Press release for “Approach”

Our Press release for “Approach”: “Motion Capture” is a technology heavily used in movies such as Avatar or Lord of the Rings (Gollum) or almost all contemporary video games. It’s generally regarded as a way to transfer the movement of a live person to a computer generated one. But two artists in residence at the Prairie Center of the Arts, Drew Browning and Annette Barbier, are using it to create a mural on the 75’ fence adjacent to the Center’s building. Two people approaching one another, one walking and one using a wheel chair, are the subjects of their most recent work, “Approach”. Seen from Washington St., with the giant processing plant Archer Daniels Midland in the background, it reminds us of human scale and presence in a highly industrialized environment. And it also speaks to the traces we leave behind us in our passage through life, knowingly or not.

Water Jet Work

Today we did some work on the water jet cutter – admittedly overkill in terms of power since we’re just using corroplast – but still, a lot of fun. We can’t operate it ourselves, but we did get splashed and watched the cut traces emerge …

Paul (thanks, Paul) stayed late to help us, we got two sheets cut and will hopefully cut a few more tomorrow – we have 9 sheets so have to fit the work into the available space. Nesting the lines, you can get more out of a sheet than just the 5 that will actually be displayed in the vertical dimension. It would be so wonderful to use a material with some durability, stability and bling – like stainless steel.

Name for the Piece

So we've decided on a name for the piece on the fence: Approach. It takes into account the two sets of traces approaching one another - one from a walker/runner and another from a person using a wheelchair. Where they meet in the center, their figures will be sketched in. Meanwhile, today we are working on what the figures will look like, and getting the traces to repeat without an apparent break. A few feet away in the woods, life goes on, with native flowers and plants blooming and the little stream bubbling by.

Jack in the Pulpit

Mayapple

Trillium

The stream

Prairie Center of the Arts Residency

We received a 2 week residency at the Prairie Center of the Arts in Peoria which has been a boon in terms of concentrating on the most recent projects involving interpreting motion capture data in sculptural form. The Center offers residencies that allow the use of studios and facilities in the warehouse district of Peoria, right along the Illinois River, and housing in a beautiful, semi-rural house set on the edge of an un-glaciated, wooded area with a small stream 20 min. from the studios.

We recorded motion capture data at Columbia College's Media Production Center in March with subjects doing two classes of activity - walking/rolling and yoga movements. The walking/rolling is destined for the fence adjacent to the facade of the studios that runs for 75' along Washington St., a highway-like street with not much foot traffic.

This is a mockup of a couple of cycles of the walking/running movement just to get an idea of what it would look like and what color material to use (black disappears). We went through many, many options in terms of where to put the work and what materials to use, finally settling on corroplast (corrugated plastic) which we will cut on the water jet machine here. Also, we plan to use mo cap traces from various yoga movements/postures to engrave on stone, and will be doing some tests with stone of different sorts (of the stepping stone variety, but different substances like marble, granite, etc.) to see what doesn’t explode.

Here’s a mockup, and below some of the traces prepared for cutting. If the water jet ends up destroying the stone, maybe we’ll try sandblasting (have to send it out for that).

The idea behind all this has to do with motion capture as metaphor for our movement through time and the invisible influence we have on the world by passing through it.