Digital Art Gallery
Freaks | Experimentation with Mediated Shadow Puppetry
Troy Hourie - 2019-2020
Freaks is a long term passion project that was first premiered at Ei! Marionettas Festival in July 2019. Freaks is a performative installation that combines art installation, puppetry and media. It uses the Penny Dreadful story. 'String of Pearls' (Sweeney Todd) as a narrative base. Oddity dolls and cabinets of wonder built from found objects (dolls) and antique Portuguese furniture. They were then manipulated by the artist to become a live performative installation.
In this iteration, the artist uses techniques of improvisation to build a hybrid form of shadow puppetry using a Kodachrome Eight Model 70 film project, a live feed camera and video mapping with a software called Millumin. With these tools, he layers images of live shadows cast by the film projector, layers of live feed video of the himself manipulating the oddity dolls and video mapping techniques to layer video of the performance from 2019. Each set up was improvised and recorded a single time, so glitches are present and accepted. The entire group of videos was then edited and layered with an aural landscape.
An Interview With My Ex (Verbatim)
Adrian Shepherd-Gawinski
“As a queer composer and sound designer, I’m interested in telling stories that reflect the honest and intimate stories of members of my community.” - Adrian Shepherd-Gawinski
Shepherd Gawinksi’s work on Buddies in Bad Times Theatre's BOX 4901 won him a Dora Award for Outstanding Sound Design/Composition. While studying verbatim theatre with Andrew Kushnir, the artist reached out to his first ex-boyfriend for an interview. Under Kushnir's guidance, he used sound design and composition to transform the transcript into a recorded verbatim musical performance. The resulting piece is a sonic journey through connection, memory, vulnerability, loneliness, and overwhelming emotion.
Mirror Exercise
Mariel Pettee, 2020
Mirror Exercise is an AI-generated duet. Real motion-capture data of the artist Mariel Pettee dancing is accompanied by those same movements imitated and distorted through the lens of a deep VAE model the artist has trained on her own movements. This model was created alongside her collaborators Chase Shimmin, Douglas Duhaime, and Ilya Vidrin (arXiv:1907.05297 [cs.LG]). The VAE learns how to efficiently represent fixed-length sequences of movement of about 6 seconds at a time. By adding varying amounts of random noise to the encoded point representing each real sequence in the latent space, Pettee asks the model to deviate slightly or significantly from her original phrases in its generated outputs.
The title plays upon the role of imitation and repurposing in creative inspiration, as well as the common “mirror exercise” game to help pairs of dancers generate new material together, in which the goal is to move in tandem while obscuring which dancer is leading or following. In this piece, the generated dancer expands upon the artist’s real choreographic impulses, creating gestural counterpoints out of subtle alternate realities.
Coronaman
Matthew Waddell, 2020
A series 3D images depicting a weirder side of COVID
RBG/GDR/RGB
Meghan Moe Beitiks and Ray Oppenheimer, December 2020
December 12th, 2020 was the 20th anniversary of Bush vs. Gore, when the Supreme Court was made to make a definitive decision on the outcome of the 2000 election. It is also when Ruth Bader Ginsberg made her famous “dissent” statement, writing from the minority position “I dissent” rather than the traditional “I respectfully dissent,” in protest of the outcome. RGB/GDR/RBG is a durational performance, a brutal engagement with time, and an opportunity to meditate on everything that has changed and been lost this year. On December 12th, artists Meghan Moe Beitiks and Ray Oppenheimer sat on opposite coastal states with significant electoral votes: Florida and California. Using the projection design program Isadora, the artists projected an image of Ginsberg’s “Dissent” collar on their own collarbones. The images of the collar will change in color (RGB) based on the date from their collaborator’s tides. In California, Ray’s collar changed according to Florida tides–in Florida, Moe’s collar changed according to California tides.
The performance lasted 34 minutes–one minute for every additional electoral vote Biden received over Bush’s 271 electoral votes. The tidal data was drawn from predictions for levels between December 12th, 2020 and January 1st, 2021. The work included audio and video from cultural ecologies at each site, images of election data and moments, and significant patterns from Ginsberg’s legacy. Beitiks and Oppenheimer enacted meditative spaces and gestures as a reflection on changing tides.
