For a project that centered on public space and projection, I knew early on that I wanted to begin my process by selecting a site. I wanted to create something that interacted with a specific place, that drew on my associations with it and (hopefully) the public’s relationship with it. I didn’t want to create a digital image that was created totally independently of the site and could arbitrarily be projected in any space; I also didn’t want to create a work that would interact perfectly with a site but would fail to engage the site in a deeper conversation. Of the many interesting sites around campus that I could respond to, I selected the electrical box for its curious relationship with the space around it and for its technical benefits. The electrical box is several yards away from the path as it passes the front of Montgomery Hall, just barely receding into the foliage of the forest surrounding it. It is relatively small, perhaps five feet tall and three feet wide on its broadest, most visible face. Although it is in plain sight, I think most walkers pass it by without noticing it or giving it a second thought -- it has even been painted green in an attempt to camouflage it with its surroundings and make it less noticeable. One of my intentions was to bring attention to a site which was otherwise ignored; I also wanted to use a site that was small and free-standing so I could either wrap my projection around it completely if I wanted to. But more importantly, I wanted to use my projection to draw attention to the box’s relationship with the woods surrounding it. The visual disagreement between a geometric form and the organic forms surrounding it refers to an ancient notion of the dissonance between manmade order and natural chaos. Because a straight line never occurs in nature, it seems poignantly wrong to see a rectangular prism placed in a forest. To me, it stood as a strange mark of man’s presence in a natural place, an attempt to control it instead of interact with it. I thought about the other, earlier inhabitants of the wooded area, and how they might have interacted with the area in a radically different way. Forests always represent a sort of primordial, untamed space, and living in North America with knowledge of the native land’s history easily awakes a notion of a deeper relationship that man has had with the forest in pre-colonial times. But I think I was led to think about earlier, native cultures primarily because of my knowledge of the specific wooded area that the box inhabits. It is perhaps the farthest off-shoot of the St. John’s forest, which is associated with the St. John’s Site and archaeological center. I did a project in Artist Naturalist last year that focused upon the St. John’s Site, and I learned that the biologists working with the site were making efforts to return the forest to its natural, pre-colonial state as part of the exhibition. By removing invasive species and planting native ones, the workers were restoring the forest to its “original” state, one that Powhatan peoples might have once known before the site was colonized and modified. To me, this made the relationship of the forest with pre-colonial life all the richer, and made the almost contradictory relationship it had with the very-contemporary electrical box even more striking. I wanted to create a project that would concentrate on this relationship between nature and technology that is embodied by an electrical box standing out in the woods, but I wanted to craft it carefully, so it didn’t become a critical statement about modern technology’s modification of nature. I instead wanted to focus on the blending of two unlike elements, a shifting from technology to nature and back again.
I wanted to create an animation that would emphasize this blending and the shifting of the two environmental elements. I chose to do this entirely in Flash, a program I had begun to familiarize myself with in the last project. Flash would be helpful because it would allow me to shift objects from one state into another relatively easily and smoothly; it would also allow me to move elements and fade them out, which would allow me to create a dynamic project that would convey my ideas clearly. I wanted to use different images that easily fell into the categories of “technological” or “natural/native”, finding ones that were visually similar in some way so that I could change one into the other easily. I initially wanted to make complicated drawings of animals, faces and designs to be animated (“shape tweened”), but I immediately ran into several technical issues that got in my way of using much of that imagery. Flash was unable to successfully shape tween an object that I drew and edited in Photoshop; it would only allow me to shape tween shapes that I drew directly onto the Flash stage. Unfortunately, Flash offers many fewer options for tools and effects, so even with a tablet, many of my drawings were of much lower quality than I would have wanted otherwise. The shape tween option also did not work well with complicated shapes that I drew in any one layer. They would have to morph very slowly with multiple shape guides to make a convincing morph—if I was too sloppy (and the margin for sloppiness was extremely low), the shapes would scramble, flip, multiply, and even disappear as I tried to make them morph. This was usually not the visual effect I wanted, so to make smooth morphs, I had to draw much simpler drawings and edit them little by little as they changed. I was also limited by the movement I could do for any one shape. It was time-consuming to create small moving elements, such as legs that walked and wings that flapped, on larger shapes, particularly ones that I also wanted to morph. Thus, I had fewer interesting motion tweens than I would have wanted. Although these restrictions and my unfamiliarity with Flash kept my project from being everything I wanted it to be, I familiarized myself with the principles of how Flash worked by experimenting and observing what it would and would not allow. I also found that I was still able to make a convincing morph with as little skill as I had as long as I followed the rules I learned about Flash, and I thought I was still able to convey my ideas successfully.
In terms of planning my work and pacing myself, I think my work process was effective. I began sketching the ideas I had early, and illustrating them in Flash soon after. I began developing existing ideas that I had in separate documents, instead of working in one master file—I found this to be beneficial because it allowed me to explore the various functions of Flash simultaneously without getting hung up one after another. I was able to develop individual ideas I thought would work well without worrying initially how they would fit together, such as the totem pole faces merging into the emoticons and the flying bird becoming binary symbols. Once these individual elements were constructed, I began sketching out ways to stitch them together and add smaller elements. I suppose it might have been more time-effective to sketch out the entire progression of the video and then completing it in separate sections, knowing exactly what I was going to end up with much sooner, which may have allowed me to make my project even longer.
Objectively speaking, I think my project conveyed the basic notion that I intended it to convey, although there are several elements that could have worked better. It is easier to put myself in an objective mindset because I watched several people reacting to my project as it stood in space, and many of them asked me questions about it. I think the relationship between the morphing shapes was clear, and the strangeness of their interconnectedness was well conveyed; several people laughed with surprise to see my totem pole faces shifting into emoticons, because the relationship is so unexpected but strangely apt. I don’t think the viewer needed to make a terribly concrete connection between Native American imagery and other specifications so long as they understood the imagery as either technological or more “natural”, and I believe elements such as line quality (straight or organic) and imagery conveyed these ideas well. The entire video moved the viewer smoothly through its different stages of back-and-forth metamorphosis, allowing the viewer to become enveloped by the forms and watching them change. The loop was rather short, so the viewer could watch it several times and think about different shifting elements more deeply each time. Several viewers told me the loop was hypnotic, and that the changes were interesting to see again and again; this is potentially a strength of the project, but also potentially a drawback. If the viewer is interested in the image on a purely formal basis, he will forget about the content of the projection and simply enjoy the movement. I think most of the viewers were interested in the content of the piece itself, and were tripped up trying to interpret it by the title. I called the piece “Inscription: 1611/2011,” meaning to reference a relationship between two very different periods of time that the forest experienced, and two very different eras of marks that man would make within the forest (hence “inscription”). The first number referred to the just-barely-pre-colonial period, and the latter referred to the contemporary era. Most people were confused by my use of the date 1611, and asked me if it stood for a specific event that happened in that particular year. In retrospect, the title was indeed misleading and could have been better developed; perhaps I could have chosen a more general term or date for the pre-colonial era, or perhaps I could have simply called the project “Inscription.”
All things considered, I think the effort I put into making this animation was considerable, and I feel that its content stayed close to my intentions, interacting successfully with the electrical box both formally and thematically. I would give myself an A- for this production. |