Light the World with Love - Nancy Burson
http://youtu.be/q45N68b_Gns
Nancy Burson interviewed by Sıla Özçelik Yener
* Can you please tell us about your new video art which has been shown in NYFOL, ‘’light the world with love’’. There is a very unique technique that you’ve used in this video which is also you are waiting a patent for. Can you please tell us about this technique and how you found and worked on it? the process of creating this technique?
I’ve always made drawings through the decades and about three years ago I started drawing using both hands. It’s a way to keep the brain balanced that feels very soothing. I kind of developed my own language through using two pencils or pens together, and that language eventually evolved into nothing more than writing words using both hands. To me, the most significant word in any language is Love and the most important phrase to say is “I Love You.” I wanted to focus on using the phrase “I Love You” as well as using the word Love. It was through drawing both handed that I discovered a system of seeing words or phrases in three directions simultaneously. I started with the word Love and then I found that the system works for phrases as well as words, and for any number of letters in most languages, two dimensionally and three dimensionally.
* What is your claim and the message you want to give in this video art?
I wanted to send a message of Love to the Earth in all different languages. It’s a kind of a hug to the world to say “I Love you” from all of us here on the planet. It’s a message that we can all unite through love. I also came up with a concept I call TogetherAllOne, which I’ll use as my line of designs for clothing, lighting, jewelry, and household items, as well as graphics and lighting installations that all promote the concept of global unity.
The music for the video was a collaboration with Harold Moss. He’s the head of Flickerlab Animation Studios and he’s produced two interactive iBooks of mine in the last two years. He has a personal history of songwriting and he sent me a rough cut of the music several months ago. I wrote some lyrics that night and then reminded him a few weeks ago that we had already co-written a song for the video. It just needed a producer and a singer. Harold had exactly the right ideas about who would sing it, as well as produce it. There’s a singer now based in San Francisco and she showed up in NYC the exact weekend we needed to record it! And amazingly enough, her name is Gina Breedlove! She provided the perfect voice for “Light the world with Love”.
* I also see the ‘’love’’ theme is like a fundamental in your works, is it something you work on intentionally or do these love ideas just come up with coincidence?
* You also have some video art works that have been shown in Berlin light festival, it’s amazing and it is again about love. It seems to me like as an artist you are working on something about spreading peace and love, or you are trying to get a connection with masses and trying to tell them ‘’something’’. ?
The Love work is the most important to me right now. I still believe that Love can bring changes in the world and that it’s not too late for humanity to be directed through Love. If it’s our destiny to be guided in that way, then that’s what will be. I still believe that’s possible.
And also, I have a granddaughter now and that’s a new kind of love I’m experiencing. I think that occurs in families when parents become grandparents. It’s a reminder of our own mortality, as well as a new opportunity to Love.
* How was the reaction to your video art works both in Berlin and Nyfol? Do you ever observe people seeing your work and their reactions? Do you remember any specific reaction to your works that you never ever forgotten? Like made you feel like, ‘’yes!this was the thing i was trying to make you feel...’'?
Birgit Zander, the organizer of the Berlin Festival of Light, commissioned myself and nine other artists to create projections for the Berliner Dom. I submitted two of my drawings which say “I Love You” repeated endlessly to project on the huge Cathedral. Birgit had seen an early version of the video with the different languages of Love encircling the Earth and she wanted to add more Love in different languages over my drawing. She was working with projections on the Berliner Dom that are created using glass slides in layers, plus a lot of projectors together to create the effect on the Dom. So it became layers of Love with even more layers of Love underneath! It was quite appreciated by all who saw it in Berlin this October.
The “Light the World with Love” video is now on YouTube where it’s been getting some nice comments. http://youtu.be/q45N68b_Gns
I’ve been fortunate in my career to see a lot of different reaction by lots of people to my work. There have been times that I’ve been at museums where my work was on the wall and I would stand next to people and just listen to what they were saying about it. That’s really fun to do!
There was a billboard that I had on 2000 in Downtown, NYC and the billboard was for the Human Race Machine which shows people how they’d look as a different race. It said “There’s No Gene For Race”. I heard some great comments on that corner as people would look up and see it. There were also many times that I was helping people run the Human Race Machine and most people were amazed to see themselves so differently. It was a really interesting experience for them, like stepping for a moment, in someone else’s shoes. It was fascinating to watch! In 2002, I had a retrospective exhibition at The Grey Art Gallery, NYU’s museum in NYC. The NY Times had run an article about the Human Race Machine in the exhibition and there was a line of people all through the space waiting to see themselves as a different race. As I looked over the crowd, I noticed that everyone lined up was from a family of mixed races who had all brought their children. I thought that was fabulous!
* How do you see art, especially this kind of visual arts, do you think art has a ‘’power’’ to make ‘’change’’ beliefs, prejudices and every way of thinking? Or rather do you just do arts, without u
In the smaller picture, adding a smile or a song to someone’s day can be meaningful. In the bigger picture, I’ve seen my art be significant in people’s lives while I was working with finding missing children for the FBI and other organizations. There were at least three children returned home using the new morphing technology during the first hour the children’s updates were shown on National TV. I believe very strongly in destiny and if things are meant to change, then they will change. It could very well be time for there to be many changes in our world and I’m hopeful that time is now. I would love my granddaughter to live in a world without conflict where family and community is honored over all.
* We know that you also have the patent of a photo manipulation technology which we can describe as the beginning of photoshop and composite works. Can you please tell us about this work, where and when did you created this technology and how was it welcomed in that years? And also how do you see the fast development in digital arts and digital photography, especially the rise of photoshop?
I had an idea to develop a machine that could reflect the viewer back older in the late 60’s. I got in touch with an organization pairing artists and scientists together when computer graphics was in its infancy, and there was no way to create what I was envisioning. So I kept in touch with the technical people I’d met and eventually collaborated with the predecessors of the Media Lab at MIT from 1976 to 1978. That was the beginning of the technology combining cameras and computers and my idea to age people by computer utilized one of the first scanners attached to a computer. The aged portraits as well as the composite portraits utilized a new system of morphing faces together. I began creating portraits of people who don’t exist. It was a quirky idea that developed into the body of images that still constitute my best known works. A lot of those were created a decade before Photoshop.
* As an artist where do you think your art style is standing, how do you describe your art? You seem like a ‘’innovator photographer’’ when i look your past works, not an artist only concentrated on her photographs but rather also an artist making innovations right?
I still think of myself as a sort of conceptual artist that’s also inventive. I ‘m still pursuing new technologies for showing work which is why I look forward to doing more with 3D mapped projections, holography, and large scale lighting installations. I still like showing people what they’ve never seen before and in ways they’ve never seen it.