Great Diurnal Range is the difference, in tides, between the height of mean higher higher high water and mean lower low water. RGB is the standard color space for digital screens: Red, Green, Blue. They are also the primary colors of visible light, corresponding to Red, Green and Blue cones in the human eye.
Ocean levels are rising. Political changes have profound ecological impacts. A lot has changed in 20 years, but the same fights keep resurfacing. RBG/GDR/RBG seeks to open up a space for reflection on interconnection, change, and political consequences. It seeks to honor the impactful legacy of a significant supreme court justice as a means both of reflecting on the ecological reality of cultural shifts, and meditating on hope for the future.
https://www.meghanmoebeitiks.com/rbg-hdr-rgb/
Motion Capture
Hugh Conacher, 2007-2020
“When I see a body move through theatrical space, it leaves a trail in my mind’s eye; the image lingers, slowly fading away. As a photographer, my goal is to interpret the emotions created on stage in the telling of a story and reproduce those moments in print.” - Hugh Conacher
In this series the artist integrates light with live performance and holds the evanescent beauty of dancer’s movements through space, conveying the body’s momentum and elegance. His experiments extend possibilities across artistic disciplines and document a journey through time and in movement; and in live gallery will show these as long prints, often twenty feet or longer.
“My inspiration comes from the dances that I am designing. I work with the choreographers and dancers to hone the movement into an idea that will work photographically. Everything is specifically staged: the movement for each image is chosen for its ability to be captured in the way that I envision; I then carefully light the stage to further that vision. I capture each fleeting moment in the tiny frame of the camera and layer them upon each other over and over again so as to re-create the emotions felt in that moment and create a story from those emotions. Once layered together, these short-lived moments become one continuous motion, challenging the viewer’s concept of time and how we view dance.”
https://www.pellucid.me/ - Check out the rest of the series here.
Dhakuria Bridge
Debashis Sinha, 2020
Soundwork created using machine learning algorithms on field recordings collected by the composer in Kolkata, India, part of a series of works using these tools in an effort to generate a world of storytelling that is intimate, personal and of the moment, at the same time exposing and questioning power structures and assumptions about what constitutes “valid” cultural expression. Sinha uses these tools in order to generate content that, when assembled, rejects many of the oppressive assumptions of speed, scale and efficiency embedded in them. His works in this series are a constructed and intentional environment in which we can discover and present the codes of traditional epistemologies in the moment of listening in a new way.
Accepted as part of the Resistance AI workshop at NeurIPS 2020, reviewers said the process of "applying machine learning processes to 'lived' sound - live recordings, in personally and culturally significant moments/places - is a compelling use and exploration of the edges of what machine learning can do for our communities. This exploration is very in line with the workshop's aim to understand what attempts at liberatory machine learning look like and could look like in our imagined futures. "
Symbiosis of Malaysian Digital Shadow Puppetry
Dr. Dahlan Bin Ghani, 2013
In an effort to promote the survival of authentic Malaysian Shadow Puppetry, the artist here has created a symbiosis of digital and traditional visual styles. This short animation was created using 3D animation software to the replicate the original two characters from Wayang Kulit performances.
Some of visual in accompanying website’s the gallery provided below are experiments in the digital application of shadow puppetry techniques such games, 3D animation, and short film.
En Main Propre
Silvy Panet-Raymond, January 2021
Created on January 16, 2021, days after the renewed pandemic confinement and curfew in Montreal, Quebec. In attempting to record sound with her IPhone placed on a piece of glass by her front window, the artist quickly realized it was filming her hands and their mirror image—continuing to experiment with this effect, the dance soon emerged.
En main propre means 'handing something in person', a gesture that is being replaced by new rituals of hand purifying and listening to the silence of night hours behind our windows.
Digital Blooms
Laura Anzola, 2019
A series of four images which were created during the COVID-19 pandemic as a way to negotiate the fragile organic self existing through a digital medium, and a way to find some colourful bliss within an isolated time.
Instagram: @iridescent_whale // @azmadigital
Serenity
WP Puppet Theatre, November 2020
Mask-Body Puppet created for VIEW for the Holidays 2020.
The puppet performs a poem inspired the writings of 11th-century Jewish philosopher Solomon ibn Gabirol which in turn echo the often quoted Serenity prayer; apt for these challenging times.