Fasano's Exhibit Marries Digital Sound to Color

Art for All the Senses: Junior Luke Fasano's multifaceted video installation "Dead Animal Candy" was displayed in Fischer this week. (photo by Pauline Shapiro)

Junior Luke Fasano's exhibit "Dead Animal Candy" confused senses sweetly this week in Fischer. The two-part video installation relied on sound, sculpture and space to both attract and repel. The work was not soothing exactly, but one was definitely absorbed the minute the gallery door closed. A confrontational, chirping electronic arrangement formed the backbone of the piece, while two very vivid 64-pixel loops, projected onto opposed screens, slowly cycled through the color spectrum. Simultaneously, the more delicate sculptural elements softened and relieved the assault of intense sound and color.

"I definitely have a natural interest in the viewer's comfort level and try to incorporate elements that are confusing," explained Fasano, a New Jersey native majoring in contemporary multimedia studies in the digital arts.

Using Adobe Photoshop, Media 100 and After Effects, Fasano created a digital video loop on a two hour cycle. The projections moved through the spectrum inversely to one another, from red to yellow, green to violet. Fasano employed a synthesizer called a Buchla, "a big box with lots of occilators, filters and other analog circuitry," to compose the soundscape that surrounds, agitates and captivates the audience. "It's a bad sci-fi soundtrack, but it's all generated with an analog synthesizer," said Fasano, who felt the tension between digital and analog media was significant to the work.

It's not surprising that Fasano relied on his musical background for inspiration, as the piece felt very electronic music-oriented. The ironic pitfall, however, was that the audience may have lumped the work into some futuristic-electronica-rave-tribute-dead-animal-eye-candy category, missing the genuine subtlety of design.

The strongest elements of the design were the gracefulness and originality of construction and the tension between sensory effects. The video images were projected onto two screens made of paper that had been successively crumpled and painted with varnish. In front of each screen were two twisting frames housing a spidery grid of fishing line. Hundreds of tiny latex drops clung to the grid, creating a dewy texture that eased the transition from flat screen to curving frame to the two viewing areas fenced off by a system of dried lily stems hanging from the ceiling.

One's body was corralled into a sort of awkward abbreviation by the division of space and seemed to be the final element in the transition from electronic to organic. Space, color, sound and even time were partitioned into reductive domains as the viewer bobbed from intensely vivid color to the spacey pop of electronically-generated sound to the ghostly sway of the suspended branches. There was a paradoxical feeling of confinement and release in being ushered from boxed color and space to the free eruption of sound and the haunting sway of the dead branches, implying an unseen presence.

There was a sense of Fasano's tight management of medium throughout; very little seemed to escape what he refers to as his "obsessive compulsion" to control as many factors as possible while creating of a piece of art. However, his authority over the piece gave way as the viewer wandered to the perimeter and accidentally stepped on the twigs that line the floor along each wall. It was too dark to see very much outside the projection and when running into the twigs, one felt as if one had broken something. It was a factor that Fasano realized after installation but it didn't seem to bother him much. Apparently, he collected hundreds of these stems and had to include them. This small oversight could be forgiven, however, upon making other textural and conceptual discoveries.