The artist vaulting over a balcony

I’m half way through my final life-size model. Here is the initial sketch idea.

The piece was inspired by walking around the college and finding a suitable dramatic location. – the central staircase. A friend suggested the idea and I liked it immediately as it worked on several levels. Including referencing a famous photograph by Yves Kline:

I used the same method and filmed video footage and modelled this in Poser.

One of the problems of the piece was how do the hands attach to the balcony? This is a major point of weight distribution so has to be modeled accurately. Unfortunately Poser doesn’t allow you to fix hands in place across a pose, so after roughly fixing them by eye I had to export the model in two parts. The body and the hands seperatly. The hands could then be tidied in Rhino to fit the balcony and then added back into the finished 3D model.

I’ve decided to make this action continuous – or as continuous as possible (consisting of 80 frames). So all the space passed through is modelled. This creates a more fluid form, paradoxically also more static. I may paint this figure realistically too, so you can see the facial features. I’m pleased with the form – it reminds me of a flamenco dancer. This type of reading is not available to analysis until the sequence is actually modelled, which makes the process somewhat perilous, but at the same time exciting.

A big advantage of the continuous decision was that the slices for the model are much simpler to cut out although the large size has made it slower – the slices are larger than the card so need to be broken into segments – still 1 month of construction looks possible.

I built a maquette to try and figure out how to break the model down. It doesn’t balance on its own so I’ll have to consider some struts or suspension to secure it.

When making the model I’m considering several factors

1) Accuracy – I’m trying to make them as accurate as I can
2) Time – I only have 1 month per model
3) Weight – I need to be able to break apart, transport and rebuild the models.
4) Materials – I’m trying to waste less cardboard.
5) Strength – The model needs to be durable

The previous half-size model was made from solid layers of card. As this model is twice as large I’ve reduced weight and material usage by hollowing out the layers – and also on the really large parts missing out every other layer (using support strips instead). I’m confident that the papier mache will smooth over these gaps.

My Olympic Bid

I put in a proposal for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad this morning which is a huge Arts Council project to build up to 12 art works which celebrate the Olympic ideals and UK sport. The commissions are for …wait for it….£500,000 but anyone could apply. At this stage they are looking for brief ideas which will be awarded £5000 to be worked up into a full scale proposal. Here are my application images and text:

My proposal is a piece of art made of athletes.

Three sculptures would model the space passed through by athletes in three Olympic events; 100m sprint, shot put and high jump. These would be grouped together in a park where the public could experience the magnitude of these events in close up. This is something I think we miss watching sport on the television.

The 100m sprint sculpture would be 100m long, life-size in full colour. The track would be marked in seconds allowing the public to measure themselves against Olympic athletes – every stride of the athlete frozen in time. They would be able to follow the bounding approach of the high jumper and then walk underneath the arch of the jump, which is something I’ve always wanted to do. The huge effort involved in throwing a 7kg weight over 20m would be captured in the third sculpture.

I have chosen these events to represent the three main strands of track athletics; running, jumping and throwing. The images I have provided are of a young girl, but I would like to model British record holding athletes for each of the events. It is important to me to show exactly how incredible the efforts of these sports men and women are.

These ideas have developed from my work in Long Exposure sculpture carried out at Camberwell College of Arts. The action is videoed and then closely modelled in 3d software. My sculptures are then hand made from cardboard layers and papier-mache, and I’ve provided an image to give you an idea of how fascinating it is to see motion broken down into parts. Of course the Olympic sculptures would have to be cast in something more durable, possibly fibreglass, to withstand the knocks and bruises of a British park. There are several UK companies who are experts in creating full colour large-scale models of this kind.

The location I have chosen is Crystal Palace Park, I can see the broadcast tower from my window. Not only does this have an excellent National Sports Centre and plenty of space to install the sculptures, but just nearby are the Crystal Palace fibreglass dinosaurs, which like my sculptures are also frozen in time.

I think this proposal would be a great challenge to make, and result in work which the public could really engage with, bringing art and sport closer together.

Symposium Video

Here’s the video I made for the Symposium and the text that accompanied the mini show we had afterwards.

This video briefly introduces the work of artist Tim Pickup on a Digital Arts MA at Camberwell College of Art.

The final outcome of this project has been to render life-size, full colour sculptures of the space passed through by a human being in motion; effectively a long exposure sculpture.

