Animation As A Bodily Experience

I recently discovered all of my new school supplies were, in one fell swoop, destroyed by cat urine. So ah, that stuff had a quicker than usual turn around time. School supplies be gone! Too bad I didn't get to use them first.

This semester I'm taking Animation for Installation, the class explores experimental film, projection surfaces and animation as gallery installation, focusing primarily on the technology to make it work.  Personally I like flipbooks and zoetropes which are physical objects, things we have to touch to operate, things that we have to interact with in order to experience for all too often as viewers we play a passive roll in the discourse that art invites us to consider, it's a one way stream that we cannot, as viewers affect - it's really only in very limited environments where we are allowed to play with art, touch it, walk with it,  interact with it in a very real tangible way.  Last night I dreamt up a kind of giant sized reverse zoetrope that would utilize playground equipment or cyclecide (I'm leaning towards the vomit inducing solution) with the idea of making the work stimulate the body physically, something that made the animated installation an ecstatic experience. This isn't a new idea but I'd like it to be an individual experience rather than a group effort.

I like the idea of making an animated art object that we intimately interact with and are also made vulnerable by that interaction so that our psychological well being is caused to wobble a tiny little bit.  Above I describe a desire to make a giant interactive piece, but the other end of that scale is making something hand-held. For class we have been tasked with making prototypes. A project I'd like to experiment with fuses extremely hi-technology display units in extremely low-tech looking interfaces i.e. VRD in old timey steroscopic viewer looking thingies, nickelodeons, coin-drop flea circus kind of things. Things you put your face up to to simulate a state of isolated darkness by way of putting on blinders, leaving the rest of your body unattended to in physical space, creating an augmented space. Whoa, yeah. I wish money were no object dang it.  How does that lend itself to crap reduction? Prototyes.

This last week I used a bunch of crap materials in my house to make two prototypes of these display interfaces. Ding!  No pictures yet, sorry, but I'll have them soon as I must document my process. Moreover they are as yet undecorated as they are mere interface prototypes.... so cardboard and spray paint. But because I think I'd like to pitch a grant proposal to the HIT Lab to maybe barrow some gear for an installation I'll have to flush out the objects fairly well. In due time.

While a VRD "stereoscopic viewer" is pie in the sky, or a cyclecide zoetrope for that matter, at the moment the crap reduction via creative process is in effect.