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This might seem like just a graffiti / painting on a set of plinths, but there is more behind it. The idea I am fascinated about the most is – the provocation of students. This installation was done at university, on all plinths of our MArch Architecture studio a week before our interim crits.

Taking all the plinths might seem rude at first, but architecture is about behaviour change and interaction between a space and its users, which is what this installation did. The painting on the plinths gave them a sense of untouchability (or at least I hoped it will). I was curious what will happen with a crit day approaching. Will students start to take the plinths one by one? They belong to them as much as they belong to me.

I wanted to see a progressive defragmentation of this painting, but what I’ve discovered instead, not even 24hours after the installation was made – plinths composed randomly, looking somewhat similar to Picasso’s paintings. Brilliant – a number of coursemates decided to re-organize them.

I loved the idea of chance in this installation – stacking the plinths randomly and then painting a symbol on them left me wondering how will each plinth look like. The random sizes of plinths stacked together was also a way of escaping a typical grid. It also has an effective three-dimensional quality, due to lengths of plinths they can be spaced in a random way, again creating something completely different and completely by chance.

The crits went great too, as my tutor Sean Griffiths, Co-Founter of FAT said: “Ricardas, you have had the best presense during the crits today”, meaning that all students were presenting their models on plinths with a piece of my painted symbol.

I was hoping that after the crits I will collect them and stack them in a random way, but there was no need for that, as like I mentioned previously, it happened sooner than I expected thanks to my coursemates.

The painted symbol is from my own created alphabet, which you can check out here and download as a font here.

I have also made a small model of this installation, which will appear on the blog soon.

Above you will find a time-lapse video of the installation making process, and at the bottom a photo gallery of the installation, as well as a photo gallery of plinths being used in the studio by other students to display their work.

]]> http://whycgi.com/Ricardas/?feed=rss2&p=568 1 http://whycgi.com/Ricardas/?p=209&utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=shadow-puppets-analog-animation-projector http://whycgi.com/Ricardas/?p=209#comments Sun, 16 Dec 2012 23:58:51 +0000 http://whycgi.com/Ricardas/?p=209 Matt has texted me on facebook today asking how its going with the final digirep assignment (we gotta do 2.5D animation, but to asnwer his question – it’s not going well, as I haven’t started yet!) and reminded me of the project we did in October this year. So myself, Matthew Witts and Alex Sun – all BDP guys at Westminster Uni right now (what a coincidence) decided to team up to create an analog device. The first task for our digirep lecture was to create an animation and a physical device to show it which would combine digital and analog processes. The technique and method was also supposed to be related to the narrative of the animation. And on top of that we were not allowed to create any conventional zoetropes or phenakistoscopes!..

While sharing a cigarette with Matt we thrown a couple of ideas of the top of our heads and agreed right away on what we are going to do. I thought – we can make our own film from acetate and then use light to project it on a wall… and that’s a basic light and shadow device concept – done. It also made sense to do a shadow puppet animation in terms of a narrative. The only question then was the design of our projector. We realised that making our own film on a analog device might be pretty tricky as it would probably be impossible to ‘capture’ the image on the wall during the transition of frames. Because of this reason we decided to use separate frames and then came up with a way how to flick them to project the animation frame by frame. The design of the device measuring around 600x600mm was pretty much supported by its function, and turned out looking like a London Eye.

The wheel hosts 22 60x78mm frames of the repeating animation printed on acetate. At the bottom of a wheel is a light box with a special slot for an iPhone to provide bright light. The iphone’s slot is in an additional box that slides in and out in order to focus the image! While spinning the wheel the first frame pops out of the light box and the next frame flicks in right after in order to capture each frame individually. How this all works can be understood from a section drawing in the gallery bellow!