Vividness

This is an installation where a light mechanism renders an arrangement of dried flowers into an illusory regime of artificial vitality through the real-time manipulation of colors. By means of a digital projector, colors are sent to the dried leaves and flower in a way that the resulting image shows no colors at all.

Living plants are first cut and dried so their surface is able to reflect the projected colors and create the illusory grayscale image. The projector lightens then the scene with a rhythmically oscillating color pulse so that the arrangement seems to come to life in a sustained digital breath.

The flow of light in the installation miniaturizes somehow the complex of processes of substitution, replacement and transformation where mechanical, chemical and digital revolutions have relied on. This setup of a controlled phenomenon, however, is open, and bodies of visitors can interrupt the projection beam when crossing the installation space. Seen from this proximity, the arrangement reacts to residual lights and shows its old colors.

In his Negative Dialectics, Theodor Adorno stated that there is a space where to catch the indelible color: “Only the utmost distance would be proximity”. This radical distance becomes a bodily presence inside Vividness, a proximity which enables to alter the phenomenon as well as rewrite it.

See more details about the installation here: http://abelardogfournier.org/vividness