Jacob Stephens Swimming in Stereo

Jacob Stephens The Dollhouse

Laura Keller Transmit

Laura Keller Reel

The strata that make up an urban landscape consist of many layers: bedrock, land cleared of vegetation, infrastructure systems, street-level concrete paving,
and buildings. Currently, with one eye on upscale urban development, and another looking toward growing concerns of global ecology, plant life is bring returned to city-scapes. In many cases this added value comes in the form of street trees, which are added to the top layer of concrete strata, not quite replacing the natural arbors that came
before them.

In this piece, the dormant urban tree is without foliage, but the shadow of the tree is animated, showing shoots, leaves and blossoms unfolding. The tree is illuminated by the projector displaying the animation. The placement of the light source, (the projector) mimics that of a street lamp. The animation which incorporates the actual shadow of the tree, is projected onto the tree, spilling onto a wall or the ground, and appears as a continuation of the tree’s shadow.

Originally a proposal for the Madrid Abierto, Wendy Wolf and I wanted to combine my projection/object work with her cut garlands. The first installation of Honey Locust Layers was with a smaller tree, approx 4 ft high, at the Spring Garden Studio in Philadelphia. The bare-limbed tree was draped with her paper garlands of hundreds of leaf-replicas. Then I manufactured a projected shadow to represent the tree with lush foliage.

For the second incarnation of Honey Locust Layers, I worked alone, without the garlands, or the wonderful Wendy, in a storage space in the basement of the Berrie Center at Ramapo College. This time, I used a larger tree, 6ft 6 inches, was carefully stripped of its leaves, measured and photographed. Nest the tree was modeled in 3D space using Cinema 4D software. Then an animation of leaf growth was created for the model. The final animation was projected onto the tree to match its shadow and create an additional “shadow” of the growing shoots and leaves. The only problem was when the tree and projector were moved to a new space. Somehow, the animated shadow no longer matched the real shadow cast by the projection beam and the whole model had to be rebuilt with the software, while projecting the results of each test in the new space. Afterward, the projector model, height and all positions were carefully measured and mapped for future installations.