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Description:
The projection artwork, Silence Dogood, was initially exhibited as Winter Fountains at the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. Placed along the mile long parkway were four thirteen-foot high domes and sixteen video projectors, serving as metaphorical water fountains.
The title for this artwork comes from Benjamin Franklin's first pen name, which he used when he pretended to be a woman writing to the editor, who was his brother the publisher of the paper. The artwork itself was inspired by Franklin's theory of electricity, in which he characterized electricity as a single fluid flowing between positive and negative charges. Franklin also discovered that lightning in clouds is the same as the static electricity. These important discoveries created a huge paradigm shift for science and culture.
The animation fancifully interprets the formation of electricity in the cloud. Inside a thundercloud are countless specks of ice dust floating and bumping into one another. Their collisions build up an electric charge that overtime fills up the entire cloud. The sculpted and hand-drawn particles resemble pre-civilization cave paintings, implying a certain primordial theory of creation. The lightning is also hand sketched on the same level of finesse. The watery iciness of the particles calls to mind the idea of a frozen fountain.
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