Direct Laser Animation

This blogthang was supposed to be all about direct animation, handmade and
camera-free, but so far I've been mostly distracted by miraculous but immobile direct alchemical graphics and other animates. Fear not seekers! The direct animation revolution rides on full tilt ahead. Can't recall how I stumbled upon these beauteous kindred obsessives in our heartland, but they fill my heart with glee. They are cutting 16mm film with lasers and then taping it back together and doing multiple projector shows and magic. Where can I get my hands on one of them laser cutter thingies - quick!

http://www.reevesmachine.com/blog/16mmLaser.html



and as if that weren't enough, then there's the absolute coolest LOOPER ever at L'Abominable!!

http://www.reevesmachine.com/blog/16mmLooper.html

this is truly a loopalicious world after all . . .

Chimmi karma kitchie CHEMIGRAM-ee-o!

(Pierre Cordier as seen by Pierre Radisic -
- click link below for awesome chemi-disco-quicktime!)

Okay so now a day later and I am totally under the spell of Monsieur Cordier's Chemigrams, and then I find this!
http://www.exporevue.com/artistes/fr/radisic/chemigram.html
(I'm still learning about embedding video from untraditional sources - apologies - but that whole site from Pierre Radisic looks awfully cool . . . )

and then here's Pierre Cordier's crazy Chemigram Cinema! From 1962, with Marc Lobet, dig that synth sound too!



it's really worth a visit to his site too
http://www.pierrecordier.com/
what a great guy! and his artwork is amazing!!
Honestly I'm still trying to get a handle on exactly what a "Chemigram" is - I get that it's not using light at all, and that he uses crazy household stuff as the "localizing agent," but then it starts getting fuzzy. Maybe I'll understand better if I watch all three parts of the gallery talk they did around the time of the V&A Shadowcatchers exhibit last year.




Pierre Cordier, chemigram 29/11/76 Mineral vegetable animal, detail, 1976

Jeff Scher's Xmas Crumplemation and the Photogrammiverse

Talbot, 1839, cascade of spruce needles photogram


I love this piece to peaces!

http://vimeo.com/17654563
or
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5a-JiNPcXjQ

Jeff Scher is genius! Seasonably dark and mystical, with lovely, subtle, glowing tints of wondrous tidings (I especially dig the pale greens with pale purples), whilst remembering we are still a people in wartime - hence insistent urgency to use our homespun heartstrings to craft a more rejoicing-worthy world.

Though it's not quite direct animation, and I suspect it's not even technically cameraless, he so successfully evokes both effect and spirit of direct photograms on film emulsion - the irrepressible soul of Man Ray and his Dada buddies early cinema experiments - that I don't care about production details, I just wanna see it again! Really nice to watch without sound too, though Paul's song ain't bad. So many lovely details, and among my favorite is the bit with crumpled currency, slowly uncrumpling in real time, closeup, in negative, seeing through both sides of the money at once.

What's really interesting to me about the success of this approach and technical considerations is that Scher is assumably utilizing various modern digital tricks and tools to create an illusion of anti-illusion. Cinema is an art medium with layers of illusions at its core - a sequence of still images creates an illusion of movement; stage sets, costumes, and actors reciting scripts create illusions of reality, etc. But early in cinema history, avant-garde artists subverted these illusions in various ways - including Man Ray's cinematic photograms - to call attention to the physical properties of film. So essentially here Scher is recreating that impulse to subvert the dominant paradigm by creating a wholly modern illusion which perfectly captures the hyper-reality of object photograms in motion. Bravo!

In related photogrammetry, I just discovered that the Victoria & Albert Museum in London has a series of videos online about the artists featured in last year's show "Shadow Catchers: Camera-less Photography." Great stuff! Here's delightful Pierre Cordier who taught me a new word for the day - Chemigram!

http://vimeo.com/13149446

blogimation

Okay I'm dipping my toe in the virtual swamp!
Since my own domain has been dormant since 2003 due to boring details, while I work on getting that back in action, I need somewhere to transmit, so here 'tis. Image from recently-launched group 16mm camerafree film: SCRATCH FEATURE PROJECT

meanwhile, here's a new favorite Estonian animation:

http://vimeo.com/24550664

Dialogos by Ulo Pikkov
Direct animation with lots of loop sequence printing. For you Scratch Featurers, it looks to me like this is done with a kind of scratch drypoint technique - scratching on clear/ tinted leader, then rubbing ink/ color into the scratches and wiping.