The bulk of my time on the course has been spent working out exactly how to use a mixture of java programs and 3D modelling packages to convert animated motion sequences into a format that can be physically rendered. The final sculptures are constructed from over 1000 meticulously cut out and glued pieces of corrugated cardboard, which are then covered in papier-mache and painted. Apart from being a fun hands on solution, the contrast between the high-tech ‘behind the scenes’ calculations and the low-tech finish adds a friendly element of intrigue to the pieces – just exactly how were they made?

Throughout the course I have carried out experiments in long exposure digital photography and video as a means of checking progress, and have also contextualised my work by examining historical artists and scientists. The key inspiration has been the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, and the way in which twentieth century avant-garde artists, and in particular the Italian Futurists, interpreted his images almost exactly 100 years ago.

I have chosen to model two actions which both address issues of balance. One piece models the artist falling off a plinth (or has he been pushed?), and in the other the artist vaults over the balcony of a stairwell. Both pieces could perhaps also be read as metaphors for my future life as an artist, which too is in the balance.

—-

At the symposium Jonathan Kearney raised an interesting question:
Is it possible to make the viewer experience a sense of time displacement?

I had one idea to explore this a while ago. It ties in with the method of the Cubists. You have a series of 3D frames of some action. Then each frame is rotated about the vertical axis by a few degrees from the previous frame in modeling software and then all these frames are boolean unioned. Then if the viewer moves around the sculpture at the appropriate rate (walking speed say) does the static sculpture animate in some way?

Ed Kelly suggested that strobe lighting would do the trick. I’m wondering whether the eye could do this on its own (to an extent it is also strobing or sampling reality). The interesting question is then what happens if the person moves around the sculpture in the wrong direction – presumably if this effect works at all the animation should reverse. Something like looking at the wheel of a car go in reverse.

Sometimes when I walk around a large sculpture I do feel as if it is slightly animating, or moving through space, but this is a fleeting effect. I’d definitely like to try this idea out in the future. I will need to choose a suitable action to maximize the effect – if each successive frame covers up too much of the previous then I think the effect would be diminished. Its probably one of those effects where you can’t tell if anything is happening until you really look at it with your eyes – not on a screen.

The artist falling off a plinth 2

Motion Lines

I’ve been reading a lot of comics recently and have been interested in the art of drawing movement and how comic imagery has influenced me since enjoying Billy Whizz in the 70s.

In Scott McClouds celebrated comic book ‘Understanding Comics (The Invisible Art)’ he distinguishes 4 main techniques for representing motion within a single frame.

Motion Lines
These are the most used – lines following the paths that objects have passed through (or will pass through) in space. Here’s one; The Thing losing it.

Multiple Images
This is the Marey one, multiple exposures.

Streaking Effects
A mix of the above two. Gene Colan began incorporating these photographic blurring effects in the 70’s. Harder to find these ones.

Background Streaking
The camera / artists moves with the moving object – which stays in focus over a blurred background. This is often used in manga comics and also sports photography.

Scott then asks if there could be any other ways?

I think the continuous studies i’ve been looking at may qualify as a different way. Essentially they extend the multiple images until every position passed through in space is part of the final image. Paradoxically despite showing all the movement these images look still, so they present motion in a less obvious way. You have to infer the motion. This image is a view from below of the final sculpture I plan to mkae. It is grabbed from Rhino and then I’ve added a crude blur to try and represent the kind of image you might see in a continuous motion comic.

Science

Here’s the abstract from a Phd on motion lines, from Takahiro Kawabe1 and Kayo Miura1 at the User Science Institute, Kyushu University, Japan 2006

Artists and cartoonists are able to dexterously depict a running person on paper with the aid of ‘motion lines’. We scientifically examined whether the cognitive system can exploit motion lines in constructing memory representations of the location of a running person depicted in a still image. A target depicting a standing or a running person with or without motion lines was presented to participants for 500 ms. Observers were required to reproduce the location of the target 1 s after its disappearance. Data from depicted leftward and rightward moving persons were collapsed. Memory displacement of the target was shown to be largest in the presence of motion lines and a posture indicating an identical direction of movement. By assessing the absolute localization error, we showed that there was no localization advantage toward a target with a symmetrical (standing) posture over one with an asymmetrical (running) posture. Our findings indicate synergetic interaction between the mechanisms responsible for processing of motion lines and human postures in the representation of dynamic events.

So they work.

