Lab 1.3 - Rewind: 95% invisible:

The work I chose for the Rewind is 95% invisible by Zois Loumakis. The works aesthetic initially grabbed my attention. It looks and sounds a certain way that I imagine to be very much 'tickling' the senses when experienced in person.

The quick rapid flashes and pulses of sound through the space are very suggestive to our perception. We perceive this rapid succesion of flashes of light as movement. And in the sound we perceive movement as the loudness of a certain sound varies between the four speakers. Although no light- or sound source is actually moving. In this way it is possible to suggests all kinds of movements through space and also and change our perceptual notion of the the space itself. I imagine the work to be very stimulating to the senses, disorientating, but also continuously exiting to experience. It is like watching dancing flames in a fire place, they are in continuous movement and always changing.

To me, that is the strongest point about works like these. What I mean with this is that this work very much abides to a certain aesthetic commonly found in (new) media art. Namely, a minimal setup with abstract light and sound playing synchronously, and intended to overstimulate the senses by making use of stroboscopic flashes and (loud) sinusoidal sounds playing extremely low and high frequencies. The goal is then to compose an interesting succesion of sequences of these lights and sounds. That is where most of these works are about, the abstract composition of light and sound. Which is totally fine and can provide a very pleasing and aesthetic experience and it has its place in media art. 

But I'm not sure how it relates to the topics addressed in the works description and the exhibition's theme like the existence of dark matter in the universe or chaos theory. Perhaps it doesn't even need to address other topics. It is in itself a perceptually interesting experience, just like watching the flames dance in the fire. That is why I still feel inspired by works like these, although I don't always agree with the artistic choices in for example the amount of 'overstimulation', they do play with our perception of space and motion in an interesting way and I feel stimulated to use and explore these topics and their techniques in my own work.