In The Days of Shilling and Halfpenny [Exhibition Show]

In the Days of Shilling and Halfpenny is a group exhibition in Leed's Holy Trinity church and curated by Blank Canvas, a collective group of emerging arts from Leeds met.

"In the days of Shilling and Halfpenny brings together a group of emerging Artists working across a vast range of both subject and mediums. Audiences are invited to explore the depth that art has to offer through the works of emerging and established artists alike. From the imposing morphing face animation of one artist to the thoughtful application of paint by others. Housed in the historic Holy Trinity Church, Blank Canvas hope that this exhibition will offer the public a varied understanding of the variety of art Leeds has on offer." - Blank Canvas

My contribution to the show is a wide projection aimed at the ceiling of the church of an animation of my 3D model head rotating around. The position of the composition is perfectly in-lined with the curve at the end of the ceiling and the columns, and the architecture acts as a frame, sort of like a face in a picture or a mirror. The result of this work was very ominous as this head is observing, smiling and smirking down at the viewing public.

There a sense of isolation in the work as this piece dominates in its own space, an empty void. The eyes are not textured and leave a bright white light creating a very intimidating stare, not knowing what this object feels and leaves a sign of its true aesthetic. I do think though that this would of worked better if l had the glitched videos to wrap around the object and the animation was slower, at around 3 frames-per-second. It would of in my mind, make the piece a whole lot more eerie.

Pictures taken by photographer Paul Dishman.

You can see more pictures of the exhibition at his blog: http://photographybypauldishman.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/in-days-of-shilling-and-halfpenny.html

3D Animation

To create and envisage my collages into 3D space, l approached 3D modelling. The program l used to achieve this is a program called "Blender", Blender is a free software tool for 3D modelling and you can download and install it from website at: www.blender.org

I have no prior experience with 3D modelling when l started this but their is allot of helpful tutorials online to get you acquainted with the user-face and terminology. My aim with this medium is to model a representation of my face and create a metamorphosis animation, where my face is changing into the faces of my proxies. This is to reflect on how we consciously choose which aspect of our selves we play and the constant play of surfaces and signs of our identity. It is where the core self remains buried and anonymous through out but with the rising popularity of public information and web user authorization, it is likely that the true-self is exposed bare and we are no longer in the Rheingold days of being hidden in the Net.

Here is a test of the animation:

Glitched Videos

Expanding on the collages, l created a composition of the images through After Effects, to display these surfaces moving and adjusting in real time and the result of this process was for the videos to be a skin to wrap around the 3D model, but the result of them was too clean their had to be something to break up the smoothness but still maintain a fluid motion. The solution for this was to glitch the videos, with this medium of de-constructing code it seems reasonable to work with that aesthetic as many artists (espically the Net.Art movement) who express similar interests, use that device/software as a manifestation of their practice.

The glitches that l caused in these videos are all made from Hex Editors and hacking the video codec's source code with a Ubuntu operating system.