Artists and scientists use techniques of observation, illustration, and imagination to describe the various phenomena of reality. In Diagram ² two 16mm scientific films from the 1970’s (Time Dilation and Relativity of Simultaneity) are projected onto photographs from my Spontaneous Geometry series. By combining projected animation with digital prints, this work creates a spatial and temporal experience in which viewers are invited to consider the nature of diagrams and their use in visualizing concepts that are abstract, invisible or seemingly unknowable.
When I came to teach at CU Boulder I was struck by the particularly sharp shadows produced by the intense Colorado sunshine and began capturing it in a series of photographs that I called Spontaneous Geometry. As still images, my photographs lacked an important quality of my experience: movement, the sunlight shifting over surfaces of the Earth as it revolves around the Sun! Projecting the moving image onto the surface of the photographs allowed me to introduce time and motion to the seemingly static photographic world.
-- Jeanne Liotta, Associate Professor, Associate Director of Graduate Studies, Film Studies