SIMON LEE
BusObscura is a passenger bus converted to a multiple aperture camera obscura using a back projection technique that allows individual images to flow into one another. As the bus moves down the street a 360 degree animated panorama is created inside. Passengers sit in the seats as usual, but instead of looking out of the real scene as it passes by, they see a real time projection of the same scene. The exterior view from the bus is projected onto the interior of the bus and the individual apertures create images that merge into each other and create a 2 dimensional animation of the outside world. BusObscura takes an ordinary activity (riding the bus) and transforms it into something different by the application of physical laws that have been established for a very long time. BusObscura was originally created for Art Basel-Miami Beach in December 2004.
- Mirages and BusObscura by Kalitan Jagvonjeul
It is fascinating that Camera translated from Latin means room and that Obscura translated from Latin means Dark.
- In the West, a light-year is a unit of distance. It is the distance that light can travel in one year. Light moves at a velocity of about 300,000 (km) each second. So in one year, it can travel about 10 trillion km. More precisely, one light-year is equal to 9,500,000,000,000 kilometers. Imagine this for a moment, if you will, The Shaolin Master and his young student at the water’s edge. At first, a gentle breeze blows past so that the light of the sun dances upon the water of the pond, but after some time it becomes calm and the water becomes still. The young student asks, “Is it not beautiful, Master, when the light of the sun makes the surface of the water become like fire?” The Master responds, “When the sun dances upon the water, we are blind to what is beneath, but observe as the water becomes still. What do you see now?” The student replies, “I see that there are fish, Master, and a large rock just below the surface, where they have found shelter. I think that maybe they are part of a larger school, or maybe they have....”. But the Master has tossed a pebble into the water, and he asks “What can you see now, my young friend? As the surface of the water again becomes calm, the student comments “Ah... I can begin to make out the rock again, but it appears the fish have gone. It seems we have scared them. Perhaps they have gone to join a larger school, or maybe they are just..,” but by then, the Master has taken another pebble from his hand and tossed it into the water, asking “Can you see anything now?,” and tossing a few more pebbles, “How about now?” To this the student angrily replied, “All I can see is the light of the sun upon the water.,” to which the Master calmly responded “Exactly.”
- If you go into a very dark room on a very bright day and make a small hole in a window cover and look at the opposite wall. What you see is Magic! There in full color and every spectrum of the rainbow and movement will be the world outside the window — but magically transformed upside down!
This illusion is explained by a simple law of the physical world. When light travels across the vast cosmos in a straight line from the sun, the sun's rays are reflected from a bright subject passing through a small hole in thin material; they do not scatter but cross and reform as an upside down image on a flat surface held parallel to the hole. This law of optics was known and discovered in ancient times. The first Eastern historical reference to this type of device was built by the Chinese philosopher who's name was Mo-Ti (5th century BC). He actually recorded the creation of an inverted image formed by light rays passing through a pinhole into a darkened room. He called this darkened room a "locked treasure room." A room filled with magic, light and impressions collected and captured from the outside world like a kaleidoscopic Genie inside a bottle.
1500 hundred years later and also on the Eastern side of the world , an Islamic scholar and Sufi mystic named Alhazen (Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haitham) (c.965 - 1039) also gave a historical account of the principle including experiments with five lanterns inside a tent in an Arabian desert with a small hole.
In Simon Lee's example and continuing in the tradition of the Eastern mystics and Western scientists. He has skillfully converted not only a room, or just a box, or a tent, but a moving vehicle. A large bus perforated with many holes and filled with many passengers from many Eastern and Western walks of life and with their many unique perspectives.
From this astonishing feat and magical experience, I wonder what it will conjure up on the back of their retinas and in their minds and memories for a long time to come. I can only imagine something outlandish, beautiful and fantastic, like luscious green and blue mirages in an Arabian desert, captured mysteriously in the poignant photographs of Simon Lee's nomadic BusObscura.
INTERVIEW
JL. Please tell me a little about your art background and your previous work.
SL. I became interested in making projected images when I collaborated with a physics teacher in a high school. We co-taught a class where we took science into the art studio and art into the science laboratory and mixed things up a bit, (not necessarily as dangerously explosive as it sounds) and one of the subjects we tackled was ‘light’. As a consequence I began to learn more about the physics of light and its complexities and mysteries, and it gradually became a central media in my work. I began looking for and documenting the natural projections that occur because of the juxtaposition of everyday circumstance -- a large windowed bus moving down the street reflecting light into a darkened room etc -- and because I so enjoyed the quality of these images and the subliminal information that they contained I began to figure out ways of using similar projections in my installations.
JL. Where did you get your inspiration for BusObscura?
