My first impression of Robert Seidel’s work in the first video was that it reminded me of traditional Chinese landscape paintings. The ink technique was really reminiscent of the way landscapes would be depicted on these rough paper scrolls. I always really liked that style of painting so Robert Seidel’s initial works resonated with me there.
The second video he showed us made me feel like I was watching the intro sequence to an action thriller movie of the mid 2000s. This felt like something I would see from Sam Raimi when he directed the Spider-Man films in the early 2000s.
A lot of scenes made me feel like I was watching a microscope view of an amoeba or microorganism. It was pretty eerie but all the movements on screen felt really natural and mesmerizing. It was nice.
There was one thing in Robert’s long presentation of various works that really caught my eye: the projection onto the direct physical environment. I think it looks really fantastical when placed on that building in Seoul he showcased.
Robert mentioned something along the lines of “not adding to the noise of the city but calming it down. I think this only works if it’s in a big city where there’s a lot of monotonous lights like Seoul though. The colored projections on a building in Seoul didn’t feel like “noise” because it was like the accent color of a tame color palette. The projections on the smaller buildings he showed on the other hand made his projections look like someone changed their color palette too late into the painting process and overdid the tertiary and accent colors.