Meet IDEA Resident Loganic
This guest post was written by Christopher Logan “Loganic”, one of IDEA’s spring residents living and working at IDEA Lab. Here, Loganic describes his interest in advancing his traditional art into the digital world, using IDEA’s equipment.
My world was flat just a week ago.
My drawings have been line dancing on flat sheets, figures against a two-dimensional wall, for as long as I can remember. Don’t get me wrong; I thoroughly enjoyed, and still do, scribbling new beings and worlds from tapestries of pen marks on paper. Like writing in my journal, it will always be a participating element in my process. But, as technology introduced and the process demanded, I’m instead typing these words, and my penmanship became rather irrelevant as soon as I opened my laptop.
A few weeks ago, however, I explored, via technology, new worlds that my penmanship not only survived, but created. Through Tony Patrick (a former IDEALab Resident, spring 2018), the Tenfold Gaming Initiative, and use of the New Rochelle BID’s IDEALab space, I was given the opportunity to create and explore in Tilt Brush, a Google-based alternate reality software. The experience itself was a revelation. It allowed me to step into my drawings. By that I mean, I actually walked behind and in between the swivels, the swerves, the movements of my hand. I crafted constellations and ventured through them. The newly imaginable creative possibilities, conceived from those virtual reality sessions, are still firing away in my brain…(I just realized I spray painted in space!)
This experience came with Vive VR system headgear, two hand control units that resembled sleek black ankhs without crossbars, two opposing sensors on tripods, and an alien adorned laptop. With the right hand control, I could record my hand motion and with the left, I could scroll through a full array of tools and colors, and many operating options. My biggest challenge soon became sticking to a minimal set of selections in each exploratory session, taking time to play with each technological toy’s full range of capabilities in those early learning sessions.
Since former IDEA Lab Fellow Tony Patrick (Tenfold) introduced me to the idea of exploring virtual and augmented reality platforms, my mind still hasn’t fully understood the planets of possibilities they could inspire. At this naive state of the inception of my thoughts, alternate reality feels to be the undisputed next step in my creative trajectory. I’m unsure as to how far I could creatively travel, but through it, I am able to interact with the artworks I design up close and intimately.
I’m thoroughly interested in exploring art in a technological context, in how I can link the two worlds-the traditional and the virtual studios. Crafting in alternative reality previously seemed drastically different from my personally developed methods of drawing and painting. Through my preliminary steps into the virtual world, questions have suddenly turned up, such as “In which ways will my two-dimensional strokes function in three-dimensional planes?” or “How compatible will my abstracted creations visually appear to me in a life-like virtual realm?”
The creative approach I’d developed over the past 15 years centers around scribbling and spontaneous mark making, which I consider “freestyle drawing” or “freestyle painting”. The lines have a lyrical quality. Quick rendering with loose strokes encapsulates my momentary energy, and encourages serendipity or ‘happy accidents” to happen in the process. Working from an energetic impulses, I implore the finding of forms by physically feeling my way around, while watching what creations spawn from my impromptu handiwork. My approach is both a form of creative meditation, as I get lost in the cacophony of strokes, as well as an artistic divination, in which lines and strokes get casted upon the surface to be further interpreted. The technique solicits a chaos to order methodology that allows me to rummage thorough my conglomerations of creative urges, to find characters and meaning in my work. The resulting imagery becomes the physical manifestation of my visual-meets-kinetic explorations, from which the viewer gets to interpret his or her own vision.
My approach to creating has roots in personal battles with uncertainty and anxiety. i was initially drawn to attacking canvas spaces in this frenetic manner because I’m largely inclined to be an indecisive creature, who rarely plans what he’d like to create. So I would find my way through the creative process by making marks, striking blank space and creating through gut reflexes, until an image arose in my mind’s eye. This way, I continually find excitement in the process, staying fully engrossed in mystery until the piece appeased my sense of completion (which was another major decision in itself). Strict, technically rendering often feels scientifically predictable to me; I particularly like that the loosely rendered illustrations do not function as would realistically dictated imagery. Ultimately, as a visual artist, I desire to create, not replicate the imagery of any world, in real or virtual realms.
I vividly remember a Life Drawing professor constantly barking about “the freshness of the sketch”, as the classmates tried our best to depict that week’s nude model in extremely short intervals of class time, from 2 minutes down to 5 seconds. My personally developed style of sketching has grown, endeavoring to champion that sentiment of quickly capturing the essence of my subject matter. A swift execution of mark-making, inspired by rapid-fire blind contour exercises, graffiti strokes and a desire to “dance out” the forms, this approach felt physically fulfilling when sketching in an alternate reality context. I love that I’m applying my penmanship to new trajectories of execution. In addition, it feels timely for these new possibilities to be conceived into existence now, at the beginning of a new year. The first month for the first steps.
I’ll admit that I might be speaking with the naive enthusiasm of the newly converted, but I’m thoroughly convinced that a clear demarcation will continuously exist in my life as a lover of drawing, a point in time signifying ‘before’ and ‘after alternate realities’. The time when I began to bring scribbles to life. The time to get lost in a new world. The space to travel through gestures. Funny how a few months ago, I was satisfied with solely rendering on flat surfaces! After my experiences with simulated reality, I’m still astonished, thinking, “Oh, what a difference a mark makes!”
