The Origin of Painting

The Origin of Painting is an interactive luminous graffiti, shadow wall and electromagnetic sound installation created and exhibited by art group Disinformation. The installation is titled after "The Maid of Corinth, or The Origin of Painting" depicted by the painter Joseph "Wright of Derby" in 1782 (Paul Mellon Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington). Joseph Wright depicted a theme suggested to him by the myth described in William Hayley's poem "An Essay on Painting", in which a woman sketched around the outline of the shadow cast by her departing lover in lamp light against a wall... "Inspired by love, the soft Corinthian maid, Her graceful lover's sleeping form portray'd..." (William Hayley 1778).
The resemblance of its imagery to silhouettes left by the atomic flashes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the image of mortality that visitors see reflected in the act of separating from their fading shadows, cause "The Origin of Painting" to function as an active...