When writing the Fall ART BRAINS curriculum, I was asked to consider tying in the Data Fields exhibition, which coincides with the Fall session of the camp at Artisphere. It's an excellent show, but I honestly wasn't overly excited about incorporating it into the camp at first, as it's highly technical with a lot of auditory elements (very cool, but not my field of expertise, per se). Now that the camp is actually underway, I'm happy to have had this nudge in another direction, because it prompted me to design some classes I know I wouldn't have otherwise. Shadow Machines is one of those, inspired by the illuminated/projected works in the darkened space of the exhibition:
Youth will create small cut-paper arrangements that, when illuminated with a light source, create compositions of shadows on the wall of a darkened space. The shadows will be the final product of their work, prompting the students to think about incorporating light into their art, and visual mediums beyond drawing and painting.
Everyone was pretty stoked on this project. It was interesting to see the kids thinking about negative space, learning more about how light/shadows work, and how to make adjustments to get the the shadows looking how they wanted them to look. I like the idea of the final products being these intangible, shape-shifting penumbra-scapes. The campers were into moving the light source (small LED flashlights) from side to side and closer or farther away from their "machines" to produce ghostly, overlapping variations of the shadows. I've included a video here along with the photos that shows a little bit of that.
Side note: During this class, I showed the kids about one minute of a Reading Rainbow show about shadows. None of them had ever heard of Reading Rainbow, which makes sense, but also feels somehow WRONG. What's the modern-day equivalent of Reading Rainbow? My two-second Google search returned this, and this. Reading Rainbow + iPad + twitter + . . . flash mob? I guess that's all great news (minus the flash mob, no thank you please), but it feels bittersweet to think of Reading Rainbow being shown any other way than on a mammoth, 5-ton television set wheeled from an AV lab to the front of a classroom on a rolling cart (which also contains a VCR to play the RR VHS tape that itself is larger than the entire device that will play the show for kids today. Whew.).
