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A contemporary animated interpretation of Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights."

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Zim & Zou are Lucie Thomas and Thibault Zimmermann, they are two french artists based in Nancy. They use handcrafted objects to make beautiful colourful installations. They studied graphic design for three years whilst at art school, but their studio works in a variety of multidisciplinary ways incorporating illustration, graphic design and paper sculptures. There favourite material to use is paper, making everything by hand.

To find out more visit their website and Behance.

The art provocateur has transformed a derelict English seaside resort into the " UK’s most disappointing new visitor attraction.”

"Parallel Connection," a piece by Birdo and OSGEMEOS, plays on 45 screens in Times Square nightly.

A homeomorphism, also called a continuous transformation, is an equivalence relation and one-to-one correspondence between points in two geometric figures or topological spaces that is continuous in both directions.

An animated short told on over 70 screens from a 2-inch smart-watch to a 65-inch curved HDTV.

"They say Mexicans have a special fascination with death," writes Christian Bermejo of the Mexican animation website Tweenbox. "We don't believe it but maybe playing around with mapping in the cemetery doesn't help."

Animation is overtaking the streets of downtown Montreal’s entertainment district, the Quartier des Spectacles, and various cities in Scotland in honor of Norman McLaren's centennial.

This sequence—Transe Le Gros—by Julie Faure-Brac was made for “Incantations”, an interactive installation produced in collaboration with dancer Rachid Ouramdane. It premiered in 2009 at “La Nuit Blanche” in Paris. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen an animated piece capture the frenzied fervor of ritualistic practice and the disturbing sense of chaos and comedy that often accompanies such appeals to the divine.

You can see the other parts of Julie’s installation—Transe Le maigre and Transe Le rockeur—as well as how they were all combined together into an installation.

Australia’s coolest boutique design/animation studio Dirty Puppet recently created this unusual rectangle-shaped piece, commissioned by Arts Centre Melbourne under a super tight deadline. Animation director Cameron Gough told me, “It’s designed for the odd format of the new 6 x 1 metre LED screen. Evolution is a tapestry of poetic scenes inspired by the history of the Centre’s new Hamer Hall site”.

Not strictly animation, but Australian filmmaker Dave Jones directed a live show in Sydney the end of last year that combined interactive animated projections with large-scale puppetry. Says Jones,

“The show was performed outdoors on the side of a grain silo and featured a 14-meter tall puppet. It took ten people to operate the puppet whilst animation was used to create an interactive backdrop for the piece as well as to project the puppet’s face. For the mouth we actually mounted a projector inside the puppets head and gaffer taped it to an ipod which we could control wirelessly from the ground 20 meters below.”

It’s pretty cool looking. Here’s a 5 minute edit of the show (performed Oct. 28th 2011 at the Nati Frinj Festival in tiny Natimuk, Australia). There is plenty of behind the scenes and making-of stuff on Jones’ blog.

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I think it’s really exciting when animation breaks the confines of the rectangular screen and shares the physical space around us. MÖBIUS by Melbourne, Australia-based design and public art installation firm ENESS is among the more impressive examples of “environmental animation” that I’ve seen. It’s described by its creators as a “collaborative stop motion sculpture”. Dozens of people were required to animate the 21 triangular structures around Melbourne’s Federation Square over a period of six days. The ‘making of’ vid below gives a sense of the project’s scale.

Credits after the jump:

Commissioned By: FEDERATION SQUARE
Produced By: ENESS
Concept & Design: Benjamin Ducroz
Production: Steven Mieszelewicz, Nimrod Weis, Benjamin Ducroz
Music: John Bartley
Animators:
Nicole Schembri
Shiva Lai
Chris Newbury
Michael Stevenson
Hamish Storrie
Lauren Bezzina
Abby Woods
Lem Ozinger
Vanessa Vanselow
Adam Templeton
Alan Want
Kate Want
Jing Hui Yeo
Casey Kukolja
Erika Siabatto
Ed Bullen
Lucy Clone
Lorna Pettifer
Blythe Mary
Chris Cooper
Mario Krajewski
Edan Weis
Veronica Carrasco
Yochai Glick
Simone Kaplan
Asaf Weis
Yuno Maekawa
Jacob Pinto
Emma Schulman
Bernard Winter
Carla Turco
Huw Millar
Nick Found
Luke Farrugia
Peter Siemienas
Lucinda Aitchison
Sarah Cartledge
Rachel Wilson
Julian DeBono
Monika Batchelor
Sarpreet Dhindsa
Stephen Luke
Pat Dowling
Sarah No
Leath Mattner
Michael Couacaud
Andre & Russel
Elodie
Harry

