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Here’s a quirky and creative little flipbook animation called Kraak & Smaak: Squeeze me (source: Drawn).
Another example of the endless possibilities for creativity with technology. Literacies? The kinds of things that include storytelling, sequencing, playful possibilities, imagination, what-ifs and the like.
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I’m long overdue for variety in post content, and I apologize. I feel I’ve been ranting and raving on my educational soap box for too long, but the problem is, for all my reading, I haven’t come across anything worth sharing. Until now. I’ve just discovered pinscreen animation, and I think it’s one of the most remarkable unions of technology and hands-on creativity. Mind you, it’s a form of animation from the early twentieth century, but nobody said you had to discover things in chronological time.
On the website Focus on animation techniques, Marcel Jean explains pinscreen techniques:
In the early 1930s, engraver Alexandre Alexeïeff, a Russian émigré living in France, decided to go into filmmaking. Wishing to make films with an aesthetic faithful to the line and shading of his engravings, he invented a new type of device: the pinscreen.
The pinscreen consists of a white screen pierced by hundreds of thousands of pins that can slide back and forth, each in its own hole. When lit from the side, each pin casts a shadow, and when all the pins are pushed out, there is total darkness. But when pins are pushed in, their shadows are shorter, and the black become grey. When pins are pushed all the way in, they do not cast shadows and the white screen can be seen.
If you are interested in a detailed, illustrated account of the technique and equipment, you can read about it here.
Being extremely time-consuming, this was not a popular or widespread form of animation, but its uniquely tonal quality created with shadows of various intensity created by the pins, gives it a dramatic and even poetic quality not unlike chiaroscuro.
Several pinscreen films were made, including the Alexeieff’s Night on bald mountain (1933) and En passant (1943), and Jacques Drouin’s Mindscape (1976).
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I’m always impressed by the time and effort people will devote to creative projects.
Art Education 2.0 is a global community of art educators exploring uses of new technology.
Art Education 2.0 is for art educators at all levels who are interested in using digital technologies to enhance and transform art teaching and learning experiences. The aim of Art Education 2.0 is to explore ways of using technology to promote effective art education practices, encourage cultural exchanges and joint creative work, and support artistic projects, curricular activities, and professional development opportunities deemed important by our members.
When you sign up, you can avail yourself of all the usual socialnetworking options, for example, you can invite friends, upload photos or videos, or start a discussion. At a glance from the homepage you can see current projects, forum discussions and recent blog posts. The format is well organised and easy to read, eg. the post ‘Sir Ken Robinson & creative thinking’ , a post about Ken Robinson’s well-known TED talk, ‘Are schools killing creativity?’, is followed by several clearly displayed comments. I suppose, what I’m trying to say, is that it’s all there, and it’s easy and enjoyable to browse. A late night for me recently while I explored the blogroll – always dangerous to jump into hyperlinks, branching out evermore into oblivion.
New Web 2.0 resources in the right-hand navigation offer such delicacies as Andrew Douch’s video on the benefits of podcasting; Vizu, an interactive poll that can be added to a website or blog; 12 seconds, where you can record and share short videos about what you’re doing or where you are, etc.
On the left, there’s a chat option, featured websites, an option to share photos or videos, a section with a blog called ‘educational paradigms’, which includes posts such as ‘Keeping your teaching experiences fresh’, ArtsJournal , where you can check out daily art news, and more. You can also join groups, such as ‘first year art teachers’, or ‘Voicethread in the artroom’.
Digital art is popular with students, and teachers can get support for this by joining ‘Digital design’ . ‘Teaching animation’ supports teachers in a discussion of ideas, strategies, and tools for teaching animation.
I’ll definitely be telling my art faculty about this supportive art community. Makes me want to be an art educator!
The Book Cover Appreciation gallery is for hardcore bookcover lovers. You can get into really heavy discussion about the details of the book cover. Clicking on the cover takes you to the comment page. The blog is updated several times a week.
Here’s an example of a comment about an Animal Farm book cover:
Although I have often conflicted about Shepard’s work and his source materials which could be debated as dubious. The propaganda style works especially since these are anti-socialist/communist novels. The Obey logo I find quite funny on the covers, how many designers have the balls or be allowed to put there personal logo on a book cover, the mark of an iconoclast
Can you get passionate about a book cover?
Human potential and creativity never cease to amaze me. Today I came across an online version of a work of art in the form of a 50-metre-long scroll representing two centuries of Chinese people in Australia. Harvest of Endurance is a painting in the traditional gong bi style depicting the story of hardship and resourcefulness of the Chinese in the history of Australia. Taking a little over 12 months to complete, the scroll is made up of 18 elaborately painted panels. It was purchased by the National Museum of Australia in 1992.
