This week I explored “The Knotted Line” project. This project is made up of 45 paintings depicting historical moments in the United States. These paintings are all interconnected through lines drawing from one painting to the next. The project hopes to draw connections between moments of “freedom and confinement” throughout US history. The project director was Evan Bissell and Erik Loyer worked on the project design and programming. Additional support came from Tanya Orellana, Lisa Nowlain, and Josh Begley.
The sources used in this project are digital images of paintings and historical context for these paintings. While it is a bit unclear, it appears that the lead on the project, Evan Bissell, created the paintings. It is unclear where the text was sourced from. The locations on the line of this project are referenced in an XML file. The processes of this project were digitizing the paintings, organizing them along a timeline, and linking them to text. They are presented as parts along an interactive timeline that can be moved left and right. The paintings have a clickable portion which allows a box with text (called a gloss in this project) to pop up. The project has a sliding bar that switches each painting between the painting, a black silhouette of the scene, and a black knotted line.
After breaking the project down, these questions come to mind: how were the paintings digitized? How long did this process take? Were the subjects of these paintings decided in advance or did some completed paintings inspire others?
This project is in conversation with a variety of fields. The most notable are history, art, and social justice.
The target audience of this project is the broader public. The project is simple yet provocative, so almost anyone can view and make meaning out of it.
3 thoughts on “Reverse Engineering the Knotted Line Project — Lab Assignment Week 2”
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Amazing project! This is an interesting project to reverse engineer, I tend to gravitate towards photo and painting projects myself. Your question about how these projects are digitized intrigued me. I want to know if there’s a special way they take these photos or if they just scan those photos in it. Digitization of projects is always an interesting thought and the accomplishment of it. Loved your project!
Thank you for sharing, Anya! As a fan of art, I am naturally drawn to your project. I wonder what the significance of the knotted line is. Maybe it is a metaphor for how freedom and confinement are tied together as you can’t have/fight for one if the other is not present. I quite like the interactive feature of dragging the slider to be able to view the line at our own pace. It gives the project a chronology, a beginning, middle and end that the audience can explore themselves, like reading a story. The gloss is a great idea too because it doesn’t interfere with the sliding, but rather creates room for more intentional engagement to get to know more about each of the paintings should the viewer choose to do so.
You bring up some really good points! I was also wondering about how the artist chose what events to highlight, since some of them are a bit more obscure than others in my opinion. I also appreciate your question on how the paintings were digitized because it appears like they were all painted by hand. I think it could be really cool for them to play with different art mediums (especially digital mediums) as another way to show the passage of time.