Woah!!
Another week down, and another project delivered. No time to waste though as the next project is due this Friday…Eeeeeeks!!
The brief for this project is to pick an art piece currently on display at GOMA and then build a game around that art piece. For me two pieces really stood out and sparked enough neutrons and brain cells to furiously transmit and receive information and ideas of what I could do and what possibilities there were.
The first piece is the beautifully and alluringly trippy Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s Lightning for Neda 2009.
I was originally drawn to this piece due to the reproduction of the image beside it, it was actually a reflection made out of a mosaic of mirrors but upon reading a bit about the artist made this piece even more interesting.
Monir Sharoudy Farmanfarmaian is an Iranian female artist which already made me sit up and take a bit more interest. According to the New Yorker and the article Two Iranian Artists and the Revolution by Robin Wright in September 2015 Monir was born in Iran and moved to New York just after World War two to study art. Returning to Iran in 1957 and marrying, she then spent time raising children and travelling collecting art and Turkoman tribal jewelry. She associated and was friends with other great artists such as Pollock and Andy Warhol.
In 1957 when visiting the Shah Cheragh Shrine (King of Light Shrine) in Shiraz she was inspired to explore and recreate
“The very space seemed on fire, the lamps blazing in hundreds of thousands of reflections,” – Farmanfamaian memoir “A Mirror Garden”
“I imagined myself standing inside a many-faceted diamond and looking out at the sun. It was a universe unto itself, architecture transformed into performance, all movement and fluid light, all solids fractured and dissolved in brilliance in space, in prayer. I was overwhelmed.”- Farmanfamaian memoir “A Mirror Garden”
Farmanfamaian start to combine Abstract Expressionism she had admired whilst in New York with traditional Persian art styles in particular the art of mosaics. She created many pieces using hundreds and sometimes thousands of pieces of mirrors and painted glass but her new-found inspiration was cut short in 1978 due to the revolutionary turmoil overtaking Iran at the time. Losing everything she fled and lived in exile in New York and slowly disappeared from the public view and interest.
It was not until 2004 at the age of eighty, Farmanfarmaian returned to Iran and reopened and reconnected with her art and studio. Then during Iran’s 2009 Green Movement protests a young Neda Agha-Soltan was killed by a sniper’s bullet. The girls tragic death inspired the piece Lightning for Neda and the piece I chose.
Applying The Art to My Game
There was another piece that also inspired me but I will not go into that as it is the reflective, mirror nature or the art work that attracted me and made me wonder at all the interesting images that could be created using mirrors. As I want to also practice using Unity’s Particle System and also being attracted to and inspired by Huang Yong Ping’s Ressort 2012, I wanted to also do something with spirals.
Instead of creating some sort of mosaic, where pieces of art are smashed up and then rearranged by the player, I wanted to create interesting effects and images using mirrors and particle effects, in particular spirals. I couldn’t help but think how interesting and what a nice small but still challenging idea to reproduce a kaleidoscope sort of effect where shapes and spirals were reflected. It would also be nice to have the player take screen-shots of the images for their own interest and fun.
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So there you go, that’s my idea and concept behind Spireidoscope, which I sincerely hope it does justice to the original artist. Thank you for your time, patience and interest, I hope you gained something from this post. Until next time….
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