Photo by Yuula Benivolski
Facets (Never Enough) is a two-minute video installation exploring the frustration of being unable to bring ideas into the world as originally conceived.
Facets was created for An Index, a group show at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto which featured the inaugural residents of Akin’s Studio Program.
Creative frustration.
Crumpled sheets of paper, abandoned drafts, half-baked sketches, unmet expectations. False starts and restarts and revisions and iterations. Dreams that become nightmares over time, haunting, mocking, flirting, betraying.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the universe, a pristine, unblemished idea floats on, searching for an adequate vessel.
Never enough.
I made Facets using Touchdesigner, a visual procedural development platform (think of it as coding with guitar pedals, each pedal adds a different effect). I’ve never used Touchdesigner before. Trying to learn a new and rather complex tool on a tight deadline for my first Big Gallery Show™ while working on a piece about frustration just seemed...right. Also, Steve Lee—who is in our studio but not in this show—gave me my first crash course in Touchdesigner, so it’s a little hat tip to him.
Each object in the video consists of 3D geometry being fed arbitrarily generated mathematical data (usually timecodes, low-frequency oscillation, or random noise). Inserting chance into the objects’ DNA ensures they cannot possibly be what I originally had in mind. Thus a piece about ideas that become disfigured over time is true to its own ideology.
