notes of an aesthete

Klaus Rinke: Time, Space, Body, Transformations

…Happiness was important to Lye and fundamental to his work. When he developed his political / philosophical concept of ‘Individual Happiness Now’ in 1941 at the height of the 2nd World War, he was hopeful that he could use his work to share ‘the best in human experience’ with others. He connected the making and seeing of art directly to our gene pattern containing information of ourselves and our evolutionary history, which he referred to as the ‘essential selfness’. He believed that if art resonated with this information, the experience of aesthetic value could translate into happiness….

…Free Radicals (1958) and Particles in Space (1966) are maybe the films in which he comes closest to this idea. In making them Lye reduced the medium to its most basic elements, scratching marks onto the black film using a variety of scribers ranging from dental tools to an ancient Native American arrowhead. In Free Radicals the result is a dancing pattern of flashing lines and zigzags, creating equal associations to microscopic movements and gigantic lightning bolts in the night sky. Synchronised with the sounds of rhythmic drumming and singing by the African Bagirmi tribe, these pure figures of motion become hypnotic…

http://architizer.com/blog/archizoom-retrospective/