MoMA and immersion
This week we visited the MoMA as we continue to explore creative focal points. So far in regards to my own work, I find that I resonate most with aesthetics and social/cultural impact. I think both of these focal points tie into creating work that feels emotionally resonant, which is something that I keep returning to as a personal north star.
Aesthetic value is important to me because at a core level I want to create experiences that are beautiful. More specifically, I think pieces that are beautiful, eye-catching, and immersive have the power to draw sustained attention. At the MoMA, the works I found myself instinctively drawn to were these large, immersive pieces that were impossible to ignore.
Light by Rafaël Rozendaal was one of these — a huge digital screen that played alternating colors, gradients, and pixelated scenes that moved so slowly that they appeared almost static. Knowing nothing about this piece and simply observing it, I felt like I didn’t need much background knowledge in order to enter a trance-like state whilst engaging with it. The actual graphics were not particularly complex — I could have probably created the piece myself in one day. But the effect of turning around a corner and immediately being hit with something at such a scale forced the experience to be immersive. Even as I walked away to other parts of the museum, I continued to catch glimpses of the bright neon colors shining through.
It turns out this effect was intentional, as I read up on the piece afterwards — “Rozendaal’s goal is for us to experience a state of immersion so complete that it becomes one with our physical world.” Learning his goal did help contextualize the piece for me in that it was so utterly simplistic. Sometimes I feel that is a good reminder as we get into the thick of these creative brainstorming weeks and really get into the weeds about our focal points and research intentions.
On the other end of the spectrum happens to be the one other piece that was quite immersive to me — Cadence by Otobong Nkanga. Another hard-to-miss piece, this ‘all-encompassing environment of tapestry, sculpture, sound, and text’ was situated in the atrium and visible from all the floors of the museum. Again, I appreciated the scale of the piece most of all, but in this case the artist’s motivation was not one I could derive from the work alone — apparently “Cadence confronts both the beauty and the degradation of the natural world—and its upheaval amid industrial and technological revolutions, resource extraction, and war.”
That one sounded a lot more like a DT final project to me — rich with layers of meaning, precedent, and contexts, situated within a larger discourse in our world. Comparing and contrasting these two pieces that caught my eye was an interesting experiment in perceived versus intended creative focal points.