Time Based Digital Media – this semester I chose this elective to gain fluency in digital editing, green screening,  software and process. I created a series of short film rough cuts in pursuit of this. The result is a current work in process, from the multi channel project I am currently re-working it toward a single channel with a more  intentional cellular mitosis movement. Looking to refine sound, ideas of keening, wailing grief, lullaby. Ideas of pain, death, synthesis, deep belonging, motherhood, biology, the absurd and the body.

 

 

In addition this past semester themes of embodied cognition, the thinking body,  the extended brain, the unconscious knowing, affect and the environment.

Pedagogy elective was an opportunity to research and verbalize some of these thoughts in a slide lecture for animation students about embodied cognition theory and in a syllabus created about learning with the body about the body as illustrated in an expanded course description:

“With advances in computer graphics we are interacting with, learning, and experiencing our own bodies through sensory experiences with digital environments, in virtual worlds, interactive multimedia technologies, websites, video games, and animated computer-based artistic works. Is simply understanding how to show motion enough to animate these spaces to their full potential? As animation theorist Alan Cholodenko defines it, animation is ‘bedeviled’ by two definitions: ‘endowing with movement’ and ‘endowing with life’

As human beings we cannot learn about the world around us without our bodies and its relationship to the environment. We process input from our senses (vision, hearing, smell, taste, touch, and movement) and use this information when we make a drawing or experience a film from both external and internal sources. The paths of learning in this course will be twofold. Externally,  through study of the information of the actual parts and structures of the body, and  internally,  experienced  through the lived process of making and moving.

Externally, we will gain knowledge of the body by study of visual and constructive information of human particularities in terms of skeletal proportion, anatomy and structural mechanics of movement and balance. Working with live models we will flow between drawing and sculpting in clay to promote analysis of the translation from two to three dimensions. Combining the use of both vision and touch will aid in developing spatial intelligence, or the ability to manipulate shapes and objects in the mind’s eye, an essential tool in working in digital media.

Experientially, if we are to make progress in visualizing and manipulating the components of the figure in space in a dynamic lively way, it is useful to also cultivate this sense within ourselves. Our second path of learning will be grounded in our own sensory and motion experiences and feedback. Through focused awareness an

d simple movement exercises, self reflected writing, embodied theory readings  and time with a visiting movement artist, we will both enhance our own learning process and cultivate embodiment as an inner sense perception of aliveness and empathy. “

 

Books: The Queer Art of Failure Jack Halberstam

Animation, Embodiment, And Digital Media: Human Experience of Technological Liveliness K Chow

A Burst of Light and other Essays Audre Lorde

Digital Bodies: Creativity and Technology in the Arts and Humanities (Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology) Susan Broadhurst, Sara Price

Immersive Embodiment: Theatres of Mislocalized Sensation (Palgrave Studies in Performance and Technology) Liam Jarvis

Affect and Embodied Meaning in Animation: Becoming-Animated (Routledge Advances in Film Studies) Sylvie Bissonnette