Giovanna Cerise 'Synesthesia' .
Metaverse Art
The metaverse artist Giovanna Cerise exhibits new work @ Split Screen (SLURL) on Second Life, where she shows her large scale virtual installation 'Synesthesia'.
Located over an area of sim sea the visitor is invited to walk through a series of parallel corridors with transparent walls coloured in blue, yellow or occasionaly warm pastel pink, within these corridors we are immersed in colour and Cerise's title 'Synesthesia' references the neurological condition in which stimulation of one sense leads to experiences in another sensory area. Most commonly some people experience letters or numbers perceived as inherently coloured but in the context of Cerise's work there is a also a synesthetic effect where visual motion induces a sound synesthesia in which sounds are heard in response to visual motion and flicker.
The installation is on half a sim, the boundary of the work unclear and as we walk through the water along corridors twice the height of my avatar, alli slight and the colour becomes immersive, overwhelming, blinding. Many of the colours on the walls - the faces of transparent, hollow, elongated cube prims are overlayed with dithered textures and finely gridded screens giving the effect of walking through a tunnel of dynamic interference patterns. Beneath us the blue waves of the sea are visible through the transparent floor and in a clever twist this familiar sea blue is muted and transformed by the colours of the transparent ground giving the observer a strange pattern movement to the floor with the added confusion of the reflection in the floor of the moving cumulo stratus clouds from the sky.
In her introduction Cerise tells us she was inspired by the essay "Concerning the Spiritual in Art" by the abstract colour painter Kandinsky and also the musical composition ”Prometheus: The Poem of Fire” by the composer Scriabin who experimented with atonal compositions. And of course there is the neurology of synethesia in this renaissance in which we could also compare her exploration of transparent colour fields in a three dimensional space to the flat canvas work of the experimental abstract painter.
Lying beyond them on the border of the installation is the musical element of a seemingly abandoned piano keyboard. Gone is the blue and yellow colour palette, here the emphasis is on the black keys and the contrasting white, string prims which sprout and strike out in a counterpoint gesture of chords of white in allusion to the synesthetic effect of pattern and music.
In this work of colour and texture, visual motion and flicker we hear brief snatches of music - Scriabin's music the audio rising, then fading away as quickly as it arrived before it is overwhelmed by the sound of rushing wind, this is strange meteorology the rapidly moving pink clouds of sunset scudding across the sky is otherworldy, a dreamscape of abstract colour, interference textures and atonal music.
Within Cerise's complex synesthetic landscape, above the planes of colour, above the prim piano keyboard and it's emanating chords stands the eponymous hero of Scriabin's music- the heroic character Prometheus who bought us 'Fire'. Cerise presents three chained Promethian figures in a esquisse asemblage of twisted prims, their alignment and form changing as we move around and through the space and perhaps the titanic figures standing on each others shoulders suggest a metaphor of reaching higher and seeing further "We are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants who enable us to see further".
"Synesthesia" @ Split Screen (SLURL)
Aug 1st - 30th 2012
author : arklo , Liverpool 2012