I visited the William Kentridge Exhibition Thick Time at the Whitechapel Gallery. I was interested in the process of animation, how individual images are linked together to make what appear to be moving images.
This is an animation where a drawing of Kentridge appears to be drawing a picture of himself but then defaces and destroys it. The Kentridge that is drawing appears to slowly emerge from the paper as the ‘real’ Kentridge and starts to reassemble the torn drawing back to its original state.
Kentridge plays with the audience’s expectation as he transforms the images from animation to the real thing. It is disorientating in that it blurs the boundaries between what is real and what is animated so that the viewer questions what they are looking at.
Mona Hatoum talked about wanting “to create a situation where reality itself becomes a questionable point” (p.24, 2001) and what we see not being what it promises to be and how she wanted to create work which makes the viewer “question the solidity of the ground you walk on” (p.24, 2001).
How do we know what is real and what is not? How do we know that what we create is real or not real?
It made me think about the question of the creator also as the destroyer, the constant cycle of creation and destruction.
This exhibition inspired me to take some inanimate shapes made from paper and see if I could bring them to life. I took several stills and then edited them together to make a moving animation. It was interesting playing around with the amount of time needed to focus on each still to create the illusion of movement, too long and the images didn’t come to life.
It was as if the correct amount of time had the ability to give the inanimate object its own life.
I made three short videos which can be viewed at Vimeo.com:
Rolling Eyes https://vimeo.com/207165916
Gingerbread Man https://vimeo.com/207165833
Drawing https://vimeo.com/207165734
Reflecting on the videos I had made, I thought about how movement could bring inanimate objects to life but it didn’t necessarily mean that something was alive. It also made me think about Freud and his description of the uncanny which can arise from the contrasting readings of the animate and the inanimate and Masahiro Mori’s concept of the Uncanny Valley.
I found creating animations raised more questions about what makes something real. We tend to say something is alive if it has an awareness of itself or is conscious but how can this be measured? If we don’t truly understand what consciousness is, how can we be sure when and where it exists?
