The Medium is the Message by Anna Ehrsam
The Medium is the Message
Written by ANNA EHRSAM
Psychic Screen by Ryan DaWalt
Sponsored by Queens Council On The Arts
Artist Ryan DaWalt’s installation Psychic Screen is an immersive, psychedelic, and sensual exploration of light, color, optics and vision as they relate to digital media, the retina, and perception.
This architecturally scaled installation enables the viewer to engage neurologically with light, space and time in a deeply contemplative and meditative way. The Installation consists of 6 Liquid crystal display screens and 12 hand made wooden multivalent wall-mounted panels, which vibrate with red, green, blue and ultraviolet electromagnetic florecing colors and patterns. The handmade panels mirror a repeating pattern based on the magnification of the digital liquid crystal display screen. Their pattern shows how digital images and screens are structured with individual pixels or blocks. On DaWalt’s panels, the colored pixel blocks are made with his own proprietary brand of fluorescing, pigmented, ferromagnetic metal particles, which are held to the surface of the painting magnetically. 6 of the panels have the same repeating color pattern, and the other 6 panels are their mirror image. This mirroring makes a colorful undulating waveform that flows through the entire series, creating a hyper stimulating environment. The work triggers optical and neurological sensations in the viewer as it connects through the optic nerve directly into the nervous system. The intensity of the retinal and corporeal effects, created by the energetic waves of vibratory spectral colors, pushes the range of what can be seen and experienced. The longer one looks, the more intense and visceral the experience becomes. The work and the space vibrate with excited florecing particles and waves of green, red, blue, and ultraviolet electromagnetic light energy. As I engaged with the work I became aware of my own bio-electric vibrations, as the waves pulsed through my body rhythmically, and connected to my nervous system.
Here the “Medium'' is an immersive installation environment, one which creates an experiential space in which the viewer can connect with the electromagnetic flux field of soothing vibratory light and color. Its hypnotic, calming waves enter the body directly through the optic nerve, while bathing the body in a powerful and pleasurable pulsating full spectrum light bath of color and sound. DaWalt is concerned with how we see, how vision is structured, what we can see, and what is unseen. With this body of work, DaWalt examines the possibility that electronic media is an extension of our neurological system, and explores how digital media structures vision, how the digital screen is structured, and how that structures us.
In “Psychic Screen” the body becomes the screen, internalizing the light and color from the electromagnetic transmissions emanating from the installation panels. The viewer's body completes the electric circuit within the installation and the work exists in a state of existential reciprocity within the viewer.
“ All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the message. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. All media are extensions of some human faculty - psychic or physical.” Marshall McLuhan
“With the arrival of electric technology, [wo]man has extended, or set outside [her] himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanisms. ” Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions Of [Wo]man
“Psychic Screen” premieres December 17th, 7-11PM at The Cosmic Wizard 509 Onderdonk Ave. Queens NY, 11385
This is a Queens community arts event sponsored by Queens Council On The Arts
Instagram: @ryandawalt or ryandawalt76@gmail.com