Film

Motion lines have been appeared in film too. From the Bionic Man & Woman in the 70s, special effects have advanced up to the present cutting edge effects of Bullet Time as seen in The Matrix and The watchmen (both films heavily steeped in graphic novel tradition)

Bullet time slows down the time-based medium of cinema and allows the camera to pan around the motion, which has an effect of embossing the action on the eye, even more than the long standing use of slow motion. Often these sequences are violent, or involve dramatic changes in position – where the action is faster than the eye. By adding CGI motion lines the effect can be hightened further. Spiderman swinging through a 3D recreation of New York is a good example, where a more blurred image increases the eye’s belief in what it is seeing.

Super-heroes?

One other thing that struck me about the models i’ve been making is how often the figures themselves look like some strange sort of mutated comic character – or super-hero. By multiplying limbs or extending the boundaries of a body part, or breaking a form apart I’ve often created super-normal versions of the human form. This is the first time i’ve used 3D software and in this regard it has been great fun to be able to experience these mutations and be able to pan around them in the software.

Here are a few examples:

The artist falling off a plinth 1

I’ve completed my half size model. It took one month and cost about £200 for card, glue and paint. Here are some images of the process, up to the stage of painting.

The small part above is a maquette for the whole model, done 1/10th scale, which was useful in working out how to manage so much stuff.

Bergson vs. Marey

(These notes are largely paraphrased from Picturing Time by Marta Braun – Chapter 7)

Bergson(1859-1941) was the most popular thinker on time and space before WWI. He gave voice to a growing disillusionment with positivism and the view of the world as a sum of discrete objects, observable and measurable, which was the central methodology of Victorian science. He challenged the philosophical framework of science, positing time as the only reality. He was a big celebrity in France and artists lapped up his stuff. He is the chief source of ideas about time, space and motion for artists in the 20th century.

He believed that movement was reality itself – continuous change – undivided fact. Time cannot be measured – each moment prolongs itself into the next. Matter as energy is also constantly moving – so the shapes matter makes are just “snapshots taken by the mind of the continuity of becoming” – they are misleading data provided by innacurate perception. These artificial forms are utilised for a particular purpose but do not constitute knowledge. Objects cannot be known through analysis (positivist science) which fragments them. What is real is a unity and this can only be known through what he coined ‘intuition’ – a form of empathy where we put ourselves within the object and break down the spatialized time barrier. Analysis is the negation of intuition.

Bergson’s ‘intuition’ inspired a generation of artists who were assimulating the demise of empiricism and the exaltation of reality beyond the seen:

“It is the artists who is truthful, it is photography which lies” (Rodin)

Remember this is the time of frighteningly quick new forms of travel and communication, scientific theories of relativity, radio waves, x-rays, radiation, spiritual photography, widespread electricity and other invisible forces.

Bergson’s terms: “duration”, “lived time”, “force-lines”, “simultaneities”, “dynamic” are repeatedly used in artistic and critical statements of the times, especially by the avant garde. Often his ideas are simplified or misconstrued.

Jules-Etienne Marey was a physiologist; a science which had branched off from anatomy in the 19th century. Inspired by the discovery of the Laws of Thermodynamics (1850) physiologists saw the body as a collection of mechanical systems exchanging energies in the course of motion. The French were also concerned with fatigue and the physical fitness of the nation after a punishing experience in the Franco Prussian war. By analysing motion and effort Marey sought to discover ways to improve the fortitude of his people.

Marey and Bergson are contemporaries, even working for some time at the same institutions, but their ideas couldn’t be more polar. The eye (sense) was inadequate for Marey becuase so much of the world lays beyond its reach. A machine (camera) was needed to overcome its frailties. For Bergson the eyes were deficient for being too much like a camera – too discrete, too halting to perceive his indivisible flux – falsifying the real. Indirectly Bergson criticized chronophotography:

“they are not parts of movement, they are so many snapshots of it…the moving body is never really in any of the points; the most we can say is that it passes through them”.

But he couldn’t stop artists enjoying Marey’s works – effectively
“the first images to rupture the perspectival code that had dominated painting since the Renaissance.”

They provided a language for depicting Bergson’s simultaniety. These ruptures were explored in turn by the Cubists (but applied to static objects), the Futurists, the Vorticists, Kinetic Artists and so on…

The Italian Futurists claimed that Bergson’s dynamic sensation of the passage of time was the central subject of the work of art in a rapidly industrializing world. Using his rhetoric, but disgarding its finer points, they used Marey’s chronophotographic stylizations as the basis of a large part of their art.

In the end Bergson was dismissive of art that used his theory and perhaps frustratedly stated “from intuition one can pass on to analysis, but not from analysis to intuition”. Bergson’s writings were gradually forgotten. On the other hand, Marey’s results would dominate the depiction of movement in the 20th century.

