The Vorticists: a short-lived 20th century avant garde art movement
"The vorticists did not have many members; nor did the movement last long, because of unfortunate timing - it formed in 1914 as Europe hurtled towards war. By 1918 there was not much appetite for dogmatic groups such as theirs.
Nevertheless, the group holds an important place in 20th-century British art history.
'They were the first abstract modernist group in Britain,' said Stephens. 'It inevitably comes out of the revolution of cubism, but then, so does everything in the 20th century.'
They were part of a maelstrom of new, aggressive art 'ism' movements, not least the one practised by the Italian futurists, who were, in Lewis's eyes, the bad guys.
Stephens said: 'Unlike the futurists, who celebrate the energy of the machine and actual war as a purging force, the vorticists were engaged in more universal ideas of identity, time and movement in a philosophical sense.'"
(Mark Brown, 13 June 2011, The Guardian)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Anemic Cinema (1926) by Marcel Duchamp
"This characteristically dada film by Marcel Duchamp consists of a series of visual and verbal puns with nonsense phrases inscribed around rotating spiral patterns, creating an almost hypnotic effect. Silent.
Anemic Cinema (various versions were made in 1920, 1923 and, finally, in 1926). Essentially a film by Duchamp with help from Man Ray. Calvin Tomkins: 'Duchamp used the initial payment on his inheritance to make a film and to go into the art business. The film, shot in Man Ray's studio with the help of cinematographer Marc Allégret, was a seven-minute animation of nine punning phrases by Rrose Sélavy. These had been pasted, letter by letter, in a spiral pattern on round black discs that were then glued to phonograph records; the slowly revolving texts alternate with shots of Duchamp's Discs Bearing Spirals, ten abstract designs whose turning makes them appear to move backward and forward in an erotic rhythm. The little film, which Duchamp called Anemic Cinema, had its premiere that August at a private screening room in Paris.'"
(UbuWeb)
Marcel Duchamp (1926). "Anémic Cinéma", 7 minutes, B&W.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
A fleeting moment: drawn and animated
"A small test getting a drawing animated. I made one main drawing, and on the following page redrew some elements so I could scan both into Photoshop and cobble together a looping animation. I staggered the elements out over more frames for a little more variation than a simple 2 frame flip."
(Yi-Piao Yeoh, 27 January 2012, Eraser Dust Everywhere)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
onformative a studio for generative design: unnamed soundsculpture
"The basic idea of the project is built upon the consideration of creating a moving sound sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person. For our work we asked a Laura Keil, a berlin based dancer to interpret a musical piece - Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek - as closely as possible with the movement of her own body. She was recorded by three depth cameras (Kinect), in which the intersection of the images was later put together to a three-dimensional volume (3d point cloud), doing so we were able to use the collected data throughout the further process.
The three-dimensional image allowed us a completely free handling of the digital camera, without limitations of the perspective. The camera also reacts to the sound and supports the physical imitation of the musical piece by the performer. She moves to a noise field, where a simple modification of the random seed can consistently create new versions of the video, each offering a different composition of the recorded performance. The multi-dimensionality of the sound sculpture is already contained in every movement of the dancer, as the camera footage allows any imaginable perspective.
Similar to painting, a single point appears to be still very abstract, but the more points are connected to each other, the more complex and concrete the image seems. The more perfect and complex the 'alternative worlds' we project and the closer together their point elements, the more tangible they become. A digital body, consisting of 22 000 points, thus seems so real that it comes to life again.
Using 3 different microsoft kinect cameras the movement of the dancer was recorded into those 3d pointclouds that were synced and exported as one large dataset as Krakatoa particle files to be loaded into 3ds max for further rendering and creation of the 3d scene including the camera movement that is controlled by the audio as well."
(Cedric Kiefer and Julia Laub, onformative a studio for generative design)
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William Forsythe: choreography as a reflection of social spheres
"In his installation performances such as Human Writes or Heterotopia, to which Forsythe has dedicated an increasing amount of his time in recent years, choreography becomes a social practice. Forsythe's installations are controlled test arrangements in which all the participants can observe themselves, their bodies and their movements together. When a performance like Human Writes deals in substance with the difficulties surrounding universal human rights, it becomes clear where the potential of dance and movement can lie. After all, it's not abstract universal laws alone that guarantee our co-existence. It is much more our physical actions, our daily movements that create and shape the community. Herein lies the political meaning of Forsythe's notion of dance. He creates spaces where he places people in a new, unknown relationship to themselves so that they reflect differently on their (social) spheres and in so doing explore their own potential scope for action."
(Gerald Siegmund, May 2008, Goethe-Institut)
Fig.3 Dominik Mentzos, "Human Writes", performance-Installation by William Forsythe and Kendall Thomas [http://www.theforsythecompany.com/pressphotos/humanwrites/].
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