SL. I was working with first generation live projection, but had rejected making a camera obscura because it seemed so ubiquitous and already investigated The idea for the bus came when I finally realized that I should at least experiment with the camera obscura phenomena, and after a couple of false starts ended up building a large multiple aperture camera obscura with back-projection screens that sat on top of a pick-up truck and could carry about five people lying on the floor and experiencing what was essentially “cinema’. It was called Truck Obscura and I thought about how to present it more conventionally for more people, and which mode of public transit (bus, boat, train, plane etc.) would be the most flexible as a live action camera/projector.
I settled on a bus because it moves through the world at street level with all the vagaries of traffic and pedestrians and so travels amongst us more intimately than a boat on water or a train on tracks; plus a bus is more able to stop/start and change direction and speed at will giving it more flexibility as a camera that can roam. So I began to see Bus Obscura as an instrument that was camera, projector and theater, and that could be used anywhere that a bus can go to make live animated projections to a live audience -- and that each outing would be like screening a film. I asked Colleen Burke (musician) and Walter Sipser (musician and artist) if they’d be interested in making soundtracks for the Miami bus and the New York bus, and they agreed and came in as collaborators and developed and produced a major element of the piece. We are now working on ideas for having live sound on the bus -- like the silent movies would have a live piano player in the theater.
JL. How does the image taking process actually work?
SL. I suppose one answer to this would be -- in exactly the same way that the image taking process works in any non-digital camera, light enters a darkened chamber and is focused on a plane etc. There is a rational explanation for the phenomena, but it’s not one that we take on board very readily. I’m sure that some people get off the bus thinking that they have just watched a video (I know this to be the case because people often ask where are the video cameras). I am as incapable of explaining how a video camera works as I am of explaining how a camera obscura works despite their disparity in sophistication -- though if I told someone that the bus was all a video projection they would accept that as sufficient explanation and if I told them it was made by a 1000 holes and some plexi-glass they’d probably feel they needed further explanation.
Anyway here’s Leonardo’s explanation from one of his notebooks:
All bodies together, and each by itself, give off to the surrounding air an infinite number of images which are all pervading and each complete, each conveying the nature, colour and form of the body which produces it.
It can clearly be shown that all bodies are, by their images, all-pervading in the surrounding atmosphere, and each complete in itself as to substance, form and colour; this is shown by the images of the various bodies which are reproduced in one single perforation, through which they transmit the objects by lines which intersect and cause reversed pyramids from the objects, so that they are upside down on the dark plane where they are first reflected.
The images of objects are all diffused through the atmosphere which receives them; and all on every side in it. To prove this, let a c e be objects of which the images are admitted to a dark chamber by the small holes n p and thrown upon the plane f I opposite to these holes. As many images will be produced in the chamber on the plane as the number of the said holes.
JL. Can you tell me some anecdotes about your experience working on this concept, or an interesting experience with the passengers.
SL. Because the bus is something of a hybrid, part bus and part artwork, some people treat it like they would any bus and point things out and talk to each other, and some people treat it more like a projection in an art gallery or cinema and quietly watch the performance.
Here is an excerpt from Ricoh Gerbl’s text for the catalog about the bus that will be published in July:
“……The retired couple from Chicago said to me, as I stepped out of the bus, blinded by the bright sunlight: I wish someone would explain to us what the artist wanted to say. I could not even look out of the windows.”
JL. Where else do you plan on taking the bus ride?
SL. So far the bus has been out for only a few days -- 4 days at Basel-Miami Beach and 4 days at the Armory Show NYC. It got a great response and now there are tentative plans to run the bus in Pittsburgh, Kampala, Georgia, Connecticut, London and Saigon.
In Miami we tried operating as a shuttle bus between art venues, but that felt far too constraining, so in New York we told people that we were going nowhere and that we would be back in 10 minutes -- and that worked much better.
JL. What other projects are you working on?
SL. Ideally, I want to show the bus as one part of a show with the other part being a separate piece inside a gallery -- the bus is a great tool to extend a show outside of the gallery. This worked quite well recently with the bus running around New York (albeit briefly) while I was showing a live video projection, How Beautiful is the Turning Cabbage, at Pierogi in Brooklyn. Right now I’m working on several gallery projects -- some painted photographs on lightboxes, a series of iron shadows (which I’m presumptuously assuming will be amongst the first cast iron films ever made), and a video of a rabbit, a chicken and a goat crossing the Williamsburgh Bridge one bright spring morning……..any of which would make interesting sister pieces to the bus running outside.
Simon Lee has been exhibiting his work since 1992 at venues such as Pierogi, Brooklyn, NY; The Armory Show in NY; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; The Berkshire Museum, Massachusetts; The Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn NY; Espace Paul Ricard in Paris, France; Snug Harbour Cultural Center, Staten Island, NY; The Whitney Museum of Art; The Hudson River Museum, NY; The Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art; The Center for Freudian Analysis and Research in London, UK; The American Academy in Rome and many other prestigious galleries and institutions around the world. He currently lives and works in New York.
Contact: Joe Amrhein, Pierogi 2000, 177 North 9th Street, Brooklyn, NY, 11211, info@pierogi2000.com