Singing Light (Watkins, 2018) Photo Luca Portik
Emotion in Abstract Animation: designing a new form of visual music by Julie Watkins will feature Singing Light-1 and Singing Light-2.
Julie Watkins is a PhD Candidate and Senior Lecturer in Film and Television at the University of Greenwich
Singing Light-1 will be installed in the Television Studio. In a dark spacious room, a projector throws strong white animations onto the black walls and white flags. A fine haze fills the air. Looking at the walls and flags you see shapes animating as if responding to a voice, but if you step into the animation and look back in the direction of the projector the light forms ever-changing tunnels. Draw your fingers through the mist, touch the light and create shadows, as if touching a running stream. Singing Light-2 will be transposed in the Gallery by being projected on to multiple translucent screens, allowing a different journey.
Singing Light is sung wordlessly and fused with abstract animation through composing motion, using audio-image units, sound and space and celebrating the human voice. It develops a methodology for creating pieces that afford soft fascination.
Singing Light is the result of a framework I developed for composing visual music from an animator’s perspective, to create non-narrative visual music with emotional impact. The significance of the framework is that visual music is freed from musical structures, which opens the visual music composition framework to artists, animators and performers. I am already publishing and adding knowledge to creative communities via international journals of contemporary artistic practice and research and in communities concerned with art, music, dance, theatre and the sciences. The aim is to generate both general interest and special interest from those who are involved in: visual music, light art, abstract animation, installation art, experimental film, soundscapes, wordless singing and vocal practice and theory.
Located in the Stephen Lawrence Gallery at 10 Stockwell Street SE10 9BD
Launch Friday, 12 April 5-6 pm | Open Tuesday – Thursday, April 16 – 18, 11 am – 5 pm | Free