Painting Shinto Shrines with Light
Trent Gilliss, senior editor
Watching video like this is tantalizing, making me yearn for a high-dollar cable package in which I can become immersed in a scene. Visuals like this envelop you. Here, screen size and resolution really do matter. The pictures are more vibrant, richer in meaning. What Discovery HD Theater is producing for television looks incredible; I only wish I could see their new series Lightscapes this evening.
The first episode captures artist Akira Hasegawa digitally painting the Grand Ise Shrine, a 2000-year-old mystical Shinto site in Japan, and the Uji Bridge during Bunka no hi, Japan’s national holiday celebrating culture and the arts. Hasegawa bases his kaleidoscopic, abstract projections on “the Shinto principles of the connectedness of nature, the spiritual, the universe, and the ephemeral.” The images move slowly but are never static. The colors morph synchronously with a rhythmic beating that enchants and beguiles, calms and propels.
If you have a half hour tonight, check it out at 7:30 pm Eastern and let me know what you thought of this experiential television. And, if you’re left with only your broadband, check out these fantastic live video shots from Iceland. You won’t regret it!
