The Shadow Collection
The compositional material: oil paintings by Güneş Çağlarcan, selected, augmented, and sequenced into the visual music.
Oil paintings from the Shadow Collection by Güneş Çağlarcan.
Shadows is an audiovisual transdisciplinary artwork composed by Deniz Çağlarcan that uses a selection of specific oil paintings from Güneş Çağlarcan's Shadow Collection as compositional material.
The Shadow Collection explores the fascination with how humans are socially connected. Although each person possesses a wide palette of unique characteristics, people constantly seek connections with one another. The relationship between social status and mental state is reflected in varying levels of social connection, which have become the overall form of the paintings, while individual and distinct human gestures construct its texture.
The collection emerges from various perceptual filters that affect how humans interpret visual input. The brain decodes clusters of oil paint as body parts, movement, clothing, and shadows. Once filtered by human perception, these figures evoke unfinished or imaginary stories, sorrows, past experiences, and unique journeys finding their place within the Shadow Collection.
The visual music piece Shadows adds a multi-layered structure to an already dense artwork. Çağlarcan filters the original paintings through his own aesthetic perception, highlighting specific elements. He augments small figures to magnify details that the audience will further decode, constructing meaning through their own perception. The selected paintings are rebuilt as three-dimensional scenes in Cinema 4D, then animated and edited in Final Cut Pro.
A formal narrative is presented through the selection and sequencing of specific paintings from the Shadow Collection. The gestural relationships in the piece are constructed using a Schaefferian approach: gestures are connected by their syntactical content and unique morphological characteristics, while the extracted figures establish a broader semantic context. The score is composed in Logic Pro X, with Max/MSP and analogue synthesizers shaping the sound.
Through this journey, guided by selected images and formal structure, the spiritual connection between people, the decisions we make throughout our lives, and the impartial judgment of their consequences are emphasized, while filters based on each viewer's past experiences guide them on a personal spiritual journey.
The compositional material: oil paintings by Güneş Çağlarcan, selected, augmented, and sequenced into the visual music.
Oil paintings from the Shadow Collection by Güneş Çağlarcan.
There are two versions of this audiovisual work. The first one is 5760 × 1080, made to cover three adjacent walls with stereo audio. The second version is 3840 × 2160, made for one screen with stereo audio. You can find the 5760 × 1080 version below, documented in the installation space.
Shadows has been installed and performed across festivals and concert halls in Europe and the United States.
