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The Project
Floating Anamorphosis Art Islands
Unrealised project: Marina Bay (Singapore), 2012
Marina Bay will serve as the setting for a unique painting consisting of different sized islands of contemporary artistic paintings floating on the water. The surfaces of the islands are printed with different images designed by invited internationally renowned artists. This will create a work of art consisting of about a dozen floating islands of images in the public space of the city.
After sunset, when the art intervention takes on a nocturnal rhythm, the intervention will transform into floating “picture islands of light”. They are floating, amorphous images with an enigmatic, dreamlike quality – a world of light between fiction and reality. They will enhance and enrich the “Marina Bay Art Hub” and give it a unique character.
The special location of the bay, with its waterfront, architecture and accessibility, allows it to be transformed into a visual experience whose form of expression, anamorphosis, originally captivated theatre architects, landscape designers and other effects masters and trick virtuosos as early as the 16th and 17th centuries. The magic of anamorphosis lies in the systematically distorted representation, which requires a change of perspective in order to be viewed in its undistorted form. Leonardo da Vinci is considered the inventor of anamorphosis.
In anamorphosis, the actual image of an island of art can only be recognised and perceived in its full glory from a single point of view. Viewed from another angle, it appears as an abstract, ambiguous motif, which in its distortion is itself another image.
The character of the picture island lies in the reversal of things. First, the picture shows the dissolution of the painting into appearances. Into ideas that are difficult to interpret until, through the right optics, they are taken out of the construction of ideas and taken back to the recognisable painting.
The mechanics of anamorphosis thus also symbolises the becoming and emergence of things in a universal context. The undefined is defined, order emerges from disorder – a process of decoding through which the abstract becomes concrete depending on the angle of view.
