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JUMP INTO THE UNKNOWN

 

An official collateral event of the 56th Venice Biennale, the exhibition is presented by  Nine Dragon Heads (http://www.9dragonheads.com/Home/main/main.htm), an international community of artists, which explores and re-considers the relationship and equilibrium between people and the natural environment. The group was established in 1995 by South-Korean artist Park Byoung-Uk.  The focus of the group is on environments under duress, and in “Jump into the unknown” the artists will work with environmental themes specific to Venice.

 

So much depends upon a stick in the mud. 

Artist: Diek Grobler

Animated film. 16:9 (1920 x 1080 dpi)

 

 So much depends upon a stick in the mud comprises a series of endlessly looping animated films compiled from photographs of the channel markers used to delineate the waterways across the lagoon around Venice, leading to and from the city.

 

Unlike other kinds of film, animated film is not shot in real time, but painstakingly constructed, frame by frame.  Its movement is not captured, it is created.  What the viewer see as movement is an illusion: In reality, the viewer sees a succession of still images, individually crafted over different periods of time.  Ironically the viewer never appreciates the crafting of the single image, as the single frames interchange at such a pace that they can only be viewed and appreciated as part of a sequence and “a single frame stands out only by omission – when smooth movement is disrupted…The production process of the animated film lacks a smooth and logical time-line; the fleeting moment and eternity stand side by side. Yet the audience is presented with the impression of an uninterrupted flow of re-created time.”[i]

 

The protagonist in my films is the channel marker – or rather the character created by visually blending thousands of channel markers around the city into one persona – the stick in the mud.  Composed of two to four tree-trunks bolted together in a pyramidal structure, these markers lead travelers, traders and tourists in and out of the city.  Some are elaborate structures, supporting lights for night-time travel, some bear warnings and notices pertaining to the regulation of traffic in and around the city.  Some are just three tree trunks bolted together -- a perch for gulls, or a refuge for mussels.  By combining the individual photos of hundreds of channel markers into an animated film, I turn them into a single creature, roaming across the water, morphing into different shapes as it strides across the water on its three legs.

 

For this work I travelled in a vaporetto all around Venice and its lagoon, photographing individual channel markers leading into and from the city.  Each individual photograph is applied as a single frame in an animated film.  Traces of what happens between individual frames remain in the rapidly altering backgrounds and surrounds in the film. The photographs focus on the tree-trunks themselves, not the surroundings. The trunks are placed in the centre of the photo. By linking the photos in an editing programme into a video sequence, the trunks become animated, seem to be a living organism moving over the water.  In the film, the trunks become the stable, relatively unchanging factor, while the city and environs flash by at tremendous speed.  The illusion of movement created by animating the channel markers is undermined by the inability to control the environment in which the animated object is filmed.  Some of the films thus both create the illusion of movement, and reveal its own trickery by not hiding the method by which the illusion is created.

 

The idiomatic expression stick in the mud refers to a person unwilling to participate in activities; a curmudgeon or party pooper, or more generally to one who is slow, old-fashioned, or non-progressive; an old fogey.  Venice, being built on sticks in the mud and using sticks in the mud to guide us in and out of the city, literally needs this idiomatic slowness – the stability, the unwillingness to move or change, for its functioning and survival.

 

 

 

 

[i] Ülo Pikkov - Animasophy: Theoretical Writings on the Animated Film. 2010

Published by the Estonian Academy of Arts, Department of Animation.

 

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