I’m thinking a lot about animation at the moment – partly because of all the bits of film I’ve been working with recently and I’ve come to a kind of a conclusion about what it is that interests me about the medium. I’m interested in change rather than motion. Traditionally animation is about defining small slices of time which is a very accurate way in which to build up an illusion of movement. What excites me however is the way in which that is unnecessary, film and video do not need to be constructed of linear representations of things and that using frames for other purposes can create new possibilities and insights into the matter that is filmed, videoed or drawn.
So this tiny loop below and the frames above are an example of how I’m thinking about time as just another axis in which to work on a drawing. I started out with one drawing, then worked on top of it on another sheet, using the previous layer to ‘bounce off’ rather than copy. I see it now as making fairly simple procedural drawings which are fed into a recursive system. The temporal aspect is an analytical tool for understanding each layer’s construction and relationship to the whole – the same drawing process extruded. It’s just the beginning of something but I’m excited about how the process might develop.
