Will Pappenheimer
July 10-Ongoing, 2012
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Funnel Visions
This project represents an installation of large-scale virtual funnels that fit into and transform the unique in-between architectural spaces of the multi-building campus of LACMA into a series of channels for focusing and reframing vision. Through a mobile augmented reality application, brightly colored sculptural vision funnels appear in the corridors, canopies and open spaces of the museum campus. Viewers are invited to look through and enter the funnels to sight the vistas at the other end. Each has a particular viewpoint combined with a peculiar animated object and audio sound framed from within. "Funnel Visions," is a project which requires walking the full campus of LACMA, from the central "Urban Lights" Plaza, to the East campus beyond the Amanson Building, to the lookout on the third floor of the Broad Contemporary Art Museum. As the viewer enters or looks through each funnel, views are telescoped and altered suggesting the focusing, intake or collection of vision. The framed scene. altered by visual and audio inference, becomes a strange new vantage point on the surrounding LACMA grounds.

"Funnel Visions" is part of a two-person exhibition with John Craig Freeman called "Project-O-rators" inspired by the concepts and shapes of projection and funneling, the two opposite functions of the expanding elongated cones of the audio horn and the telescope. As inspiration for this concept, we reference a number of artists who have employed these forms and principles in their work. A concurrent show of Russian Avante-Guarde aligns with our interest in a series of robot like structures ("Orators") by Gustav Klutsis (1876-1938) that project political dissemination and collective social energy into the public square. Conversely, the funnel shape takes inspiration from an early series of works by Mike Kelley (1954-2012) entitled "Spirit Collector," "Perspectophone" and the birdhouse sculptures (1978-79), suggesting the focusing, fixation, intake or collection of vision. The framed estranged viewpoint also revisits the controlled vista perceptual effects of James Turrell's "skyspaces" of the 1970s, this time refigured by an ephemeral virtual medium.

 
Funnel Visions installation between the the Resnick Pavilion and the Broad Contemporary Art Museum
Vision Funnels Map at LACMA
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