Verge 360: beyond the frame
Animation Deviation Symposium a Film
Studies Research Group Event, School of Creative Arts,
Bower Ashton Campus, University of the West of England
13 July 2010
Abstract
Co-presented with Stuart Moore
This presentation considers the ‘frame’ and the ‘framing’
within our current collaborative research into the
immersive digital arena (IDA360). Through examination of
two case studies we will demonstrate the ways in which the
interplay between frame, screen, and audience shifts,
depending upon the incarnated specificity of animation,
with particular focus on the IDA360.
Firstly we chart the evolving forms of our project
Verge: from the process of its making to the first
presentation as a looped dual-screen gallery installation;
through a series of iterations for single screen; to its
recent metamorphosis for the IDA360. To make
Verge, found objects collected on a circular walk
are printed directly onto 16mm filmstrips: the fallen
bodies of bees and flies picked from the dirt, and the
vegetation growing up in the stony rubbish along a roadside
verge. The original artwork is frameless: the filmstrips
are ‘framed’ photographically in order to create series of
sequential digital images playable as cycles on a timeline.
Our second case study reviews the practice-as-research
outcomes of Verge, and examines the ways in which
these inform the creation of a new animation we are making
specifically for the IDA360.
To conclude, we suggest that the IDA360 provides an
environment - created by image projection within a 360
degree dome to an ‘unfixed’ audience - that extends
animation’s potential to become an experience ‘beyond
itself’, through the embodied visuality of an expanded
cinema that continually reconfigures its borders beyond the
frames of space and time.