We take a lot for granted and there is one thing in particular we are all subjected to every waking moment. No human to this day has ever been truly free of its grasp though many may think otherwise. I am of course talking about gravity, the force that holds us all down and determines what's up and what's down. Most everything in our world is right side up, meaning heavy on bottom, light on top which is quite a limiting factor one would think. But artists love such established notions. The best art always comes out of breaking such expectations and precedents. And seeing how gravity is one of the strongest forces of all, it's opposite, inversion, must be quite the inspiration.

Artists have long experimented with themes of flight and weightlessness. Making things feel like they have weight at all can be quite a frustrating artistic process. Yet Li Wei seems to have mastered an ability to toy with preconceptions about physics in a startling way. His works are often self portraits with the artist performing death-defying feats like seeming to hover outside a window or hanging onto a car to stop from floating away. Yet his more recent pieces seem much lighter, focusing on the freedom of flight rather than the danger of falling. Most important to our theme however is his obsession with being upside down. Nearly every series he creates contains at least one portrait of the artist in an ostrich-like pose, head in ground.

The web promises a similarly liberating freedom from mass, yet unlike a piece of paper, a screen cannot be easily rotated. However the rise of tablets has given fostered a new breed of adaptive sites. Imagine a magazine that changes its layout depending on orientation to best highlight certain aspects of an article, for instance a chart in one orientation and the text describing it in the other. Or, as in this example for software development firm Ikayzo, the page seamless transitions to an inverted state as you scroll from top to bottom (though obviously the words stay right way up). Such designs could leverage mobile computing in the future to great effect.

Yet can you imagine having to live life completely inverted every waking moment? What a strange and challenging existence that would be. Oh, well someone thought of just that and made a wonderful animation to tell the tale.

Have a great July 4th and enjoy the warm weather!

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.