Mirrors, Light and Bouncy Balls
Following my response to Maxim Zhestkov’s particle simulations, I set out to further develop my response and research the Infinity Mirrors of Yayoi Kusama due to the similarities between the different works. In an attempt to respond to both artists, I began by filming some glow-in-the-dark bouncy balls against a black background with strong lights from each side to produce a video of the bright balls darting across the frame - similar to the balls of light that are infinitely mirrored in every direction in Yayoi Kusama’s work.
The biggest problem I faced when making these videos was ensuring that there was still enough distinction to the balls to allow you to decipher the pattern and sequence instead of it becoming a confusing mess of pixelated colour.
Once I had the footage in Premiere Pro, I duplicated it four times - each one rotated by 90 degrees - and used a lighten blending option to start to layer the balls over each other to create more and more complex outcomes as the layers repeated.
Having reached the tipping point where repeatedly layering the previous footage simply created an undecipherable pixelated mess, I returned to a previous edit and began to duplicate it again, only this time I offset each layer by 10 degrees. This created a spiral effect that was unlike the work of the artists I was responding to, but it was interesting enough for me to want to further develop this theme of sequences and circular patterns.