A long time ago, I was a professional animator.
[Eric Dyer][Animator][Compositor]And at night, I would make my own experimental films.
And I was spending a lot of time, way too much time, in front of a screen for work that would be presented on a screen, and I had this great need to get my hands back on the work again. Now, before “The Simpsons,” before “Gumby,” before “Betty Boop,” before there was such a thing as cinema and television, animation was hugely popular in this form. This is a zoetrope. And you spin this drum, and you look through the slits into the inside of the drum, and you see the animation pop to life. This is animation in physical form, and it’s animation I could get my hands on again. I took these ideas to Denmark. I went there with my family on a Fulbright Fellowship. That’s my daughter, Mia. I rode around the city on my bicycle and shot all the interesting moving elements of Copenhagen: the boaters in the canals, the colors that explode in spring, the free-use city bikes, love, textures, the healthy cuisine —
And I brought all that video back into the physical world by printing it out on these long strips of ink-jet paper and cutting out the forms. Now, I invented my own form of the zoetrope, which removes the drum and replaces the slits with a video camera. And this was very exciting for me, because it meant that I could make these physical objects, and I could make films from those objects. That’s me riding on my bicycle.
I made about 25 paper sculptures, each the size of a bicycle wheel. I brought them into the studio, spun them and shot them to make the film “Copenhagen Cycles.”
This project not only allowed me to get my hands back on the work again but it helped me get my life back. Instead of spending 12, 15 hours a day with my face plastered to a screen, I was having these little adventures with our new family and shooting video along the way, and it was kind of a symbiosis of art and life. And I think that it’s no mistake that zoetrope translates into “wheel of life.”
But film and video does flatten sculpture, so I tried to imagine a way that animated sculpture could be experienced as such, and also a completely immersive kind of animated sculpture. And that’s where I came up with the idea for the zoetrope tunnel. You walk through with a handheld strobe, and wherever you point the flashlight, the animation pops to life. I plan to finish this project in the next 30 to 40 years.
But I did build a half-scale prototype. It’s covered in Velcro, and I could lay inside on this bridge and stick animated sequences to the walls and test stuff out. People would comment that it reminded them of an MRI. And that medical connection spoke to me, because at the age of 14, I was diagnosed with a degenerative retinal condition that’s slowly taking my vision away, and I’d never responded to that in my work. So I responded to it in this piece called, “Implant.” It is an imaginary, super-magnified medical device that fits around the optic nerve. And the public is, in a sense, miniaturized to experience it. With a handheld strobe, they can explore the sculpture, and discover thousands of cell-sized robots hard at work, leaping in and out of the optic nerve, being deployed to the retina to repair it. It’s my science fiction fantasy cure of my own incurable disorder.(Machine buzzes)Now, in the real-world gene therapy and gene therapy research, healthy genes are being administered to unhealthy cells using viruses.
There’s a lot of colorful, fluffy hope in this, and there’s also some creepy, threatening idea of viruses maybe becoming an invasive species in your body. Vision loss has helped to take me away from the things that disconnect me from the world. Instead of being sealed off in an automobile, I ride my bike, take buses and trains and walk a lot. And instead of a visually intensive process in the studio, primarily, I’m also getting outdoors a lot more and using more of my senses. This landscape is a couple hours east of San Diego, California. My brother lives out that way. He and I went camping there for four days. And I grabbed my camera, and I walked through the canyons. And I tried to imagine and figure out what kind of motion would be present in this place that was so still and so devoid of motion. I think it’s the stillest place I’ve ever been. And I realized that it was the movement of my own body through the landscape that was creating the animation.
It was the motion of changing perspective. So I created this piece called “Mud Caves” from those photographs. It’s a multilayered print piece, and you can think of it as a zoetrope laid flat. It’s kind of my western landscape panorama. And next to the print piece there’s a video monitor that shows the animation hidden within the artwork. I think one of the best parts about this project for me was that I got to hang out with my brother a lot, who lives 2,500 miles away from me. And we would just sit in this seemingly eternal landscape sculpted by water over millions of years and talk. We’d talk about our kids growing up and the slowing pace of our parents, and our dad who’s suffering from leukemia, memory loss and infection. And it struck me that, as individuals, we’re finite, but as a family, we are an ongoing cycle — a kind of wheel of life. Now, I want to leave you with a tribute to one of my mentors.
She reminds me that physical presence is important and that play is not a luxury, but a necessity. She’s Pixie, and she’s our family dog. And she loves to jump.(Dog barking)(Dog barking and spring boinging)And this is a new kind of zoetrope that I developed at the Imaging Research Center at UMBC in Baltimore. And I call it a “real-time zoetrope.”(Dog barking)(Dog barking and spring boinging)Thank you.