Sharpest Point: finished remainder

Finished reading "The Sharpest Point" which entailed reading a handful of short articles, some of which were scripts from films rather than essays.
Notes:"Change/Translate/Represent" by Oliver Hockenhall, page 268: re computer animation,"when (code) ... are both subject and object of attention, the message of anthrapamorphic representation is undermined". Page 269: source code link.
Page 271, interest point regarding Point of View.

Sharpest Point: Chris Gehman

Read Gehman's article on Janie Geiser and her puppet and animation films. Notes: page 251, interesting observations about using foreground images as "composite or laminate space". Page 255: "mediated version of 'live action' also creates an additional composite temporality...."

Sharpest Point: Wrik Mead

Read "Wrik Mead: animating the jitter and tilt of erotic anguish" by Bart Testa. Good overview of Mead's body of work. He discusses the psychodrama in context to Mead's films, which is not new to me as I also discussed that in my MFA thesis, but the reminder gives me a potential starting point to work with William in this style sometime soon (this is a 4 hour project which will require some bribing).

Sharpest Point, 4 articles

Read "Our Town" by Libby Hague. Mostly the script for the film, a good example of diary film writing. Also, like the idea about faux 3D described on page 227 (influenced today's film, "Canister vs the Other Guy in 3D".)
"red Buffalo Skydive" by Jude Norrisd: the script, I'm not sure I understand why this was published, it is interesting to see this text but doesn't illuminate anything about this film, let alone animation in general.
"A Clarification" by Lewis Klahr. On page 234 he defines works at defining himself and his work as not animator/animation but rather as collage artist and eventually as a "re-animator", pointing out that not every filmmaker who makes work one frame at a time is animating.
"Eric Henry: the thing that doesn't seem  tasty" by Daniel Cockburn describes the work of Eric Henry which may be important to study for my Rerun project.

Sharpest Point: 2 articles

Read "Animated Image, Animated Music" by Staphanie Maxwell and Alan Schindler. Page 202 describes their rephotography of their 35mm film (all direct animation techniques).

Read "Demoscene and Digital Culture" by John Sobol, which describes live video on line and its history, video art which began with digital tags marking the pirate of cracked games. I'd like to look at some of the examples described on page 207, in particular "Poem to a horse" and others at www.farb-rausch.com .

sharpest point: Tom Sherman

Read Tom Sherman's "Video/Intermedia/Animation" in The Sharpest Point. Basically a video-supremacist, claiming that video fills all gaps and is the all encompassing art form. Bit tiresome.

Sharpest Point: Cinema, Animation, and the other arts

Read "Cinema, Animation, and the Other Arts" by Pierre Hebert in Sharpest Point. Notes, points out that live action cinema uses camera as a black box so that filmmakers do not need to know how it works but "on the contrary, animation is constantly reopening the technical black box..." (page 183). On page 187, "The expression 'relationship between different arts or disciplines' doesn't really fit what I'm interested in. Formal relationships between arts are a speculative varnish that cover what is really important: relationships between artists, that is relationships between people, which are always problematic.".

Sharpest: Direct animation

Read "Meticulously, Recklessly WOrked Upon: Direct Animation, the Auratic and the Index" by Tess Takahashi from Sharpest Point. Great in depth analysis of drawn of film, photogram, and other cameraless film techniques. Page 166: "Direct" defined. Page 168, digital described as a threat. Page 172: suggests that direct filmmaking guarantees meaning. and that hand drawn film "index the process of their production". Page 173, "guarantee of authenticity". Page 174, examples of blood and the body use in direct films. Page 176, problem of direct film being categorized only as form in contemporary reviews.

Sharpest Point: Jeremy Blake

Read "Jeremy Blake: I blacked out and had some very vivid dreams" by Lia Gangiatano.
Interesting metaphors about vampires on top of page 156:

Sharpest Point: David Clark

Read "The Discrete Charm of the Digital Image; animation and new media" by David Clark in "The Sharpest Point". Much discussion of time, things slowed down or sped up, time laps, altered time, etc.
Notes: page 140. claims 7-12 seconds is time for images to move from short to long term memory. Then describes animation as dead or undead, as opposed to "live" film. Page 142, Muybridge presented rotoscopes of his photos instead of the photos when in moving devices. Page 143, "Truth is now a pixels and code". Pages 143-149 describe numerous interactive web animators to check out.

