Keja Ho Kramer

Joe Schievano

Dazzeling Shadows is based on Goethe’s book Theory of Colours and the research he documented observing colors through prisms in controlled light and dark situations. During my research, the film camera & lens are the medium I used to compose the images of color using light, the sky and flowers. There is a reoccurring theme in observation in the
dark: the ‘afterimage’. A color or visual vibration is printed on the retina it has something to do with how our mind is reacting to darkness after the impulse of light.
There is a perpetual transformation of color and hue in light and darkness.

.

When I saw the photographs Keja Ho made in the Botanical Gardens I immediately felt their musical resonances. The colors emanating from the plants and flowers in her photographs vibrated and enveloped me in their light and sound.
My emotional perception of the work was the deciding factor to collaborate on an audio-visua encounter. After experimenting various possibilities Dazzling Shadows took on its current form.
The Video is made of the photographers research which are based on Goethe’s book Theory of Colours and the research he documented observing their manifestations through prisms in controlled light and dark situations. She writes : “There is a reoccurring theme in observation in the
dark: the ‘afterimage’. A color or visual vibration is printed on the retina it has something to do with how our mind is reacting to darkness after the impulse of light. There is a perpetual transformatio of color and hue in light and darkness.“
This is the foundation on which I started developing the sound OF the images. I listened to them, without really creating music but trying to translate what was already vibrating in the photographs.
Pulses, beats, a-rhythmic patterns in high frequency, harmonic echoes, fragments, melodies that
casually appear. At a point the sound becomes the perception of the flowers towards the outside world. The surrounding vegetation, and a diverse flow of humanity casually experiencing daily life: talking, whispering, laughing. Only in the end the sound is narrative as the act of seeing becomes an epic journey ; precisely because Goethe concludes his rigorous and scientific treatise on colors with
the pantheistic approach of those who recognize the divine in Nature as belonging to the phenomenons observed.