Phase shift series#

The viewer does not see only the work they see what it means to see and remember color.' In 2014, Sash was projected on the outside north wall of the Detroit Institute of Arts as part of the International Dlectricity festival. The slowly shifting and mutating video work of Summers is immersive and transformative. Quoting from the catalog: 'he work featured in ColorMAD by Dennis Summers does this: it enacts the perceiving of perception itself. In 2012 two of these videos were included in an exhibit devoted to color called ColorMAD at Western Washington University. One of them, Pendant, was a purchase prize winner at the Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo, in Spain. In addition to traditional art galleries and museums they have been included in the art and technology festival called FILE RIO 2009 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and played in the Koltsovo Airport in Yekaterinburg, Russia. They have played at a variety of venues throughout the world. One critic has written of the work’s “technological virtuosity,” describing them as “simple and complex, multiply layered and subtly detailed, yet so invisibly sophisticated that they take on a moving life of their own.” And finally, for many they create an absorbing meditative experience. Additionally, like abstract art in general their interpretation is open to the viewer's discretion. They create unusual optical effects - for example, the shapes sometimes appear to change size, or even move, when in reality nothing except color ever changes. They are visually quite beautiful, and set up an ever changing pattern of interesting color relationships. These pieces can be experienced on different levels. Although in other videos from this series, the shapes, arrangements of shapes, and color patterns become more complex - the generative system remains the same. They come back into phase after roughly 15 minutes at which point the piece seamlessly loops.

The first one created (One Again) analogously set two colors (a fuzzy disk on a square background) - each of which is cycling through all the colors in the spectrum - against each other as they slowly go out of phase.

Phase shift series#

The videos in this series were inspired by the early phase shift music of Steve Reich.