Shadows

Program note:

“Shadows” is an audiovisual transdisciplinary artwork composed by Deniz Çağlarcan with the selection of specific oil paintings from Güneş Çağlarcan’s “Shadow Collection” as compositional material. “Shadows Collection” reflects the fascination with the idea of how humans are socially connected. Although each person has a wide pallet of unique characteristics, people seek any degree of relationship with each other. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs explains the relationship between social status and the mental state, where the level of social connection is explained in each degree become the overall form of the painting while each individual and different human gesture constructed the texture. The painting collection is a result of different filters that affect human perception. The human brain decodes the ball of acrylic into human body parts, direction, clothes, and shadows. After the figures are filtered by human perception, unfinished stories lived or not lived, sorrows, past experiences, and unique journeys find their place in the “Shadows Collection.”

The visual music “Shadows” adds a multi-layered structure to the artwork, which already had a dense form. Deniz’s perception filters the substantial work of art and underlines the elements in the paintings with his own aesthetic interpretation. Deniz augments the small figures to magnify the details that will be decoded by the perception of the audience, which constructs the piece; he presents a formal narrative with the selection of specific paintings from the “Shadow Collection.” In the flow of the piece, the gestural relation is constructed with a Schaefferian approach, that is, the gestures are together regarding their syntactical content and unique morphological characteristics while the figures extracted from paintings establish a general context in a semantic manner. In this journey embarked upon with the selected images and the accompanying formal structure, the spiritual connection between people, the decisions we make throughout our lives, and the impartial judgment of their consequences are emphasized. Meanwhile, the filters based on the viewer’s past experiences guide them in this personal spiritual journey.

Shadows – 3840x2160p for onescreen:

Technical Setup and Interaction of the Installation:

There are two versions of this audio/visual work. The first one is 5760x1080p which was made to cover the entire three adjacent wall with a stereo audio. The second version is 3840x2160p which is made for one screen with stereo audio. You can find the example of the 5760x1080p version below from the installation area.

Shadows – 5760x1080p for three walls showcase from installation area:

Shadows – 5760x1080p for three walls:

Some of the Paintings that I worked with: