Academic practise 23/02/2011
Lecture by Brigitta Hosea
Context : Animation
Topic : Practise-based research.
This lecture was really helpful to understand what it is to do creative research. I think this is one of the best lectures we’ve had this term, because it was in direct relationship with what we are trying to do for weeks: finding a Context, Audience and Strategy for our subject matter.
In deed, Brigitta has just hand in her PHD on animation as a form of performance. Showing mind maps, notes, and experiments, she demonstrated that creative research was both theoretical and practise-based. She insisted on this part saying, that it was what made Phd in art so interesting, yet controversial, because it breaks out of century-old academic standards. In other words, it is no longer theory vs practise it is a matter of PRAXIS, that is to say putting theory into action.
She untitled her thesis: “Substitutive bodies and constructed actors: a practise-based investigation of animation as performance”, it seemed very evident, but she said it took her a long time to come-up with the right title. In fact, she said that, at the beginning if one was to ask her about her subject matter she would not be able to explain it unless if it was in 20 minutes! Hopefully, the more she worked, the more she could describe clearly and efficiently what she was doing, until she got to the point where she could express it in one sentence (see title above).
Getting lost in your research happens very often, she recommended to make mind maps and little schemes in order to clarify your process. She also advised to look at other practitioners in your field and constantly as for feedback making prototypes and showing it as much as you can in galleries, online, on blogs and benefit from the CSM environment and seminars. What really amazed me about her was the clarity and the faith she had in her subject, and how her little experiments, that didn’t cost much money were so “a-propos” regarding her research question. She wanted to explore three major aspects of contemporary animation: The animator as performer, Animation as a live Event, and the performative viewer.
For the animator as performer, she dressed as a cartoon character and behaved like one, walking around London and cutting books in CSM’s library.
For the animation as a live Event she did a very basic animation inspired by the feminine icons in Hollywood Films. She then used the animation as part of a “frenetic” performance. And finally for the performative viewer, she made people interact with an animated figure, having conversations with it. All this experiments showed that animation was more of a concept than a media, that it should be regarded as a collaborative performance, allowed by code, and only code.
All along her research-practise she collaborated with a group of Drawing PHD to create drawing performance. This really caught my attention, as drawing is my practise. I found this approach of contemporary drawing fascinating, because, it is no longer a medium it is also a dance, a communication, a performance and animation, she called it “telematics drawing”. In a nutshell, you don’t need to use software, machines, and have a whole lot of people working to do an animation, it just takes a few mad people, a few mad ideas a white wall and a pencil.
Chloe Belloin
MACD
A few websites she gave worth consulting:
www.birgittahosea.co.uk
http://upstage.org.nz:8084/stages/smiths
http://drawingtogether.wordpress.com
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