Plato's Cave

"Plato's Cave" Portfolio

"Before all the wondrous shows of the widespread space around him, what living, sentient thing loves not the all-joyous light -- with its colors, its rays and undulations, its gentle omnipresence in the form of the wakening Day? [...] Aside I turn to the holy, unspeakable, mysterious Night. Afar lies the world -- sunk in a deep grave -- waste and lonely is its place. [...] More heavenly than those glittering stars we hold the eternal eyes which the Night hath opened within us. Farther they see than the palest of those countless hosts -- needing no aid from the light, they penetrate the depths of a loving soul -- that fills a loftier region with bliss ineffable. [...] No longer was the Light the abode of the gods, and the heavenly token of their presence -- they drew over themselves the veil of the Night. The Night became the mighty womb of revelations -- into it the gods went back -- and fell asleep, to go abroad in new and more glorious shapes over the transfigured world. "

- Novalis (1772 - 1801)
Hymns to the Night

Postscript. Clicking on the image at the top will take you to a new "Plato's Cave" portfolio on my web gallery. For those of you who have not already guessed at how these images have been created (I posted the first in the series a few weeks ago with the heading, Platonic Forms), the title (and reference) will be obvious when I describe how these images are created: I shine thin beams of light (using one, two, or three flexible gooseneck LEDs with magnetic bases secured to a metal plate for stability) through a wide assortment of acrylic geometric forms (squares, prisms, pyramids, circles, spheres, etc.) ranging in size from a quarter of inch to about three or four inches and of varying translucency and color (many of the forms harbor a multitude of colors, depending on the direction of light that hits surface), and photograph the most "pleasing" combinations of the resulting lights and shadows that appear on a black matte board pitched vertically some distance beyond the light source(s). Note that although the images look noisy, it is not actual "noise" you are seeing, but rather the collective impression of noise due to the specular reflections of light off an imperfect receiving surface. 

Apart from my delight in being able to use this technique to explore a part of the abstract aesthetic latent space pioneered by László Moholy-Nagy, Itten, Kandinsky, Klee, Robert & Sonia Delaunay and explored by my dad in his later years (albeit, in my case, on a woefully amateurish level compared to these timeless artists), I am intrigued conceptually, philosophically even, by how blatantly it blurs the distinction between traditional art and photography. I say this because for this series photography plays only a minor (and least important) role! Arranging and discovering a "pleasing configuration" of lights and forms requires a lot of time and patience; it typically takes me 20-30 min to find a single geometry worth taking an image of. Indeed, the process of choosing the type and number of specific acrylic forms, adjusting the light's direction and the size of the beam(s), and gradually sculpting the relative geometries by making myriad small changes (and sometimes having to start from scratch) - where the final "shot" is almost an afterthought -  is arguably more akin to making art than doing photography!

My lifelong fascination with the blurred distinction between art and photography has directly fueled my experiments in abstraction, wherein I deliberately try to tease apart (disentangle?) the creative tension between finding abstract patterns vs. creating them. For example, for my Synesthscapes series, I search for patterns in what are essentially "fixed" environments (e.g., natural light refracting/reflecting through a rum bottle); for my Swirls, Whorls, and Tendrils series, I create singular "worlds" made up of ink and water, which I then photograph a time-slice of if it proves to be sufficiently interesting; my yearly efforts to find ice abstracts consist of exactly that, finding existing patterns; my light abstracts involve fixed geometries of light filaments and intentional random camera movements, wherein I decide whether an image is "good enough" to keep only after taking the photograph; and Cymatiscapes require little more of me than to choose a vessel type and size (e.g., a small soy sauce dish) and a vibration frequency before clicking the shutter in my camera's burst mode. Compared to these earlier experiments, the process of creating - literally, creating - images for Plato's Cave is obviously on an entirely different level!