In the Still of Night - art show snapshots

On the left is my invitation of the show. The show ran from 25th to the 28th of March in the Front Gallery of East Campus Hall. This show was dedicated to Storm, who crossed over 4th March, 2002. I had an informal opening on the evening of the first day, where I discovered "a bug". What the ferret does during each cycle of the moon is supposed to be random, but I had exported the movie to a newer format, which made one random sequence and repeated it endlessly. Since the ferret is supposed to catch the moon randomly, and I had programmed the randomness so that it will happen at least once every 15 minutes, I got a bit suspicious after a couple of friends waited for half an hour and nothing happened. The funny thing is most people didn't notice the cycles weren't random. I forced it to happen for a couple of times for the opening and fix it for the rest of the show. I feel badly about the bug, but it is kind of amusing... I guess I can't get away from my CS roots :).

Survey

Josée Lajoie had a survey for people to fill out to help her in her research on Slow Animation. One of the things she was interested in was wheither people will view them as animations or paintings, and why. Here are some of the results of her survey, taken from her master's thesis:

• 43% - believed that the terms painting and animation describes the work equally well.
• 35% - preferred the term animation
• 22% - preferred the term painting

Some of the comments (when asked if the term animated paintings is a good description of the work) indicated that some people weren't satisfied with either description:

I would have called it mixed 'media' painting. In considering it a painting I see the animation as another new form of image making in painting, like using mixed media - and transient in the same respect as a mixed media painting incorporating perishable material that changes over time.

People who preferred the term painting or agreed with both believes that the colours, surface texture, and light and shadows contribute most to making the work paintings. Not surprisingly, the top reason for preferring the term animation for everybody is motion :). About sixty people filled in her survey.

Gallery setup

Here's what the setup looks like under normal room light. Unfortunately, I was not able to hide the projector and computer fully from the viewers. The paintings are hung on a backdrop of gray fabric to hide edges created by the black level of the projector. The installation itself took up a little less than half of the gallery.

I also had a small tv running the 14 minute process video I created to accompany the piece. Twelve pieces of gray fabric with ferret shapes dyed on them were scattered on the walls to fill up the rest of the gallery space. A couple of these pieces have been sold with proceeds going to the Ferret Aid Society. One of them was given to Steve.

Here's a shot of the installation with the roomlights on. You can see both the paintings and animations at the same time, which is kind of neat :).

Here's a shot of the installation as you would see it when you walk in the room.

For a small student show, I think I had quite a few visitors. When I was packing up things on the last day, a couple of people dropped by dragging their friends/family to show them the work. I also had over eighty people sign my guest book, which was nice. I guess I'm pretty happy with it, and happy it is over, since there was no security in the building, I had to lug the computer and projector and set them up each day!

Aftermath

Hopefully this is not my last art show.

After the show, Bill and I took the technical ideas from this piece and created a poster, which I presented at Graphics Interface 2002. Currently we are working on a couple of papers for submission.

Acknowledgements

While all the work was done by just me, it wouldn't turn out the way it did without a lot of people, especially the following:

• Art, who had so many crazy suggestions that I almost suspect him of trying to work me to death.
• Bill, who helped me with my colour stuff and is now unofficially my backup-thesis supervisor.
• Don, who made the very last suggestion that was incorporated into the project, and promised to make no more after that.
• Josée, who was always happy to give me comments, and provided me with extra feedback by having a survey.
• Steve, who let me work on this when I was supposed to be working on my thesis.