Represent & Animate

muybridge horse

Muybridge-child-plate-475

child-frames

Photoshop layers view

In this project you will work with poetry—interpreting, mashing up, composing a text—then translating to create animated narratives using found or generated photographic and graphic images. You’ll first develop texts and a static image (storyboard) as a design plan, then produce an animated interpretation (not an illustration) that expresses the spirit and meaning of the text.

Like contemporary postmodern digital culture, Dada poetry and photomontage are relevant starting points for this project as they originate in media and, when mashed-up, can be simultaneously nonsensical, random and curiously poignant. Dada was an art movement formed during the First World War as a reaction to the horrors and folly of the war. The art, poetry and performances produced by Dada artists are often satirical and nonsensical in nature, making the absurd into a critique of modern culture.

Photomontage, the making of composite photographs by cutting, gluing, rearranging and overlapping photographs into a new image, was one of the techniques used by Dada artists to criticize corrupt culture.

For Project 2 you can use any text as a source to interpret or compose. See these sources: the Poetry Foundation, and Poets.org.

The project has 2 parts: a static image/storyboard and a 25-30 second movie file with sound (for screening Tuesday October 29).

* Readings/Video/Sites, for October 15: (discussion leaders: )

* Video, Animated Gifs – the Birth of a New Medium

* Reading from McCloud’s Understanding Comics, The Six Steps

* Visual Remix

* Postmodernism, definition (read Hebdige’s quote, p 154-155)

* Dada Was Born 100 Years Ago, So What?, NYTimes

* How to Make a Dadaist Poem, Tristan Tzara, 1920

* Dada Poetry Generator

For browsing:

Julian Rosefeldt Manifesto video installation – # 6 is the Dada manifesto