for sunday

Reminder!

It is very important that you edit and print all of your researches and explorations from the beginning of the project - along with a clear proposal (sketches, renderings, technical drawings, site plan, etc.).
We will have a projector for those who need it.

This way, you will be (almost!) done with a great part of presentation and will be able to fully focus on the project next week.


Dream, the lighting company is called Zumtobel. Maybe you can find some interesting info there...

interesting point in drowning by numbers

Deadman's Catch

If a player in the game of Deadman's Catch drops a skittle, he is obliged to suffer a succession of handicaps. First to catch using one hand, then to catch kneeling on one knee, then on two knees, then with one eye closed. If a player finally drops a catch with both eyes closed, then he is out and must take his place in the winding-sheet.

Consider that there are seven people playing the game - a game which is essentially the children's game of handicap-catch. They play it on the lawn in the late afternoon sun. A coffin containing someone they all know passes behind them on its way to a hearse parked nearby. The widow of the man in the coffin is one of the game-players. In deference to the widow's feelings, all the characters unite in pretending that the coffin is not there. The seven players play anti-clockwise in a circle throwing three skittles - two read and one black. The coffin-carriers pass, making a diagonal line outside the circle. The whole plan of the action works succinctly as a flat geometric design and composition.

On the horizon of the landscape that stretches a mile or more away from the lawn across the marsh and sunlit water of the estuary - is a building - a tower - it creates the apex of an invisible triangle of which one side is the trajectory of the coffin carriers. The flat-plain triangle that works in the same plan as the cinema screen now can also be seen as a three-dimensional shape stretching back to the horizon - a triangle leant backwards over the landscape. Inside the triangle and the circle is a white square - the winding sheet - in which players ousted from the game are obliged to lie - making a square within a circle within a triangle.

The building on the horizon could be a church-tower, but it is in fact a water-tower - thus by implication - all the players - due to the elegant compositional device - are contained in the water-tower conspiracy which is soon to make itself felt in the narrative. The seven players are hung in a geometrical cage of the triangle, the circle and the square which is hung on the nail of the water-tower.

The game-players are three females and four men. Consider three as female and four as male numbers - consider the configuration they make on a dice - three make a diagonal and four make a square. The game is played such that the four men are losers. All the male protagonists in the film die - they meet unnatural deaths - largely due to their own inadequacies or incompetence and they lose in the game on the sunlit lawn in the order in which they will eventually succumb - Hardy, Bellamy, Smut, Madgett. The fifth male - Jake, Cissie One's husband is already dead - in the coffin on the way to the crematorium where soon all the others will follow.

When the men have lost and are lying in the sheet - the women - never dropping a catch - come closer and form a triangle - they become an inner triangle pressing closer around the square.

All this takes many clumsy and inexact word-descriptions to describe - but if we read paintings like we read books - it would not be such a hidden language for painting can effortlessly produce such elegant solutions.

you can also visit its website, there are more interesting things about the film

http://petergreenaway.org.uk/games.htm