Seismic image of ocean floor
J Whittaker, University of Sydney
An animated on-line interface, www.antarcticanimation.com has been built as a tool for inquiring into the profound changes that are happening in the Antarctic landscape, and within some who have gone there to work. Dialogues have been conducted with expeditioners, scientists, artists and dancers. Gestures and drawings made in response to texts arising from these dialogues, have been used to compose animations. The proposition is that animation arising from human gesture and drawing can connect us viscerally with the data, to bring the changes happening there closer to human experience.
The aim of the Study Group is to explore the possibility of accuracy and objectivity in gestural responses to Antarctic texts, while at the same time identifying individual perspectives.
These seem on the surface to contradict each other. But I am interested to know if aiming for objectivity can in fact help reveal different views.
I am also interested to observe and record the transformations that occur in participant’s understandings of the texts through the process of moving and drawing, and of my own understanding through working with these to animate.
How objective can a gestural response be?
How can objective and subjective gestures be identified?
How can the transformations in understandings be tracked?
Sessions will begin with warm-up activities that explore the use of space, time, and energy, through scores exploring FACTS, ACCURACY, and SUBJECTIVITY.
Words and images composed by two man, after walking together through an unchartered landscape, are the first texts to be explored.
These texts will be new to the group, and participants will take turns to make a series of movement gestures, or phrases, in response, while the others observe and draw them moving.
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I am exploring ways that on-line animation can be used to respond to and communicate scientific and poetic texts produced by people who have worked in the Antarctic, observing and experiencing changes in its landscape.
Working with a small study group, human movement, and drawn gestures are being made in response to written, spoken and visual texts. The drawn gestures, and selections of the source texts are then being used to build the animation.
I am interested to know of anyone who has previously researched ways in which drawing, drawn animation, and dance, can been used to reveal different ways people can know a landscape.
Like drawing and animating, writing helps me think. In describing the work I am doing to a group of other artist researchers, more layers of my own understanding arise. Writing a note to The Drawing Research Network website, I write about the source texts being integrated with the gestural responses being made to them, which I had not done before. This was because I was writing immediately after animating, so the making process felt closer to the writing. It was possibly also because I was writing to a group of people who are close to the process of making, and writing closely about it. This is how I need to write more.
In calling for information on others working in the way I described, I found myself identifying a possible field of research to which I aim to contribute: Moving, drawing, and then animating as a way of revealing transformations.
Specifically, I realised, as I wrote, how interested I am in how we know a landscape, and am looking at the visceral connections we can make to them through gestural movement, drawing and animating . Antarctic landscape interests me particularly because I want to reveal some knowledge of the transformations that have been observed in the landscape, and experienced within some of those who have worked there. The changes happening in Antarctica affect the future of mankind. The mechanisms of change are complex, and difficult for non-scientists to grasp. For this reason reason it is important to find ways to connect with the changes in ways that can be known.
Of course here, now, I am writing about the writing, and find I know some more.
And then writing to a scientist, I explain more:
I am particularly interested in the different perspectives of artists and scientists.
Despite similarities between them,in their search to reveal the unknown, one of the differences between art and science, is that they seek different kinds of accuracy.
Artists can work with a range of materials to make something that accurately to reveals some kind of response they have had to the Antarctic landscape, from what they have learned or experienced. This
is a kind of dialogue the artist has with their subject, to make an image that cannot be expressed verbally.It is only after exploring the possibilities of the materials that images emerge. So that’s another level of dialogue – between the artists and their materials. If the look and feel of a piece accords with an artist’s response to that knowledge, this are kept. Others may be discarded. It is up to the integrity of the artist of course to recognise an accurate embodiment of their response when they see it. We don’t really know what a particular image will be until the piece is finished.
The material I have gathered on different Antarctic perspectives is now being assembled on www.antarcticanimation . It is not finished to a stage that I’m happy with yet, and of corse will bever be, by
nature, complete. It is simply one person’s collection.People engage with the work in different ways: through a Thesaurus (with some of Bernadette Hince’s Dictionary inside), some Journeys, Objects and Animations. And there is a Log (or Blog), where people
write to me.But I’m finished with collecting now, being half way through my PhD, and am starting a major animated piece. It’s structure is the rhythm of the Milancovitch Cycles – only slightly simplified. Much of the material gathered on the site over the last year and a half will be brought together here.
And building and shaping the website is a big part of the making, which I sometimes forget about mentioning. For example, over the last few days, material and comments were included, that change the experience for viewers.
Dominic Hodgson’s Comment is evidence that people who go to work in Antarctica do not always have time to indulge in aesthetic responses.
At the start of a new animation just started, his voice tells of changes, caused by humans, that are changing the natural cycles of climate change.
Glaciologist Barbara Frankel writes that past creatures trapped in ice cores can only be imagined.
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To Dom:
Here is a link to a first go at animating to the rhythm of the Malankovitch cycle:
http://www.antarcticanimation.com/content/animation/cycles01.php
The animated drawing is simply an attempt to bring humans into the picture. The animation I really want to place in here is this one:
http://www.antarcticanimation.com/content/animation/cycles01.php
but there’s a technical hitch with this right now.
Your voice is perfect. Some minimal sound will come, just as soon as I get together with my friendly musician.
Cheers,
Lisa