Yep, here it is at last. My senior iDEA project.
It includes steel sculpture, projection, sound, and arduino-controlled LEDs. The projection consists of time-lapse photography from Southwestern New Mexico landscapes and starscapes, plus slowed-down footage of me (well, of my hands and feet) playing around in my yard.
In the video I explain with some text breaks the nature of “Brane Cosmology.” So I won’t spoil it for you by writing about that specifically. However, I will say I love combining science, particularly astrophysics and quantum physics, into my art. To me there is so much wonder to be found there, and in New Mexico, where nature, people, and art coincide so well together. Every night I can feel the heartbeat of the universe when I close my car door and walk to my house under the clear night sky.
The iDEA program here at WNMU has been amazing for me. I never knew how enchanted I would be with combining so many disciplines. I’m like a kid in a candy store here. I feel like my journey as an interdisciplinary artist is just beginning.
Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.
Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
***************
Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.
In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.
