Final Photos of NCN dance installation

Film sequence for installation

In keeping with the notion of beauty as a fleeting experience, and how best to represent this, one of my initial ideas had been the desire to incorporate into the installation the use of film footage. Through the use of projection, the footage would show short exerts from movies which captured brief, yet deep, and moving, moments which reveal ‘true beauty’ as an existential, as well as ethereal, part of the human experience.

The film sequence needed to be completed before the final production week, in order to test the projectors in the theatre space. Once I had determined which movie scenes would be included, they each needed to be downloaded on to my computer, where they could later be assembled on Adobe Premiere Pro (video editing software).

Unable to successfully download the movie clips safely to my computer hardrive, I used a software known as ‘Flashback Pro 5 – Recorder and Player, to record the movie clips directly from the computer screen. The software enabled me to adjust the frame rate of each clip, ensuring a high definition. Once the frame rate was set, the clips were uploaded to Adobe Premiere Pro video editing software where they were assembled to incorporate fading transitions.

The use of the Flashback Pro software, enabled the film sequence to be produced to an exceptionally high quality by allowing me to adjust the frame rate of each movie clip.

Above: Screenshots of film clips featured within projection sequence.

(Photo of set for final performance displaying the film projections either side of the cube sculpture).

A Rubik’s cube

The most challenging aspect of the design process, was to produce a design which didn’t attempt to characterise beauty, but instead to create an environment within which, more crucially, the audience could potentially encounter beauty. The design would, therefore, need to invite the audience to seek out an encounter.

One important quality, that the sculpture within the installation had to portray, was the notion of beauty as a permanent, although seemingly fleeting, experience. Essentially, our encounters with beauty, are an intensely rich pleasure, something that is “exquisite and yet leaves us unsatisfied” – Tom Wright.

Following an extensive search for an object that could represent this quality, I eventually settled on the image of a ‘Rubik’s puzzle cube’.

 

In my mind, the twists and turns, and mental exertion, involved in attempting to solve a Rubik’s cube, dovetailed neatly with the thought processes of an audience trying to solve the meaning of the sculpture. The cube’s form would also, hopefully, encourage the audience to walk around the sculpture, observing it from different angles. For me, however, the most significant reason for using the Rubik’s cube type sculpture, lay with the idea of the cube itself representing beauty as a puzzle.