Sharpest Point: Laura Marks on Brothers Quay

Read essay by Laura Marks "Institute Benjamenta: an olfactory view", a discussion of how the Brothers Quay presented the sense of smell through their live action film.
Interesting notes: page 131, "...haptic images have the effect of overwhelming vision and spilling into other sense perceptions." Page 132, interesting notes on perfume. Page 136, entire last paragraph discusses the brothers in terms of how they practice subjectivity and links this to their disavowal of authorship and refusal to be analyzed as being identical twin.

Sharpest Point: "The Rock": William Kentridge

Read essay "The Rock": William Kentridge's Drawings for Projection by Rosalind Krauss in The Sharpest Point.
Notes: quote from Kentridge "There was no feeling of what a good idea I had had, rather, relief at not having overlooked what was in front of me. " (Page 101)
"Fortuna" and automatisms discussed throughout.
Quoting Cavell "In calling such things automatisms, I do not mean that they automatically ensure artistic success or depth, but that in mastering a tradition one masters a range of automatisms upon which the tradition maintains itself.".  (page 103)
Page 104-105 discusses implosion of Modernism.
Page 110 compares time exposures to snap shots as metaphor.
Palimpsest being animated/revealed through destructive animation style (erasure) described. (page 112).

Sharpest Point: Pain of Ordinariness

From Sharpest Point, read "The Pain of Ordinariness: The Art of Tabaimo" by Morishita Akihiko. Notes: interesting discussion of being ordinary (page 86).  On page 92, "We tend to push whatever we are not interested in away from our consciousness. Things that actually exist are made transparent and invisible."This is why we cannot perceive ordinary things as they are."
On page 93, creates correlation between presentation of "ordinary" and of "horror".

Sharpest Point - Beloff

Read essay "An Ersatz of Life: The Dream LIfe of Technology" by Zoe Beloff in Sharpest Point book.
Interest: page 74 -opens with a two paragraph artist statement which would be a good example to teach from. Mostly discussions of panorama images, quick time movies, and chronicling different projects personally done.
P75, describes work as "toys" rather than "machines" because "machine suggests something altogether too functional".
P80: "the first films were initially shown with a still frame up on the screen that would suddenly come to life". 

Sharpest Point: compositing

From Sharpest Point, read "Compositing: From image streams to modular media" by Lev Manovich. He suggests that digital compositing is replacing montage as the cornerstone of media communication, that montage is used to fake reality (page 61-2) and "compositing is key operation of postmodernism" (page 54). Some artists to look up: Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince (page 55), and especially Rybczynki for his films "Steps" and "Tango" and Zeman for his "Baron Prasil", a 1961 version of Baron Munchhausen.  His metaphor on page 68 about rows of brinks relating to time and montage is good too.

Sharpest Point 2

Read "Animation as Baroque: Freischer Morphs Harlem; Tangos to Crocodiles" by Norman M. Klein in Sharpest Point. Interesting points: "animation never required a fourth wall" (28), discussion of "Land without Bread" (29), animation has an "uneasy alliance between special effects and drama" (29), "Metamorphosis is far more lyrical than a pyramid of gags" (30), discussion of x-men (32), pointing out Disney's complete avoidance of metamorphosis (33), and a discussion of difference between a puppet and a doll (43). Much of the essay talked about animation allowing things to morph from one state to another. This inspired today's film "Old Man Winter Awakens".

The Sharpest Point

Started reading article by Steve Reinke in "The Sharpest Point: animation at the end of cinema" (ed. Chris Gehman and Steve Reinke, YYZ Books, Toronto, 2005). While I have not had enough quiet time today to immerse, I was excited by ideas of animation reclaiming it's 19th century birthright through computer based cinema which doesn't rely on capturing reality. "If we move from lens to a computer based production of images, can there still be representation of the world? No.". (page 16). This has inspired my video of the day, "Big Cock on Parliament Hill" which takes animated walking shot during a workshop a few months ago with a rooster sock puppet (made my Margaret Bessai in the late 90s, puppetteered my me today), and a photo I took while traveling last year. Animation and effects completely negates representation, like collage. I'll be working more with these ideas with my "Rerun" project.