Art, Science and Myth

Art, Science and Myth
07:30 mins

This talk centres round the film Particles in Space. Lye made a place for himself in the film history books by pioneering the method of ‘direct film-making’, a form of animation that dispensed with the camera by painting, scratching or stencilling images directly onto film. He displayed an astonishing sense of control, taking as his canvas a strip of film that was only 35mm or (in this case) 16mm wide. Lye had a lifetime commitment to experiment and he continued to come up with new versions of this method. In his last two films, Free Radicals and Particles in Space, he concentrated on the scratching process and on black-and-white imagery (after developing new colour techniques in A Colour Box, Rainbow Dance, Color Cry, etc). Particles employed a particularly free style of abstract, doodled imagery – it seems loose at first but is in fact brilliantly controlled and synchronised to the music on the soundtrack. Lye was ahead of his time in his interest in ‘world music’ (as we now call it) from many traditions. He had a particular interest in traditional African music (as he did in African art), and selected some of this music for Particles. He relates the film to many of his current interests, already touched on in other talks – doodled imagery; the benefits of thinking of art in terms of energy; visualising or ‘personifying’ the energies of nature (such as thunder and lightning, and atomic particles); and affinities between sounds and images. Through its ‘genetic archives’ (the information that we inherit in our genes), the old brain can put us in touch with the energies and patterns of nature. It can give us access to ancient mythic modes of thought, and in uncanny ways it can seem to anticipate science (such as the latest discoveries about ‘energy particles’). The talk also makes connections with Lye’s sculpture as he used the sounds made by Storm King over the opening title of the film and the sounds of Twister over the closing title.

Download full pdf 'Notes on the Talks'

<< Previous - 'Classical’ and ‘Primitive’ Art Next - All talks continuous >>

These versions of Lye's slide/tape talks were prepared by:

The Len Lye Foundation, PO Box 647, New Plymouth, New Zealand,
with the assistance of the Govett Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre
(42 Queen Street, New Plymouth, New Zealand), and Ngā Taonga
Sound and Vision (National Library Building, Wellington).

Research: Evan Webb, Roger Horrocks, Paul Brobbel, Sarah Davy
Digitizing: Olivier Wardecki, Next Technology
Writer: Roger Horrocks