UK
Please give us a brief summary of your work, including, if possible, a description of your creative process (e.g., how your creative ideas first appear and take shape).
I work with computer animation. Advances in imaging technology have the potential to stretch the limits of our senses and what we are capable of perceiving, but much CGI and game technology instead appears directed towards anthropomorphism and a pre-canned form of wish fulfilment. In contrast, I’ve developed a body of work that often combines elements such as a static virtual camera, restricted viewpoint and repetition to create something that has sometimes been described as ‘anti-animation’. The intensive labour that goes into these animations is perversely used to produce images of objects and experiences that we normally go out of our way to avoid seeing and experiencing. I think that the ‘durational experience’ of viewing my work, with ample time to explore the unchanging areas of the image, is more akin to viewing a photograph than a conventional film or animation – the image ‘posing’ rather than ‘passing’ in front of our eyes.
I will often structure works as continuous loops rather than conventional films, so there is no real beginning or end – one can start watching at any point. I think that this kind of ‘flat’ narrative structure works well in gallery or public spaces allowing what Walter Benjamin referred to as ‘reception in distraction’ where multiple fragmented viewings allow casual passers-by to build a view of the whole loop over time.
My ideas tend to take shape slowly. I often will read around subjects that I’m interested in, looking for an angle or a way in or maybe looking for an overarching concept that combines several ideas in one piece. Some ideas will arise through ‘play’, where I am learning something new and experimenting – it’s all about making the connections. Even then, I might have the kernel of an idea for 12 months or longer before I take a decision to invest in it and try to make something. Much of this conceptual thinking about new ideas will be done while I’m actually making something else. From the initial decision to make something to the completion of a new work usually takes about three months, but a lot of that time will be used playing around with different visual ideas and structures. This will include a lot of visual research as well as the ‘how can I do that?’ aspect where I experiment to see how I might technically achieve certain visual ideas. The actual ‘making part’, where I am intensively modelling, rendering and editing, usually takes around four to six weeks. This is a pretty creative period and the final product is often a bit different from what I might have been thinking about when I embarked on the process. Often this search for a final structure can suddenly resolve itself very quickly and the multiple elements fall into place in a way that I think works.
How would you define your animation practice in terms of its relation to fine art traditions, experimental animation or the (historical) avant-garde? Its relation to commercial industry? Who/what are your strongest influences?
I think of my work in terms of a conceptual art practice that happens to be built around digital animation. At the heart of each piece is an idea, or set of ideas, that I am trying to bring together both through content and form using a visual rather than textual medium. I am obviously utilising the techniques of industrial computer animation, but to create work that I think is quite different. That’s not to say I’m not influenced by commercial animation – I spend a lot of time looking at mainstream movies and commercials. For example, I might use visual cues that could have come straight out of the world of Pixar as I think this creates an effective way for the audience to access my work, as they will understand the visual language that I am working with. I also think my work has a relation to structural film-makers. I’m interested in the dematerialised nature of digital animation and how it relates to and reflects the tools used in its creation, and I think you can see this is my work.
I feel that some of my strongest influences have been writers and philosophers. For example, the writings of Gilles Deleuze, Brian Massumi and Bruno Latour have all had some impact on the way I think about the world. In terms of artists, I find the work of Mark Wallinger and Rodney Graham interesting, particularly the way they utilise humour within their work.
Why animation?
When I first went to art college I thought that I wanted to be a painter. However, I became increasingly frustrated with using paint as a means to express or explore a particular idea or concept. I found that moving images offered me much more flexibility. I could add whatever sound, colour or movement I wanted and if I stopped the film it became a photograph. To me it seemed like a ‘super-medium’ as it was multi-sensory – each element could be directly manipulated to generate effect. Further, with animation you get complete control over the image – I could represent anything I wanted as I was not reliant on needing to have the physical subject standing in front of the camera. Digital editing and computer animation took this one step further, allowing the direct manipulation of the pixels to potentially generate photo-realistic imagery of anything. That in turn opened up the opportunity to explore ideas around perception and the potential failure of digital images – the so-called ‘uncanny valley’ where our brains sometimes appear to reject hyperreal digital perfection.
Is material or media a particularly important component of your practice? How does it operate in your work?
My choice of medium is a key aspect of my practice – to me it just seems natural to use ‘digital materials’ to make work about contemporary subjects. CGI and digital animation underpin almost every advert and movie that we see so it seems apt to utilise the same medium and visual language to make art, albeit with a different objective – perhaps foregrounding the technology that is usually intentionally hidden. It also opens up certain strategies that are hard to pursue in other media. For example computer simulation allows one to meticulously recreate experiences that are hard to access or even no longer accessible, such as events from the past – a technique common in role-play video games.
What is your work’s relation to experimental form and technique? Is there something you want to articulate with your work that can’t be expressed through conventional narrative means?
A key form that recurs many times in my work is ‘the loop’. I’m interested in loops both as a metaphor and also as a durational experience. The loop is the fundamental control structure that forms the basis of pretty much every computer programme, including those I use to create my animations. Many of our daily processes in the workplace and in our leisure time are structured by the technology that we use, and the control loop is a key part of that. If we think about globalisation and the myriad of supply chains and systems that we use to manage that, none of these would be possible without the loop. Hence, I’m interested in the loop as a metaphor for both technology and contemporary existence itself. At the same time, I’m interested in loops in a material sense. The seamless temporal loop is a structure that seems unique to animation as it requires direct control over the image to ensure that the start and end conditions are identical, something that is hard to achieve with live action film-making. Loops have unique durational characteristics in that a viewer’s narrative is constructed from where they start and stop watching – once the loop has started there is no beginning or end. Conventional narrative flow and causality can even be reversed depending on the point at which the loop is entered and exited. Hence, it allows an exploration of ideas around repetition and memory as each iteration of the loop will be informed by those that we have viewed previously.
How do you see your work operating culturally? Politically?
I use humour quite a lot in my work as I think it encourages people to make new connections. However, there can be a price to pay in terms of accessibility as humour can be very culturally specific and my desire is to try to create something that is ‘open’. Still, I understand that my practice is a product of a specific set of cultural forces – that’s just the way it is. The contemporary art that most interests me encapsulates some criticality about the society that I live in – in some way it interrogates my contemporary existence. As you can probably gather from my previous answer, I believe that technology is a key aspect of that and so I’m interested in it both as a subject in itself and as a vital material for artists. Today, location is not so much defined by geography, but by our position within the complex web of processes that make up contemporary society. My work attempts to capture such a situation, caught in a perpetual state of transit where increasing complexity is often presented as the illusion of ‘progress’. I see technological development as deeply political – each innovation directly impacts how we structure our society and how we relate to each other and ‘the world’ – the idea that technology is in some way ‘neutral’ is a myth – I think there’s some value in exploring this idea. If we think of politics in the terms of the ongoing creation of multiple collective subjectivities, technology directly impacts that and so I think it lies at the heart of twenty-first century politics.