Graham Milton

I went to the AIM graduation screenings, tonight.

There were some crap animations, some funny, and one really beautiful b/w piece, i think it was called The Astronomer (i HAVE to meet the woman who made it)

Afterwards, a friend and I started thinking that it might be funny if there was a short animation about cartoon characters who are having problems with their illustrations / animations ways….

Here’s a partially formed idea for you, lets see how much we lose in its translation from my mind, to this blog, to your mind:

To communicate with an audience through art, we take our ideas, and translate them with a visual language of icons and metaphors etc through whatever medium we prefer. The viewer will then (hopefully) understand the artist’s message by ‘decoding’ the visual language employed, and the context in which they were used. Here we see that a successful, but certainly not always lossless, transaction of thought has taken place through a creative act.

The success of the creative act is dependant on the translation of the artist’s concious thoughts into a tangible entity.

So, if our conciousness is nothing more than an elaborate series of electrical connections over time, and digital art is also an elaborate series of electrical connections, communicated to a viewer over time, it may be logical to suppose that:

Through digital technology, we can hypothetically create a ‘perfect artwork’, with lossless cognitive translation between artist and audience

IDEA: An infinitely looping video of an artist, existing.

PREMISE: Time shall always pass, but in his creative statement of existence, an artist shall remain forever, untouched outside ide of time.

DETAILS: 2 digital photographs taken per minute, for the duration of 24 hours of a motionless being, sitting in a motionless world, spinning through space endlessly.

The photographs will be compiled as a time-lapse video on an infinitely repeating DVD, creating the image of an artist freed from the constraints of time.

Composition should be an expansive outdoor area, prefferably with long fields of grass, larges trees to the side, and a still body of water in the distance (to better show the changes in colour throughout the day, and to allow shadows cast by clouds to run across the ground, etc.) With this in mind, a public park should be ideal.

2 shots * 60 minutes * 24 hours = 2880 stills
2880 stills / 2 minutes / 60 seconds = 24 frames per second (for two minutes)

Perhaps its because I feel guilty whenever I feel lazy, or perhaps because of a new project I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while:

Whenever I find myself with nothing to do, I can’t shake the image in my mind of the Earth and I, slowly spinning aimlessly through a pitch black: