Why speak, move and draw with others, to animate Antarctica?
To come to know other perspectives
To share different modes of thinking
To come to know my own connections to Antarctica, through words, images and gestures that I make in response.
Why Antarctica?
Antarctica holds evidence of climate change that we need to find ways to connect with, if we want to know what we feel about it.
A place so remote as Antarctica is ideal to approach from scratch, to explore what it means to be human, with no preconceived ideas.
In movement improvisation, the body is moved as if for the first time. You shape your own being through how you use space and time and energy. You can draw from experience your shape in a place, through gestural marks and symbols. Sharing experience, through moving and drawing, and drawing others in motion, you can come to know more than your own perspective.
Why animation?
An authentic human gesture is a movement response to something known through the body. It is not an act, but has meaning to the performer. It embodies some knowledge, found through the motion itself, responding to a stimulus. Drawings can reflect gestural responses, embodying something of their original meanings. Animations made from these drawings can embody something of the original gesture. To capture that gesture through animation, dialogue between the mover and the animator is necessary. This dialogue can happen through words, drawing, and gesture.
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All yesterday I animated Malekovitch graphs, of the three cycles of the Earth’s motions. What did I learn? The animated lines each describe one slice of the action only, one way that the Earth moves. Drawing and animating, understanding one action at a time is possible. Overlaying the three cycles together, the patterns appear chaotic. Colouring each layer, in blue, yellow and red, just added to the sense of confusion. Yet it was a beautiful combination of rhythms. Animating scientific data can can have aesthetic appeal. There is something about accuracy that is inherently beautiful.
Consider the philosophies of Spinoza, Walt Whitman, and Johanna Exiner, where no line separates mind and body.
Consider Joyce Campbell’s Antarctic daguerreotypes, with which she returns to first principles of photography.
back to basics, back to the start of photography, when making and viewing a photograph was a different experience than it is today.
Athol McCredie, Joyce Campbell: Last Light: A Daguerrotypist in Antarctica Photomedia – New Zealand Journal of Photography #65, 2007 pp 24-25
Enough tricks. Post digital art returns to basics, back to accuracy, and more direct connections with the natural world.