“Video art was the solution…it was precisely the opposite of painting. It had no formal burdens at all.” (Video Art, 2006, Pg 8)
My art practice is based on a quite simple premise. It looks at one particular art-form: Animation, in the most traditional sense I have been making drawings that are then set into motion using a computer. The films are self-evidently concerned with movement, yet they are paradoxically made up of stills. My work is research-based, that examines drawing and animation practice. I wanted to explore how animation could be used in contemporary art practice. My animations run on endless loops, with no conclusion, randomly moving actions often with nonsensical audio. An endless loop is variations in speed, rhythm and image recognition. The repetitive characteristic’s is transcended making the beginning and ending of the footage endless. I like its jarring combinations and its attack on the senses.
“It doesn’t go together. But sometimes it does – suddenly the beat of the music, the movement of various films… blend into something meaningful, but before your mind can grab it, it becomes random and confusing again…” (McCombs, 2008, p.109/10)
One of the principal reasons I’m interested in using animation is because it seems to be the media of “now”. Things like cinema and television are really the things that people look at, “…With the television set – both as illusory window and as furniture…” (Hall, 2006, p.42) In considering the space of the monitor as a structural device, using animation like cinema and television is a much more appropriate place to be.
My aim is to re-present how animation is presented - to establish movement in the space of the spectator’s continual moment of reflection.
“The creative act is not formed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.” (Duchamp, 1999)
I am fascinated by animations potential in a technical way of what it can do, to explore its powers in what I have available to me. Animation however undefined expands its possibilities in a contemporary world, where aspects of its technology and the versatility of its effects makes possible a more creative way that seems to be without limit.
I am curious as to what is animation? Is my work really animation or something else and did creation really take place?
I found a wider field available to me than I first thought with the term “animation” expanded to incorporate all manner of real-time footage. Usually animation is thought of in terms of cartoons that have been drawn or models moved frame-by-frame, but animation now includes films which have been intensively re-worked with rapid effects and digital manipulations, with digitalization of all media, all forms of production will perhaps be as much animation as anything else.
