Art Animation

The finished product:

Short, but unfortunately it was all I could manage due to other commitments, so it ended up a little rushed. The sheer number of shots required meant that the actual filming was a time consuming task, with editing in Quicktime a fairly straightforward procedure.

I lacked a tripod for the production of the shots, and instead had to use a stack of books on an office chair - this makes for difficult shooting and often the shots and transitions did not turn out as smooth as I hoped it would have.

Stop-Motion Animation

For our final task, we were required to create a short stop-motion animation.

"Stop motion (also known as stop action) is an animation technique to make a physically manipulated object appear to move on its own. The object is moved in small increments between individually photographed frames, creating the illusion of movement when the series of frames is played as a continuous sequence."

- Wikipedia

Some examples that I found while researching:

Collage

 Lighting is bad, didn't want to risk putting it through a scanner..

Word-Weave

Faces

Icecream

Cheers

Soup

Puzzle

Dress

Artwork Proposal #2: Whiteboard

For my second proposed artwork, I decided to go with a site-within-a-site: the Whiteboard.

Working with the site-within-a-site theme of the object, I considered appropriate sites in which the empty whiteboard might be placed. Since the whiteboard is an interactive object, an empty board (and whiteboard marker) placed in a suitable location invites public creativity and collaboration.

So, placing a board on  a suitably unappealing horizon...

(Image Source:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Kolkata_cityscape.jpg)

I offer the passer-by a blank slate, an opportunity with which to create their own skyline. While the physical whiteboard is permanent,  the artwork becomes ephemeral, and ever-changing, as additions and changes are made to the ideal skyline over time and as different people add their input.

An alternative, perhaps less invasive installation might be to use a pane of glass or something similiar so as to not obstruct the entire skyline, but rather add to it and edit it at your will.

A variation of this would be to find a suitably more picturesque horizon, and place the large transparent 'whiteboard' in front, so that instead of blocking off a messy skyline with a sheet of white, the board gives passers-by the chance to mess up a blank skyline.

(Image Source: Murray Fredericks, http://altfotonet.org/blog/2010/05/23/FredericksMSalt236.jpg)

Forgive the badly drawn cityscape, but you get the idea...

Scale is important in both versions of this artwork - the bigger the board, the larger the canvas and ability for collaboration and intricate drawings, but the invasiveness of the installation also increased. With a smaller board, the invasiveness is lessened, but so is the visual impact and artistic potential.

Artwork Proposal #1: Vacant Block/Pool

So, for the first of my proposed artworks I chose to go with the empty block/pool I documented earlier.

I chose to use this site for my artwork because it was such a generic representation of an 'empty site', so I felt I could work with the contextual assumptions of this site to my advantage.

I considered the element of negative space that the empty pool represented - perhaps filling the pool would be enough to change the site considerably, but with what?

Also, how does the empty pool interact with the environment around it. Does it 'fit' better in the vacant block in it's empty state?

I set out to alter the pool's surroundings in order to give the pool the centre stage and highlight it's 'emptiness'.

By replacing the land surrounding the pool with water, it becomes instantly unrecognisable as a pool. Because, to us, a pool is either filled with water, or awaiting it's filling (as is seen in the original image), the water which surrounds the empty pool is more obvious than the 'intended' water which is represented by the empty volume, creating confusion as well as interest in the observer.

I then decided to further strengthen this this role-reversal between the empty pool and it's surroundings.

By filling the pool with 'land', it loses all identity as a pool - the land becomes pool, and the pool becomes land.

So, in order to retain some of the pool's original 'pool-ness' I included a diving board and ladder, items which with we associate together as a singular entity (a pool) rather than considering them each as individual objects, although they obviously are individual objects.

An anti-pool.

Empty Site #10: Fridge

Similiar to the wallet in that it can serve as a representation of a socio-economic state, the fridge's emptiness does not go unnoticed, as an empty fridge is a culturally recognised 'bad' state- that is, if a fridge is empty, the status quo dictates that it must be filled.

Does an empty fridge have more to say than a full fridge? What about a fridge filled with several identical items? Would you consider a fridge with a single item inside an 'empty' fridge? How many items before it becomes 'non-empty'?

Empty Site #9: Bed

Similiar to the chair as an empty site, a bed's 'emptiness' comes from our assignment of the word 'empty' to describe an unnocupied bed. Is a bed still 'empty' if it has an object in the same negative space as a person would occupy?

Also, the size of a bed does not affect how much of an object (or how many people) must be in the bed for it to be considered 'not-empty' (rather than full), i.e one person on a huge bed is just as 'not-empty' as one person on a tiny bed.