the june fox: Animata experiments: project overview

Collingwood weaving - screenshot
Stop-motion animation / site-specific installation
chainlink, grass, mallows
©2006 Kirsten Bradley

In 2006 I spent a quiet and quietly wonderful year doing part of a Master of Fine Arts at RMIT in Melbourne, within the animation department.

My gondolier for this regenerating year was my supervisor (and old housemate) John Power. We chatted much about the nature of nature, the history of landscape, animation in all its forms and 'the grand view'. JP was (and still is) a bristling collection of references, ideas and enthusiasm, in the loose shape of a scruffy, tall man with an uncanny knack for breakdancing (the poppin' and lockin' bits, anyway).

Over the course of this year I sort of re-generated from a burnt-out new media artist into someone who allowed themselves to work with twigs and bits of string, as well as a computer. It sounds like a little thing, but it was a big thing for me.

This project was also the first one that I kept an ongoing record of the process for, although I bounced between notepad and laptop and found a happy medium somewhere in between.

The outcome of all this research was a series of site-specific animations, and some stop-motion animations, all of which were exploring natural and unnatural motion, circadian rhythms and ways to intersect with the everyday, using animation and found objects.

I was planning to continue this work thru to large-scale site-specific animations, which took place over a year, or a lifetime... In the middle of this momentum, however, I moved to a remote farm for family reasons, and was confronted with the reality of 'the land', rather than the idea of it, or 'the land' in a daytrip format. Moving to the farm changed things, brought the far-away into my everyday, and for some reason, I stopped. But I will come back to this project one day soon.

- process diary for Animata experiments
- photos to do with Animata experiments

- Collingwood weaving - video
- Fire escape weaving - video
- Kitchen centipede - video