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Two things stand out about this architectural mapping piece by Paris-based 1024 Architecture which debuted in Lyon, France last year:

1.) The building deformations were audience-controlled via a microphone and an audio analysis algorithm.

2.) Unlike most architectural mapping projects that use abstract imagery, they turned this building into an identifiable character, kind of like a real-life Monster House.

(via BB)

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | 2 comments | Post tags: 1024 Architecture, Architectural Mapping, Mapping, Paris

Public Domaine, a skateboard art and culture show currently on display at Gaite Lyrique in Paris, features an installation of classic board designs brought to life. The animated was created by skate legend Natas Kaupas.

(via Mike Geiger’s Twitter)

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I’ve written fairly often about the contemporary evolution of animation beyond the flat, rectangular, non-interactive screen. Animation will increasingly be integrated into the built environment over the coming years, and new applications of the art form will evolve. One exciting area I hadn’t considered, however, is how animation could be integrated with a natural backdrop. These possibilities are explored in the impressive projection mapping experiment “Lit Trees” by Seoul/London-based Kimchi and Chips which encourages audiences to interact with trees through an animated interface:

Through the use of video projection, a tree is augmented in a non-invasive way, enabling the presentation of volumetric light patterns using itʼs own leaves as voxels (3D pixels). We have developed our own structured light system (called MapTools-SL) which scans the location of every pixel in 3D, allowing a cloud of scattered projector pixels to be used as 3D Voxels.

The tree invites viewers with a choreographed cloud of light that can respond visitors motion. As visitors approach, they can explore the immediate and cryptic nature of this reaction. The tree can form gestures in this way, and can in turn detect the gestures of its visitors. By applying a superficial layer of immediate interaction to the tree, can people better appreciate the long term invisible interaction that they share with it?

The most fascinating by-product of such an idea is that the animation could potentially assist plant growth. It would be cool to get some biologists involved and have them collaborate with animators on developing this further:

Since the colour temperature of light produced by a video projector’s bulb is similar to the surface of the sun (5800K), we suggest that over time, the tree could naturally react to the light that is projected onto it….We listen to the tree’s reaction through the detailed 3D scans of its shape that are produced by the projection system. This type of photosynthesis would also allow for the tree to self-optimise for projection. Leaves which are in shadow from the projection move out to find the projector’s light. Furthermore light wasted inside the tree is absorbed in photosynthesis, which converts local carbon dioxide to oxygen.

More details on the Kimchi and Chips website.

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | One comment | Post tags: Kimchi and Chips, Projection mapping, South Korea, UK

“Rotary Signal Emitter” is a picture-disc LP created by Sculpture, the London based duo of musician Dan Hayhurst and animator Reuben Sutherland. Music AND animation is pressed into both sides of the disc:

Sutherland ‘DJs’ with home-made zoetropic discs, intricate concentric rings of illustrated frames, projecting fragments of looping images at 33, 45 and 78 rpm – pre-Edisonian imaging technology combined with a digital video camera.

The LPs were produced in a limited edition of 300 copies, which can be purchased HERE. I want one bad but it seems like ordering is a tad difficult if you’re in the US. The videos below show the mesmerizing—almost hallucinatory—effect when the audio component matches up with the animation.