Block Universe

A scientific reading of my sculptures might be that they model a subset of a person passing through a 4 dimensional block universe. Let me try and explain what that means.

There are two main conceptions of time – they are conflicting.

Tensed Time

This is time as it is commonly understood; the past, the present and the future. The past is gone, the future doesn’t yet exist and only the present is real, constantly moving forward through time. An interesting question might be – at what rate is ‘the present’ progressing? Can we measure the rate of time? Does this mean anything?

Tenseless Time

In this model all of space and time is put together into a single huge object known as space-time. (There are 3 dimensions of space and 1 of time so this space-time is considered 4 dimensional). This model is also called a block universe. To view the block universe we would need to stand outside of time and space, seeing everything at once, the past, the present, the future.

This was the position occupied by the Tralfamadorians in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5. They could view all of history at once (incidentally including their own demise). To them a human life looked a little like a billion legged millipede…

“… And Tralfamadorians don’t see human beings as two-legged creatures, either. They see them as great millipedes – with babies’ legs at one end and old people’s legs at the other,”

One way of visualising space-time is by using an example in a lower dimensioned world and then lifting ourselves up a dimension by analogy. The lower dimensioned world I shall call Filmland, which has 2 space dimensions. Imagine that each event in Filmland’s space-time can be captured on a single frame on a piece of film, just as if we froze time we could capture a 3d model of the whole of the earth. We shall concentrate on a tiny area of Filmland, but it could all be captured, given a large enough piece of film. Here is one frame:

A moment later the red man has walked to the right a little:

Now as the red man walks to the right we could arrange all these frames into a 3d block by putting them next to each other. (Again we need to imagine that this block starts at the beginning of our 2d Filmland universe and ends at the end of its time. We are just looking at a subset of it.) This 3d block has now become our Block Universe for that 2d world.

There is no ‘present’ or procession of time in this conception; from outside the block universe everything that ever happens is visible – we can see the red man in all stages of his walk at once.

Now to go back up to 4d. By analogy imagine that our entire 3d world can fit onto each frame (the frame now being 3d). As each element of our world moves through time and space it goes from one 3d frame to the next. If now we make one final stipulation*, that the spatial dimensions of our model are fixed relative to the earth then you create a world model I shall call Longexposureland – and within this world live my long exposure sculptures, as subsets of the objects in this 4d block universe.

*This stipulation is necessary and slightly different from the standard block universe model (which assumes the universe as the reference point) as otherwise my sculptures would be hurtling through space around the sun.

Block Universe
The block universe model is favoured by scientists. The problems they have with the tensed time model is that if space-time is to represent everything and there is a passage of time through it (ie. each frame is lit up in order), then what externally is controlling this flow? The point of space-time was to remove everything external.

Another problem is how do you define what now is for all people? Einstein’s “Relativity of Simultaneity” says that different moving observers will have different opinions about what events are simultaneous. This being an inevitable outcome of the fact that light always travels at the same speed and to ’see’ an event light has to travel from the event to your eye.

A third problem is what is stopping there being more than one flow of time? If there were more then we’d repeat our exact same lives over and over again.

So science is happier with the block universe tenseless model, and indeed it underpins the Theory of Relativity – still, the illusion of the passage of time is a hard one to break.

—-

The Fourth Dimension (and how to get there)
Rudy Rucker 1985 Penguin Books

That Mysterious Flow – Paul Davies – Scientific American Magazine

Cardboard, Paper and Papier-Mache

I’ve been enjoying using low tech materials to make my sculptures and think the contrast to the high tech digital concepts is interesting. I’ve been looking at other artists who’ve used cardboard and papier mache as mediums and who’ve accepted the resultant crude finish. Through the 20th century cardboard hasn’t featured that prominently – the Cubists and Kurt Schwitters used it in collages, but it’s not been used so much for its own properties – the art world probably sees these mediums as too impermament or craft oriented. A few artists do use ‘crappy’ materials for their own sake; for example Joseph Beauys and Colin Self. But more recently artists (perhaps green inspired) have been developing ideas specifically geared to these mediums.

Honorary mention should go to Niki Saint Phalle whose range of cheerful styles included papier-mache originally. She soon adapted to plaster and wire frames to enable the sculptures to get bigger, but the pieces still have that rough finish. Here’s her most famous piece ‘Hon’:

If you type cardboard artist into Google you will typically find two types of art:

1) organic forms – ironically often laser cut
2) decorative pattern based art

Good examples of these approaches would be the contemproary work of Tobias Putrih (which suggest gnarled up figures) and Mark Langan’s semi-reliefs. In both cases corrugated layering, and granular possibilities are the key design considerations.

