An Interview With An Artist
An interview with digital arts and new media artist, Carinne Knight.
"I work with primarily photography and digital media. I am looking at relationships of humans and/or other animate beings within their environments and visualizing them as bodies of light and interaction with the space around them. The narrative that I'm working on right now is an abstract and conceptual narrative of water and the redwoods. I'm using the equation of light plus water equals life. I'm making a looped narrative that tells the story of how the water goes from the ocean to the redwoods through fog and then trickles back down to the ocean."
"This project is a reaction to my environment here...I've never lived by the ocean, especially in the coastal redwoods, so I think it's a reaction to me coming from middle of nowhere Pennsylvania and now living by the ocean in California. What am I experiencing? What am I learning here? What's the reaction that I'm having to this new environment that I didn't have growing up? What does my presence imply?"
"The structure of my current project is a geodesic dome cut in half that is presented like a satellite dish. Touching on the theory of telematics and telecommunications systems of control, seeing the human body as both an interactive element and a transmitter of energy. So, this geodesic satellite dish and the human body are having this communication as well as it being a circular device to show a projection of my own story."
"It needs to be interactive so people can create their own stories and create their own experience within the space. That's something that I've been wrangling with and I'm still trying to figure out if I am really creating an artificial space or am I really representing a natural space. What am I implying there? I'm still working that part out."
"I became interested in the interactive element of the artwork and playing with art in that way when I started working with virtual tours. That's when I started working with 360 images and having people be able to move the images themselves and become part of this world within a computer screen. My goal here was to take it out of the computer screen and make it more tangible and even more real, in that sense. I think there is a boundary that the computer screen causes and I think it's important for people to put their bodies into something…to feel something."
"The narrative itself is rather straightforward. It's not interactive in the sense that they can change locations but they can still watch. It's meant to create this disjointed feeling. I intend to make people feel sort of uncomfortable. The point being that when people come up closer to the projection and want to be a part of that narrative or get closer to seeing that narrative, that that narrative actually disrupts and disintegrates."
"I would say it's abstract non-fiction. It's my own experience. I'm going to be putting lights on my body and moving through the environment. So it's really a representation of my own experience, based on data of water cycles."
"It's a time-lapse based on a 360 composite and it's going to be moving."
"I think people want to be a part of something bigger and they want to be a part of a story. It's human nature to play, as well, so they want to project themselves into something. That's why we read books. That's an interactive story too."
