When I first searched for a CBD site for what would eventually 当我第一次找什么将CBD网站最终

When I first searched for a CBD site for what would eventually 当我第一次找什么将CBD网站最终 When I first searched for a CBD site for what would eventually become maxims of behaviour’, few things were certain. The City of Melbourne was looking for a major light based artwork to engage with people on cold, dark, winter nights…a form of light therapy. I was looking for a prominent site that didn’t have icon status. A building that somebody might let me drill all the holes in it that I suspected this work would require. While sitting at a tram stop on the corner of Bourke and Swanston Streets, I noticed the interesting, shabby, geometric facade of a ten storey 1960s building I’d often looked at while waiting for a tram. The Swanston Street side of it was plastered in giant billboards, attesting to its high visibility credentials; while the Bourke Street facade supported an unusual, modernist ornamental/shade structure in rectilinear concrete. The more I looked, the more I realised that the combination of location, style and a remarkably convenient array of ledges made this building unique, not just as a platform, but as a major visual element of this new work. The building was willing in other ways too: its owner was open minded, the Council seemed excited by it and it really was uncanny how well suited it was to the complex and demanding job of supporting a large light installation. After numerous tests and much planning, the ledges above the windows were fitted with eighty-eight colour changing LED lights by a team of abseilers. With this impressive new capability for producing spectacle on a grand scale, I became interested in the idea of making this huge work somehow disappear into its surroundings. I looked at biological models that echoed this ability and found one in the photo-chromatic camouflage skills of a cuttlefish. These creatures possess a remarkable capacity to analyze their surroundings in realtime, and produce a simulation of that environment on their skin that metamorphoses as the cuttlefish glides over different surfaces -its form of invisibility through spectacle. I saw a lab test where a cuttlefish tries with its sublimely flexible pigmentation to reproduce the man-made grid of a checkerboard. Under the glare of the laboratory lights, it hadn’t disappeared; in fact, its difference from the checkerboard was perhaps accentuated by its mimicry. I wondered if the animal was happy with its beautiful facsimile of the grid. I know I was because it had given me a clue as to how the work could relate to its surroundings. How it could be from its environment, and be a part of it, yet still somehow alien to it. This similarity, yet difference, I paralleled to lights reflected on a wet road - some information is lost but in its place there are other aspects of light and rain and roads that trigger our cinematic imaginings. An important part of making work for me is finding a process and a level of abstraction that’s right for the project. A logic needs to be found within the site and in the idea of trying to inhabit that site: a logic for filtering information, for distillation and even for a certain level of dislocation. For maxims I worked closely on this process with the very capable and creative animator, Craig Deeker. We filmed crowds of people, traffic and lights from around the site that became the raw visual material for the lighting program. People that just happened to be passing the site on the days we videoed became embedded in the work - giant phantoms, shadow people, representing us all. We found that footage of people walking by could be pushed to extreme levels of diminished definition while still remaining recognizable. It’s similar to the way the shadow of a hawk darting along the ground is instantly recognisable to a rabbit. We must have some primitive but direct part of our brain that deals exclusively with looming shadows. Likewise, the intense colours that these shadows punctuate in the work are like signals, stop-reds, go-greens; its a lizard brain pallet on an environmental scale. When maxims of behaviour first ran, it was common to see passers-by standing, camera phone at arms length, pointing towards the work recapturing the imagery that not so long ago had been gleaned from this very site. It’s even possible that these huge people- shaped holes in the lightplay that glides back and forth in front of their phones, are their own silhouettes, recorded as they passed by this location on a previous day. The more familiar a part of Melbourne's nightscape maxims of behaviour becomes, the more readily it slips out of our consciousness via the peripheral and into the phantasmagoric. Alexander Knox