Panel Statement

Panel: Serious Animation: Beyond Art and Entertainment

The paper will be framed within a brief dis­cus­sion of Sys­tems Art, the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of time in art and the place of paint­ing in con­tem­po­rary art. I will briefly de­scribe my per­sonal mak­ing process and how an­i­ma­tion is used to doc­u­ment vi­sual de­ci­sion-mak­ing processes at all the key stages of the de­vel­op­ment of a piece of work. The key stages of my paint­ing process will fol­low, with the as­so­ci­ated form of an­i­ma­tion-doc­u­men­ta­tion em­ployed:

Stage                                                                                    An­i­ma­tion
1. Data col­lec­tion                                                               Stop mo­tion and GPS
2. Prepara­tory stud­ies in colour and com­po­si­tion      Data sam­pling, real-time & pro­ce­dural an­i­-                                                                                                ma­tion
3. Paint­ing de­vel­op­ment                                                  Pro­jected an­i­ma­tion
4. Cap­tur­ing the paint­ing process                                  Stop mo­tion
5. Post paint­ing time-based analy­sis                             Com­pos­ite of an­i­ma­tions from stages 2 & 4

An­i­ma­tion is used to doc­u­ment the sys­tems method­ol­ogy I em­ploy at each stage of the cre­ative process. It al­lows me to cap­ture any de­vi­a­tion from the sys­tem; to map the ran­dom­ness, and chaos. My pri­mary in­ter­est is to doc­u­ment in a time-based way the in­tu­itive de­ci­sion mak­ing processes tak­ing place within a con­trolled en­vi­ron­ment. An­i­ma­tion is an ex­cel­lent method for such doc­u­men­ta­tion. Ul­ti­mately I am in­ter­ested to un­der­stand what this might say about the re­la­tion­ship be­tween in­tu­ition, con­scious and sub-con­scious­ness de­ci­sion-mak­ing in art.

• Paul Good­fel­low is an artist-an­i­ma­tor, and Pro­gramme Leader for the BA (Hons) de­gree in Mo­tion Graph­ics and An­i­ma­tion De­sign, at Northum­bria Uni­ver­sity. He is a prac­tic­ing artist, and has many years ex­pe­ri­ence in an­i­ma­tion, with film and tele­vi­sion cred­its. He began his ca­reer in sci­ence and data vi­su­al­iza­tion and used early 3D com­puter an­i­ma­tion soft­ware to vi­su­al­ize change in com­plex spa­tial and tem­po­ral data. He is cur­rently un­der­tak­ing a prac­tise-based PhD. In Sys­tems based Paint­ing en­ti­tled ‘Map­ping the Lim­its of Sys­tem based Paint­ing’.

Full text (PDF) p. 1004-1010