The Kentucky Shape Fair

 

The Kentucky Shape Fair was created with the Sloppy Films Animation Station on September 10, 2022 at the Louisville Maker Faire. It had been 2 and a half years since its last outing in public, when it created collage animation on Family Day at the Walker Art Center in March 2020, just before the COVID closedown started.

This was a tabletop set-up, like many of the most recent versions of the public animation appearances. A thin light green plastic tablecloth was placed on the table with my clip stand and the webcam hooked up to Dragonframe software. I had lots of colorful paper which could be cut into simple shapes to make a state fair out of shapes.

I made the titles and the running horse and Ferris wheel before the first people started coming up and wanting to make things. I had a few other things in mind to make during slow times but didn't need those because it was pretty non-stop for the rest of the day. The public part was from 10 to 6 pm but I started animating a little before 9:30 and wrapped it up a little after five.

The Animation Station table was next to the table of the U of L rocket club, so rockets made several appearances in the film. The Demolition Derby was an idea I had for a big finish. I had one dedicated volunteer who stayed with me the whole time to make it happen.

And with that, the Animation Station returned from a long absence, and in a new city!

The Birth of the Animation Station

 It was nearly ten years ago that the Animation Station made its debut at the Lowry Avenue Open Streets/Harvestfest even on September 29, 2012.

Margo Ashmore, a friend of mine, told me that the folks organizing the neighborhood Harvestfest part of the event were looking for artists to do different kinds of art on the street. I had been playing with a new stop motion application on my laptop, and thought that maybe I could do stop motion animation with people, pixilation, like Norman McLaren had done in "Neighbors" way back in the 1950's. 

It all came together pretty quickly. I could bring my laptop computer with the stop motion software and I could mount a webcam on a tripod. I bought a video projector, so I could project the laptop screen on one of the portable movie screens I had. I was going to get power from the hardware store on the corner of Lowry and Penn, and they were also going have a table and a chair that I could use. The chair ended up being used as an animation prop as much as anything else. I didn't spend too much time sitting down.

I loaded up all equipment on my bicycle trailer and went up there. On the way to the spot where I would set up the animation station, I did some filming and shot some interviews. I would also edit together a video of the event, which is above.

The animation was just about anything that could happen. I didn't really have a spot on the street, it was really on the sidewalk because I didn't have an extension cord long enough to get any farther than that. I had some chalk, and there was drawing on the sidewalk, and lots of improv pixilation with mostly kids. I didn't exactly know how or when, but I knew I wanted to do something like this again.

Behind the Scenes - 20 Years of Art-A-Whirl

 In May of 2015, I set up the Animation Station in the Northrup King Building for the 20th Anniversary of Art-A-Whirl in Northeast Minneapolis. Building Manager Debra Woodward let me use a partially finished space on the second floor of the building for the three days of the art crawl. I used tape to attach a webcam to the ceiling and then ran a USB cable from there to my laptop on a table below. I taped out an area on the floor. The webcam was aimed straight down so that area on the floor was the table top for a gigantic animation stand.

The space had served as a gallery in the past so it already had some bright lights on the ceiling, which I took advantage of to light the floor. At the top of a ladder I attached my Go Pro Camera to record a time lapse of the whole process, which you can see at the end of the full video here:

Before the big day setting up, I made a list of twenty one word themes and put a theme on each of the 20 years. I divided up the hours of the three days to focus on roughly one year each hour.

On Friday afternoon I set everything up and started animating on my own. Soon people were passing by, and some of them stopped and spent some time. I would try to get a group to stay for each hour theme. They would spend part of the the hour making things. I had a table set up with lots of bright colored paper, tape, scissors and pens that people could use to make things. I told them to make things that were big. I had already made some things, some of the Northeast Minneapolis buildings that Art-A-Whirl revolved around, some giant drops for the occasional storms that would go by during Art-A-Whirl weekend in May, and some lightning bolts. The storms were also a great way to clear the frame to get to a new topic.

There was a lot of leaning down and getting up, moving things a little and then pressing the button on the Dragonframe keypad to take a frame. Several times people stayed on the floor so they could be part of the animation. I had some people who stuck around for a while and even took over some of my work in having to explain what was going on to every group that came by.

Sunday was pretty quiet at first. That gave me time to use some masking tape to spell out the word creativity for day 17. Other times there were lots of people. At the end of Friday and Saturdays session I showed some of the videos I filmed the first few years of Art-A-Whirl.

