By talking about the physics of nature, sometimes we do not just copy the world. A lot of anmiated motion has artistic treatment. The common squash and stretch technique in animation is one of the examples. The back-swing or follow-through movement in common sport games is often exaggerated. By observing the body movements in mime, break dance, for example, we can notice that those movements are not natural. They have been treated with artiistic choreography which make them elegant, powerful, etc. In these cases, we may introduce artistic factors into the pure force/acceleration based motion.
Mime is one of the greatest art forms that can create illusion with minimal settings. I remember in the performance of Marcel Marceau, not only the illusion of physical properties are displayed at ease, complicated emotions and narratives can reveal in front of the audience by using just a pair of hands in gloves.
Image from un.org.
It is one of the key challenges to create emotions by motion. If we can achieve the illusion of physical properties like weight, texture, elasticity, can we just by using the locus of movement of an object to denote subjective properties like emotion and personality? How do you create the movement of a square which is shy in response to outside stimuli?
Image from MIT Press.
This tiny book, Vehicles – Experiments in Synthetic Psychology, by Valentino Braitenbery is often quoted in algorithmic and generative art creations. Each of the experimental vehicle in the book is done by quite simple rules that control the movement of two motors through manipulation of two or more input sensors. By observing the behaviours outside of the vehicle implementations, we can experience abstract terms like fear, aggression, love, logic, etc.
to be continued …
I can relate very much the work “Recyclying cinema” to the idea of “emotion created by motion” and psychology generated from car behaviour. I can still see why this discourse will not be too late if not out date to art making in Hong Kong. Very often in new media art practics, we look at the relation of art and technology, but in a tradition of humanist, we must also learn well how acquired/ artifical / generated media work is related to human cognitive, emotional psychology.. .sometime by pressing the right button, the right adrenalin, hormone, enezymes will be released and that is making this work unforgetable and sometimes addictive too,e.g. when we look at game or tear jerk movie. And this is a way how we change ourselves from gadget geek to a visionary artist.
Those techniques have been around for ages in animation, abstract film, net art, etc. They become some of the buidling blocks among others to evolve into more complicated works.
Quite often the art and technology relation in media art in Hong Kong is pretty much an institutional matter. I would prefer a more holistic treatment on it. Explaining the ‘click’ is one of the key challenges in education. Cognitive science, neural science and sometimes folk psychology can be the starting points. In addition, we may often resort to investigation in a broader sense related to the social and political context.