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Hands down the coolest thing I’ve seen in the past week—heck, in the past month! Graeme Hawkin, the mad Scottish animation scientist who I profiled last year, continues to expand his experiments with 3-D zoetropes. The evolution of his zoetrope process and the making of this piece is documented extensively on his website Retchy.com so if you have questions, go there first. The hypnotic effect is achieved through a relatively basic concept—projection mapping onto a three-dimensional model rotating on a turntable. It reminds me of some of the performances I saw last year at the Elektra festival in Montreal, where artists created visual experiences that existed in a three-dimensional space instead of straight-ahead on a flat screen.

Here is a video of the turntable zoetrope that Graeme built from balsa wood minus the projection mapping:

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | 4 comments | Post tags: Graeme Hawkins, Projection mapping, Zoetrope

One of the most exciting evolutions within the animation art form in recent years has been its development beyond the traditional screen. Environmental animation and site-specific installations have the potential to occur throughout our natural surroundings and be woven directly into our day-to-day lives. In other words, animation no longer need be restricted to a passive viewing experience or limited to a rectangular screen.

The most restrictive factors at this moment in time are the significant financial outlay and tech-savvy required to set up these kind of spaces, especially permanent ones. Additionally, each space must be designed individually to respond to a specific location. One such new space is the lobby inside of the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. The Rockwell Group installed over 400 displays in the lobby, and the effect looks impressive. Since each set of 3 monitors is an “addressable 1920 x 1080 output” and there are 64 addressable faces, there is a lot of flexibility for artists to create distinctive works, and I hope the hotel commissions animators and filmmakers to experiment with its great setup.

More details from the Rockwell Group:

A kinetic space, centered around 8 giant central columns wrapped with mirrors and LCD screens. Rockwell Group’s LAB installed 384 displays on the columns and 26 behind the registration desk to create a platform for a variety of customized immersive digital experiences in the space.

Watch it in action:

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We posted the centerpiece of this animation back in 2006, but here is an expanded version featuring the pre-show with Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. Boy is this script corny, but the animation is fantastic, full (maybe too full) and at this point, quite nostalgic. The character animation for The Funtastic World of Hanna Barbera ride at Universal Studios Florida was produced at Sullivan Bluth Studios in 1990, and was directed by David Steinberg. The ride ended its run at the Orlando theme park in 2002. Thankfully someone had the foresight to photograph this bootleg video:

(Thanks, Matthew Gaastra)

Dani from the Spanish animation blog Protoones turned me on to Puck Cinema Caravana, a cool little project from Spain conceived by Carles Porta and Toni Tomàs. In short, Carles and Toni got their hands on a trailer home, decorated it beautifully on the outside, outfitted the inside with a cinema, and are roaming the Spanish countryside screening rare animated shorts for young and old alike. There is a more in-depth description on the Puck Cinema Caravana blog:

“Puck is a caravan fitted out as a cinema. Its inside is a tiny cinema, maybe the smallest in the world. There is room for seven people. Puck shows animation films which are not usually broadcast on TV. There is a wide selection of international films from all around the world that have been made throughout time. The menu is varied but selected. It aims mostly to the spirit.

The objective is to capture a brand new lover of animated cinema or simply be able to recover the experience of cinema in a particular way in order to enjoy in a short time a little big piece of work of audiovisual creation.”

They’ve put a lot of care and detail into the presentation and branding of their cinema, from the beautiful paint job on the exterior of their cinema-on-wheels to this cute animated trailer:

Kenny Scharf, one of the first “lowbrow” artists to popularize cartoon culture in ‘fine art’, is back with a new exhibit of Flintstone and Jetsons mash-ups. His new show, Barberadise, opened tonight at the Honor Fraser Gallery on La Cienega Blvd. in Los Angeles.

The show features several “re-appropriations” of cartoon characters created by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, including “the contrasting stone-age family, The Flinstones and the futuristic Jetsons amidst world annihilation”. The exhibition will run through on October 31st. Can’t make it? You can scan 20 pieces in the exhibit online if you click here.

There has been a lot of growth in site-specific animation over the past few years, and artists like Blu and Pablo Valbuena are finding different ways to incorporate the built environment into animation. The video installation “Tetragram for Enlargement,” created by the Italian visual artist collective Apparati Effimeri, is set against a medieval castle, and it’s one of the trippiest marriages of architecture and animation I’ve seen to date.