One wall was the projection wall. The screen of my laptop was projected onto that wall and I tried as often as possible to run what existed of the project so far up on the wall so people could see how the thing was working and growing.

A lot of very cool people stopped by and helped me make the movie over those three years. I used my camcorder to try to record a little from each person who participated. I asked them to either share a memory or thought about Art-A-Whirl, to create a sound effect for their section, or at least give me their first name, so I could put them in the end credits. Using the camcorder to record the audio helped me to visually match the person with the section that they contributed to.

Editing the video part was easy - it was just putting down the animation that had been done over the three days without making any corrections to it. The audio mixing took quite a bit more time!

Here's a little Behind the Scenes video, with camera by Beth Peloff.

CAVE 4

Often I'll go to a screening of short films after the sun has set and the sheer number and variety of them, and the fact that after sunset I always seem to be fighting sleep, will completely defy my memory. What did I see and hear, and how do I made sense of it now as that experience is fading into the distance? I like to take notes, but the notes I take in the dark are almost always unreadable when the lights have turned on. But those notes sometimes do help me pull out some moments and impressions, some bits of the experience, that I can attempt to put into readable words after the fact, when the sun is rising.

The fourth CAVE Festival of Cinematic, Audio and Visual Experimentation began at Bryant Lake Bowl on the last day of January 2020. The first program featured Nazli Dinçel of Milwaukee, both films that she made and films she selected that others had made. The program started with her film, "Untitled," which was about film exhibition, a view from the booth with headset jocks running the show insulting the program being presented and everyone around them. It's a trip into the mind of someone hostile to experimental films who is actually the one showing those movies to an audience. 

She partly throws us off by putting her subtitles on the top of the frame rather than the bottom.

The other films of hers also used subtitles, but never leaving them in a sub-postion. Often they are directly on the center, and made by scratching the emulsion off the film or even typing on the film with a typewriter. Sometimes the words on screen don't match the words we hear, but by the time we even realize that, the words and sounds of them are gone and we're left questioning both our eyes and ears. Her last film, "Instructions on How to Make a Film," shows us how to make a movie by growing a garden.

Her camera is often pointed straight down at the ground, or into a mirror that may or may not pull away to show what actually is in front of us. Her program was called "Do Not Look At The Picture," which is the hardest thing to do in a dark room where they only thing you can see is the bright image on the screen. But it was exactly what her movies were saying to us, as well as the others she chose to show.

Joyce Wieland's "Solidarity" showed us a Canadian cookie company strike through the shoes of the strikers. Greta Snyder's "Futility" presented the story of an abortion with happy archive images of people working. And George Landow's "New Improved Institutional Quality: In the Environment of Liquids and Nasals a Parasitic Vowel Sometimes Develops," probably cannot even be explained, but has some of the greatest baffled eyebrow acting to ever grace the screen.

The second program Friday night was all local shorts and there were so many of them, my notes are such indecipherable scratch, I lost the little piece of paper that listed the program, and it was late for me - because of all that I am left to scramble for what was even there, which was backwards muscles on a beach, Goldilocks danced by a forest, a Lynchian dream of orange wigs, Richard Nixon lying opera, the delicious embarrassment of seeing one of my own movies on that screen, a fireworks of young faces, a life told by a circle, a wrestling match between water and forest, and blue bodies splashing black ink out of yellow water while fashion meets the wizard of oz meets prayers of snow angels, and so much more.

On Saturday, I was one of the people who took a cyanotype filmmaking workshop with Margaret Rorison, whose work would be featured in the Saturday night program. Sam Hoolihan and John Marks were also there to guide us. We dipped short strips of film into a chemical that left an iron-based emulsion on the film. We then placed flat or flatish objects on the film such as lace, dryer lint, other pieces of film, plants, clay, pressed it under glass, and then exposed the strips of film to UV light for more than a half hour. The slow exposure time meant that we could place our objects on the film under low light without exposing it.

After the UV exposure, we developed the image in water and then spliced all our short strips together to project a work of white ghosts on blue.

Rorison's program that evening did not feature any cyanotypes, but like the small objects pressed on the film and then blow up to the screen, her films got close, close to the worn brick, manholes, shiny concrete and falling walls of Baltimore, close to her grandmother's hands and face, close to the walls and shadows of Los Angeles. Even her shots of vineyard rows, jets in the sky, and windmills felt intimate.