Appreciating the actual scroll is one thing, but just as impressive in its own way is the accompanying interactive website produced by the National Museum of Australia. You can explore the scroll from right to left along a timeline from 1788 to 1988 by clicking on stages which are described as eg. Australian gold rush; the rise of merchants, etc. In selecting a period, a scene forms in front of your eyes, first as an outline, then graudally as a complete coloured picture. Clicking on red arrows outlines an object or person, and provides you with a brief explanation or definition. There is a detailed audio-visual explanation of how to read the scroll, including how colour and form create the story, and an explanation of how the scroll was created from the point of view of the artist and the researcher.
The presentation of historical facts in artistic form, coupled with an interactive, multi-layered online representation, is a clever way to facilitate learning through exploration. Wouldn’t it be fantastic to create a similar project for students where each would have a choice whether to contribute as either a researcher, artist, technical expert or other. In particular, I like the way you can select parts of the picture for explanation or background, and I think that would be a great way for students to present their newly found facts.
The collaboration between the people of Australia and China in the form of the Australia-China Friendship Society aimed to promote friendship and understanding between the two countries and their cultures. It would be interesting to connect Australian students with students from another country, perhaps through blogs, in order to create a final product requiring collaboration and fostering friendship and mutual understanding. That would be an authentic and meaningful project.
Babelswarm is Australia’s first Second Life arts residency. Recognition of 3D Multi-user Virtual Environments (MUVEs) as a medium for serious art work comes in the form of a grant of AUD 20,000 from the Australian Council, the biggest grant to be awarded for Second Life work. Here’s what the creators of Babelswarm have to say:
‘We will collaborate to develop an inter-disciplinary artwork in Second Life, which converges possibilities of literary, music/sound art and real-time 3D arts practices within the virtual world. There will be a simultaneous installation in Second Life and in a real world gallery, where gallery visitors can be directly involved in its creation via a voice-driven interface”.
It sounds amazing. If you want to go there, you can teleport in.
Here’s what Radio National had to say.
Have a look at the Babelswarm Flickr group.
Desktop magazine asked creator, Chris Dodds of Icon Inc, about his second life and creating virtual art in a virtual world. Dodds answered, “The grant recognises virtual worlds as legitimate environments for artists to work and create in and, while some artistic institutions already have a presence SL and a few have offered residencies, the $20,000 Australia Council initiative is the biggest of its kind.”
“This work, called Babelswarm, will consist of a real-world gallery installation and SL-based interactive sculpture. Participants from both the real world and SL can speak to the artwork and have their words translated into virtual three-dimensional letterforms. These letters then tumble from SL’s sky via a complex set of scripting and voice recognition software. The more words, the higher the tower becomes. The work is to be viewed in a gallery via a wall-sized screen, and in SL by proxy of an avatar. Both real-world and SL-based participants can interact with the work and communicate to each other through the artwork, and the work investigates real and virtual entanglement, language and interaction.”
The work will be launched as part of another Second Life project that Dodds is working on – the Australian Centre of Virtual Art (ACVA). Through this platform he’ll run galleries, host events and develop a permanent archive of virtual art.
Here’s something that Dodds said that made me sit up and listen, “Icon is interested in virtual worlds as the next social and business interface, and we’re formulating a number of ideas. Virtual environments are the next logical progression for mass interaction and collaboration and we’ll be there to enjoy, and hopefully influence, the ride.” For those of us who think that Second Life and other virtual worlds are just games, we should think twice.
“The next decade will see MUVEs having a profound impact on business practices, governance, law, economics, personal relationships, security, anonymity and our overall sense of self and place,” says Dodds.
That’s something to be reckoned with.
I showed my 18 year old son this article. He said, ‘I don’t like it; truth can be controlled in a virtual world’.
Any thoughts?
Cruising through one of my favourite blogs, the ABC’s Articulate, I came across a clever film by US video artist, Philip Scott Johnson, who creates morphing montages. How long did it take to make this film of 500 years of women in art?
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If you’re thinking of researching all the paintings used in the video, save yourself the trouble, someone else has already accomplished that. You can even link to where those artworks live. Phillip’s video has been nominated as ‘Most Creative Video; 2007 YouTube Awards’! An example of creative technology, in my opinion. somehow, after watching the video, it’s even more interesting to look up the background of each artwork. I tried to guess them; it’s fun.
