Cadavre Exquis
Fissiotropes
Fissiotropes mimic the workings of the 19th century optical toy, the thaumatrope. The thaumatrope, literally wonder turner, consists of a card disc with different images on each side. When the disc is spun on its axis the images are combined to form one. The most common thaumatropic iteration is a bird and a cage, a play on the binaries of nature and culture. The fissiotrope cycles several images to the left and right of the screen that appear at once combined and separated.
Petting Zoo, 2021
In 2018 as part of the Ipswich Annual Biennial I made a series of speculative planning permission signs to be posted around Ipswich town centre. The signs exactly mimicked those used by the town council but were rather improbable in content. One was for an underground esplanade with drone seagulls, another for a moon rocket launching site and a third proposed a genetic splicing laboratory and attached petting zoo. There were some concerned calls to the council and eventually a representative appeared on BBC local radio to denounce my irresponsible actions. The signs were subsequently removed.
The work presented here is the result of my daydreams about the realisation of the Rare Animal Petting Zoo, of the strange creatures that would emerge and create a sense of wonder in a town that really needed it. The works consist of a number of standalone green-screen gifs, speculative planning gifs and more involved animations that were made during a phygital exhibition at Small House Gallery, London.
HorseRadish, 2021, Green-Screen animation, square formatted available as gif, mp4 and giclee print
Untitled (phygital video)
These videos were made using images of a live exhibition which contained the green screen images above. Using a blend of chroma key technology, stop motion animation and projection the videos were then presented online as living chimeras of the real and digital worlds
The House of the Dead Man
The House of the Dead Man, 2021, 5’04”
Single channel video for projection or monitor (silent)
Soon after we moved in, our neighbour died. He had been some sort of recluse, his house was covered in ivy and the ground floor was flooded. This film is made from torchlight shots of the interior animated with images of the film stars whose lives he avidly followed.
Prisoners Cinema, 2020
Multi-screen installation
A child comforts itself in the dark or claps its hands or invents a way of walking, adapting it to the cracks in the sidewalk… Tra la la.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 299)
Prisoners’ Cinema is a phenomenon reported by people kept in darkness for extended periods. It consists of flashing coloured lights that can sometimes coalesce into human figures and other forms. It is believed that the cinema is caused by random firings of cells of the eye alongside the psychological effects of isolation. This installation, inspired in part by Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the refrain, presents various rooms of a 1970s dolls house animated by flashing images of toys, animals and monsters. The gifs are presented on screens of varying sizes in a single room and are accompanied by a separate sound track of nervous tapping recorded while the animations were being constructed.
Spectropia I - XV
Available as gif file, mp4, or looped dvd for presentation on screen, monitor or projection up to 4K. (varying dimensions)
A series of 15 animated gifs partly inspired by J.H. Brown’s Spectropia and the idea of persistence of vision. The gifs present portraits of animals and flashing coloured shapes which burn their memory onto the viewer’s retina.
The Living Dead
Available as gif file, mp4, or looped dvd for presentation on screen, monitor or projection up to 4K. (varying dimensions)
The Living Dead is a series of gif animations using the digitised collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Much of the collection is copyright free and it occurred to me that the objects could gain some sort of erotic afterlife through animation. The gifs vary in length from less than a second to 25 seconds but are presented as looped video objects or digital vitrines.