She also showed us a film made by the radiation released by the Fukishima Nuclear disaster and a family tree made with a real tree, films by Tomonari Nishikawa and Brue Baillie.

She said she likes to walk with her camera and observe. The next day, at the Walker Art Center, she showed us her mother's hands in a piece that she optically printed. She said it was all about her love of the process.

Love of the work and the struggle to make it was the subject of the Sunday panel, which included Rorison, Dinçel, local filmmaker Richard Wiebe, and University of Iowa students Trevon Coleman and Michael Wawzenek, all of whom showed a film, a part of a film, or a work in progress and then talked about they struggle to make work while trying to work to make a living. It was an intimate conversation in the rows of the Walker's Mediatheque while a line of chairs, a microphone and table sat empty in the front as if they were the real audience.

And then, after some food and drinks at the attached cafe, everyone went their ways to keep on doing and exploring in all their faraway places however they might manage to do it.

Powderhorn Park Art Fair 1992

In 1991, a group of Powderhorn Park Neighborhood artists and volunteers organized the first ever Powderhorn Park Art Fair in the big bowl of Powderhorn Park in Minneapolis. The event was a success and they decided to repeat it for a second year. Now, almost 30 years later, it continues.

The first year of the fair, I filmed and edited a 30 minute documentary video about the fair which played on public access TV in Minneapolis. So I decided to film at the second fair.

I shot two hours of video of that fair and maybe I wasn't able to spend as much time at the fair, or maybe I was too busy with other things, but that two hours of video stayed on a tape and I never looked at it or edited it after I shot it. That tape remained unviewed and unedited until last spring, when I digitized it so I could edit it on the computer. I edited the video down to a little over 20 minutes and here is what I made of it.

It was filmed on Hi-8 tape with my Sony TR81. The video was all on one two hour tape, which was close to film. If I were going to edit it in 1992, I would have had to transfer it to SVHS and edit it on an SVHS edit system at MTN, the public access center where I was volunteering, and where by 1993 I would join the staff.

Today I was able to edit it with Adobe Premiere on my computer in my home office. As I write this, John Karrigan, the volunteer delivering flowers at 1:55, has died over the past weekend. His funeral is this coming Saturday. I'm sure a number of people in this video aren't around any more.

CAVE 3 Day 3

CAVE 3's third and final day was yesterday. Kevin Obsatz, our second set of MC eyes, started off the 3 pm program of experimental documentaries saying that the festival itself was experimental, and that some of the work we would see was newly finished, or still in draft form, or might never be finished.

Jonathan Rattner of Nashville put together the program of short experimental documentaries that, like traditional documentaries, walked us to places we might never visit without film, but did so without the confident strut of traditional documentary. Instead, the makers made films that weren't sure if they should be looking or listening or not, and whether and what they should be presenting to the likes of us, people who might not even have any business walking in those other peoples' shoes.

The show began with Robin Starbucks' "The Stag's Mirror," and with Starbuck present as well to introduce the film, which combined super 8 film she shot in Chiapas with the text of an allegory native to the people she was filming. She regularly disturbed her sober observational images with animation that recalled the weave pattern of improperly interlaced video and fragments of images we would see later in the film, and sometimes blotting out the text of the native story by re-writing it upon itself.

Other films in the program used alienating strategies like frames and interruption to complicate their stories of home and looking. Lisa Danker's "Foreclosed Home Movie" used a linoleum print of a welcoming front door to tell a story of real estate boom and bust in Miami. Sometimes we saw just parts of the print skipping by, stamped directly on 16mm film. At the end we saw repeated printings with less and less ink to say goodbye to the house after foreclosure.

Ratter's own "Southern Refuge," which he said he was re-cutting that very morning, looks inside or around the corner of or doesn't quite look into the work of a Nashville resettlement agency for recent immigrants, refugees working to start a new life in Nashville USA. As they tell Rattner and us about the horrible experiences that led them to the US to try a new life, Rattner withholds focus, just barely showing us one person's broken hand, and just barely shows us others through fogged 16mm end rolls. But he also surrenders his camera to the children at the agency, as they mob him and us in extreme close-up, pressing themselves tight to pose and smile and dance their identity with it.

