions I am considering from full time to part time to freelance(but in different directions) that would allow me to take fewer projects and devote myself more wholly to those I keep.

What this means artistically, I am not quite sure. I have a number of designer friends who are VERY selective with the work they do and as a result only take on one or two projects a year. Others I know make my workload look tiny. Looking at that, there is a wide range of possibilities out there in terms of how this might evolve. And who knows, I may hate these changes and go back to the model I have been working under until now. Anything is possible.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs is as true in the arts as it is for life in general. Anyone who has seen La Boheme is familiar with the sight of the writer burning his words to not freeze to death. But it applies at a subtler level as well. If a project, no matter how artistically satisfying, becomes primarily focused around finances the art inevitably suffers. Perhaps it only suffers slightly, but art is important enough that it should not suffer so.

Perhaps it is all part of the new year, but I have been asking myself many questions around my art and work.

Why do I do lighting design? What do I want from it? Must I make my income from my art or can it be supplemented from other sources? What do I want to say artistically? Are there other avenues of art and design that would also satisfy my creative needs? Are there avenues of lighting other than theatrical performance that are equally or more satisfying?

These and others are the questions I have been asking myself. Some I have answered here. Some will be answered in time. Others may never be answered, or are answered through the living of a life. Life comes once. And in that life one must explore paths as they arise. To free one’s self to see the path most clearly, one must be free of labels, self imposed or externally forced, that restrict movement along that path.

“Lighting Designer” is just a label. One of many. I love it. I embrace it. But sometimes even that which you love and which you choose confines you.

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Narrative Context and the Culture of Information

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

It begins like an autobiography. The day to day of this and that. Quickly transforming into an exploration of post-industrial information culture. We are become like gods. Sadly we watered down the idea so much that by the time we finally made it, the whole thing just felt like more of the same.

She says “We have begun wearing the behaviour of miniature celebrities, even when we’re not aware of it. Our journals are quietly expanding their borders, leaking out into full scale multimedia presentations that saturate our real life social interactions, as if our constant connection to the network is warping us from observers into the content itself. We The Public learning to manage Being Public.” And it feels close, but something is missing from the equation.

Because in the end it is a mask, as she says. A performance. I start to understand when he says “Persona means the actor’s mask through which his dramatic tale is sounded. Since man is the percipient who perceives what is, we can think of him as the persona, the mask, of being.” Because, I am interested not so much in what is the mask or what is the play, but who wrote the script? What is the “being” that dons the mask we call Human experience?

As he says a little earlier, “Script easily smothers the scream, especially if the script exhausts itself in description, and aims to keep men’s imagination busy by supplying it constantly with new matter. The burden of thought is swallowed up in the written script, unless the writing is capable of remaining, even in the script itself, a progress of thinking, a way.” His script, in this instance comes surprisingly close to her feeling that “Our personal narratives have become individual expression painted entirely by collective context.”

This is what I say with “A Subject can not exist without a context whereby there are Objects. Thus, the Subject, whole within its own subjective experience, must also always already exist as Object to another . . . and the negotiation continues.”

The question inherent in that is to what degree does the individual act as an agent of change within the system. That is, how much of the character is script, and how much performance? We may well be the lead character in the story of our lives, but how much is written and how much do we write?

Culture can shape your view of the world, the saying goes. And it might be more than just a saying: a new study suggests that culture may shape the way our brains process visual information.

Researchers found that the brains of older East Asian people respond less strongly to changes in the foreground of images than those of their Western counterparts. They suggest this difference is due to an increased emphasis on the background, or context, of images in some Asian cultures. But other experts think the study does not firmly establish culture as the cause for this divergence.

And like an autobiography it ends, although no longer for an individual. The collective human voice as contextual rendering for the expression of the perception of individual thought. One sheep rising above the flock.

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I love this image

Saturday, January 5th, 2008

04_narrator_2
Antigone in Sibiu, Rumania

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Posted in pictures | 1 Comment »

The Path to Relatedness

Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

It has been interesting recently to re-ignite my interest in the writings of Martin Heidegger. What makes his work so fascinating to me is two primary things. First is his interest in fundamental ontology and phenomenology. That is, his work is concerned with human activity at the most basic level. Where many philosophers take issue with the absolute, god, reason, and so forth, Heidegger is concerned with walking through doors or using a hammer to build a chair. The second point of interest is the way in which his writings feel like a journey. He is the tour guide to the reader through the phenomenal aspects of human existence, again contrasted with most western philosophers who act as the supreme lecturer disseminating information to the lowly masses.

His thoughts on art and the poetic worldview are of specific interest to me. In What is called Thinking? he speaks of the essential nature of craft and art by exploring the work of a cabinetmaker in saying “what maintains and sustains even this handicraft is not the mere manipulation of tools, but the relatedness to wood.”

In art, this relatedness is essential to the work. It is a relatedness that is itself an entire world of being, and the artist must negotiate that being-in-the-world. Take for instance the play. The playwright must have a relatedness to language, a relatedness to story, character, theme, plot and so forth. Each one of those “related tos” are one strand in a web of relations that comprise the matrix of relations necessary for the play to be wrought.

Stepping away from the act of writing a script, or engaging in a play being wrought is the production as a whole. Every member of the collaborative team must needs have a relatedness to the other collaborators. No one person can act and create in a vacuum, certainly not if the intent is to create a true work of art. Instead a web of relations builds or is made manifest that allows the creation of the play to happen.

But returning to the more basic level, the artist must have a relatedness to the work. I, as the lighting designer, must have a relation to light. And that relatedness to light is what guides and shapes the way the light relates to the play. To the work as a whole.

David Lynch in Catching the Big Fish talks about this relatedness from a different direction. He speaks of the artist’s relatedness to creativity or, as he puts it, ideas. Through meditation he finds it possible to transcend the day to day confusions and get right to the heart of one’s relatedness to creativity. “Life is filled with abstractions, and the only way we make heads or tails of it is through intuition. Intuition is seeing the solution – seeing it, knowing it. It’s emotion and intellect going together.”

Intuition can only exist when the artist has cleared the path for the relatedness towards the medium. If you are hungry you are related to food, tired to sleep, angry to frustration. Clearing the path towards that primary artistic relation allows the work to happen. To flow. It makes, as Heidegger would say, “the world fall away” and creation to commence.

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