a not so final project

For my final project, I continued working through concepts from my midterm having to do with Sufism and the Whirling Dervishes. In this project, I wanted to comment on how moments of clarity are ephemeral. We can think we understand something one second and then the next second that clarity is gone and we don't know where or how to find it again, and we can't seek it out because then it won't be able to find us. Going off of this idea, I decided to work with motion (spinning), red and blue transparencies, and light. I wanted to create a project where the light could shine through these moving transparencies so that occasionally the shadows caused by the light would interact and overlap to create purple. But that overlap would only last a short second, and then the shadows and transparencies would keep moving on and on, only occasionally and unpredictably deciding to overlap again. This project took on many many forms as I encountered various technical difficulties and physical limitations.

The first image posted here is one of the beginning stages of the project, which would have worked quite well had the fan that I used as a spinning motor not broken. As shown here, I attached blue and red transparencies to the bicycle wheel. The bicycle wheel would spin and because of the two lights, two shadows of the spinning wheel were made and the shadows could interact. (This was actually a second stage of the project, as in the first stage I had two bicycle wheels spinning individually on two separate fan motors. Each wheel had a color on it and the color shadows would interact. This would also have worked except that one of the fan motors broke, after which this idea was changed into the above picture of the one bicycle wheel with one motor)

After both fan motors broke, I experimented with a lot of other ways to approach this idea. I worked with attaching transparencies to the actual fan and making them spin, I tried suspending colored disks between two fans, I tried making the disks move between two fans, and eventually I came upon the idea of a windmill, something that spins naturally. I decided to ultimately work with this form and suspend a red and blue windmill between two fans so that the windmill would be constantly spinning in one direction and then the other and then back to the first direction and so on. The shadow that this spinning windmill created forced the colors to interact, which was a goal of mine from the start.

This project has been a whirlwind of ideas and thoughts and trials and frustrations and experiments and excitement. To be honest, I was not completely satisfied with the outcome of my final project because I feel as though I still have a lot of thinking and experimenting to do with this idea of ephemeral clarity. In a way though, I am actually very glad that I am seeing my final as more of a work in progress because this idea is not something that can be captured easily. I don't even know if it can ever be completely captured, because that's kind of the point in the first place. If after a lot more experimenting I find that this is something that cannot be captured in a way that does this phenomenon justice, that impossibility could be the starting point for my next project, and so the thinking and thoughts continue. I am extremely sad to be leaving Florence, but because I can not see this project as "final", a part of me doesn't really feel like I'm leaving after all.