More exacting is the work of Chris Gilmour who builds as accurate as possible life-size models of cars, bicycles and other machines. The chief aesthetic response to these would be Wow! (I suppose) I’ve always appreciated art that looks as if it has taken a lot of (boring) work to put together – even if the work is shared by a team, but can’t find much more in the objects. (edit) This is perhaps unfair as I haven’t seen any of the works in the flesh. The redundancy of making anything original is a theme which I have related to in the past.

My work seems to sit somewhere between painstaking effort and a playful crude finish. A good example of an art aesthetic like this (though not made from card) would be Claes Oldenburg’s soft sculptures of the 60’s. These reacted against what a sculpture should be – hard, marble, imposing, classical and also reflected the disposability of 60’s culture and the game like experimental happenings of the time – which these sculptures often served as props for. Oldenburg developed them further into larger and more permament, but still cheap looking, sculptures like the apple core below

Segal’s sculptures of the same period, which although made of solid stuff also share an unfinished surface which contrasted with the ‘modern’ settings he gave them. Another fantastical artist of the time, Ed (and Nancy) Kienholz used a wide range of materials (including papier mache) to make visceral dangerous assemblages which usually had some kind of melting or bespattered or messed up finish.

Both artists were predominantly figurative and suggested humans trapped or encased in the detritus of their times. The idea of a figure escaping from a pose, through movement, has been raised before in terms of my sculptures – also the idea of metamorphosis. Contrasting a moving human with a static backdrop is something I’d like to explore in the future. ( One simple ideas, which time allowing I may make, is a drunk falling off a bench. This would in a way triple with the other two balancing pieces in the show, and also allow me to explore the weather proofing of papier-mache. There’s a good location for this piece outside college on the benches. )

Papier-Mache has a history as long as the invention of paper. It is used in toy manufacture, craft and folk art to this very day. Here are some vivid examples from Venuzuela. The ease, low cost and flexibility of the medium lends itself to bizarre new forms like this comic centipede monster.

A recent Lincoln artist, Roy Ealden, has received some acclaim for his papier mache mulched sculptures. Although I find the treatment a little gaudy, what I like here is the use of semi-relief – I have ideas to make large scale images with hundred of small figures (made using long exposure techniques) snaking across city scenes – for example ‘exploding’ out of a tube station. One thing that is great about papier-mache is that people really understand it as a medium – it doesn’t frighten them. By allying this friendliness to a fairly abstract concept (motion in 4D) I think that an interesting conflict is set up, which leads the viewer into the piece to try and unravel its complexity of form.

Finally three artists who use not card, but paper in interesting ways. Thomas Demand shares with me a meticulous process whereby he models entire 3d scenes from colored paper. The scenes are often taken from media photographs of venues of some disturbance or historical note. The final model is then rephotographed – further displacing the viewer from the action. Below a TV studio set, which if I remember correctly (I saw the piece in Cardiff 2 years ago) was on air on German Television at the exact time of the Kennedy assassination.

Osang Gwon takes photographs of humans and then pastes these photographs to rough life-size models. The difficult concept of humans encased in their own media representation is in play, but the results are also just very ‘cool’ to look at, and his work is currently popular in media spreads, and does lend itself well to such use – I wonder if his method is protected?

Similar in style but much harder to produce are the 3D masks of Bert Simons These are made by creating a 3D digital approximation of a real face (you can do this crudely in Poser for example), and then printting a 2D geometry from the 3D model which can be folded back into 3 dimensions. Clever stuff.

Filippo Masoero

Masoero was a post war Futurist who used to enjoy hanging from aeroplanes photgraphing cities. After this MA (which concentrates on humans in motion) I’d like to start making images of London in motion.

These would use grabbed video footage (and i’m particularily interested in the new HD video cameras which can capture up to 600 frames per second at lowish resolutions), and then combine the video frames into a single merged abstracted image. The program and algorithms to do this would form a part of my broader Voxelisation project. As the resolution of these grabs is low and i’m aiming to make high resolution digital prints one idea is to spread the pixels out over a larger target frame size – thus the element of time would be contained in yet a different way in the 2d image. A clue to the technique can be seen in Balla’s violinist at the Estorick collection where each hand is made up of a series of small colored flecks.

The idea is to capture the vortex that is a city, as seen in Masoero’s photo, but to localise the blurring to the parts which move more, as opposed to below where i’ve crudely Zoom filtered a shot of Liverpool Street in Photoshop.