CAVE 3 ended with a 7pm show of work by Sky Hopinka, currently of Cambridge, MA. Hopinka's films took us into and out of the body of this continent, beginning and ending with the two parts of his "Cloudless Blue Egress of Summer," which approaches the land from the sea and then takes us back to the sea at the end. This first and last film takes us on a journey through Castillo de San Marcos in St. Augustine, Florida, a five hundred year old fort built by the Spanish invaders that looks like an instrument of torture when seen from above. Hopinka shares with us the stories and faint pencil drawings of the fort's indigenous prisoners before releasing us back to the horizon line of ocean.

Hopinka's films are all about the horizon. The horizon line, often horizontal but also sometimes vertical, leads us through the texts and places he takes us to. At times he doubles the horizon, with land above and below and sky between, a powerful sandwich of creation that also might feel like the end of time.

In "Jaaji Aprox," Hopinka tries to find and remember and learn and understand a father who might be his father or one of the fathers, but someone distant but also full of light and history. After the film played, Hopinka read in the dark theater an alienated academic essay he wrote to explain the film and then footnoted that with deeply personal recollections of the people and places that those images and sounds came from. Illuminated only by the penlight he used to read, the only real light besides the Exit signs, he held us spellbound as he spoke the supreme DVD commentary track.

Leaving us drowning in the ocean off the coast of Florida, Hopinka waved goodbye and CAVE 3 was completed.

CAVE 3 Day 2

Day two of the third year of CAVE (the Festival of Cinematic and Audio Visual Experimentation) featured the work of two visiting artists at Bryant Lake Bowl brought to us by Cellular Cinema.

The first show was composed of short videos by Anaïs Duplan of Iowa City, Iowa. Duplan introduced himself as someone who came to video through poetry, and the director's credit used in most of Duplan's films was, "A Poem by..." Duplan's spoken poetry was never narrated, but presented as text on-screen. Instead of carefully placing text at the bottom of the screen so as not to challenge the image as is traditional, Duplan boldly smacked text dead center, blocking the image with a black box, challenging the pictures with words.

The combination of text and image in Duplan's work sometimes teetered on the brink of narrative, but never went over to that side completely. Duplan's first film, "Hickory Hill," at times threatened to turn into a spooky forest movie, but instead followed its subjects through the woods with no clear mission. At times Duplan's camera followed its subjects so closely that it almost got tangled in their clothing. "Cocaine Barbara" parallel cut between a murky grocery store and a light filled bedroom and "The Lovers are the Audience Who Watch" put its text in all corners of the screen to challenge found images that made me think about family trauma, truth, and the curse of having to look at that screen right in front of you.

In the second program, Carl Elsaesser of New York City, Maine and elsewhere, set up his computer on the stage and invited us into a tour of his work and concerns. He was a genial and open host, holding a candle in one hand and walking through the theater, standing in the projector light to declare his connection with the images, hunting through his hard drive to find the right file to play to us. I had seen some of Elsaesser's work before at Cellular Cinema and have to admit that I left feeling a little baffled; his unpretentious and playful exposition at CAVE 3 provided deep insight for me into his concerns and methods.

Central to Elsaesser is the notion of Ambience, all the things that go on in the background that we don't ever really notice. He strives to make films about Ambience, and also which are ambient themselves, which means that to him the idea that his film might play in the background and only occasionally be noticed by its audience is fine with him. His ambient subjects included mapping the portions of Maine zoned for strip malls, and exploring methods of file management used by artists.

His "Exercises in Resistance" are one hour gestures meant to be a middle finger to the Current Occupant. In one, he sits beneath a public restroom hot air hand dryer, reaching up to turn it back on every time it goes off. In another, a camera outside his house watches him dance deliriously to unheard music while framed by doorways and windows and the sound of crickets.

In "Exercises in Looking," he frames both himself and what he is looking at side by side, also for an hour. He showed a portion of one where he looks at his lover, covered completely by a blanket and motionless, in bed. He frames the shots to defy standard eye-line match, so Elsaesser appears to be looking at something off-screen, something that isn't the body in bed. The connection and disconnection in those side by side images of looking and object play havoc with our expectations and create both peace and unease. Elsaesser's emphasis on Ambience dares us to look away, or look at the thing that we are trained not to look at, and that forces us to look a little more inside than we might want.

And with that, Elsaesser turned off his shadows and put away his computer to clear the stage for the third and final day of CAVE 3.