Urban Terrarium is a new media installation project from Allison Moore. It is a part of a Research & Creation Grant funded by the
Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec [CALQ] 2011.
Urban Terrarium
+ Video-assemblage and animation
+ Urban landscapes and ant farms
The project is to create animations for a panoramic video installation. The animations will combine illustrations, and cut-out textures from photo-imagery. These elements will all be composited together in Adobe After Effects to create a widescreen videoscape, split onto LCD screens.
It is my hope to combine several animation techniques, composited in Blender and After Effects to create one seamless animated landscape. LCD screens will be placed in a horizontal line on a wall. A fictional video urban landscape stretches across all screens, seamlessly connected as one. The landscape contains many details of city life, people, cars, city life all animated in subtle ways. The direction of my work is playful. The treatment of the colorful images will be saturated by symbolism and surrealism. My work is very research orientated, both socially and politically conscience. My main concern is to include a level of absurdity, humor and surrealism. The directive is in alternative storytelling, and cultural observation. My experience in drawing and video art combine to make a hybrid collaborative piece blending digital techniques with traditional practices.
I like to cut things from their regular habitat and rearrange them in new spaces. Either to enhance the meaning they already represent, or create a new representation. With video and any photo medium, there is the ability to fool, and be fooled.
My animated characters will move in and out of repetitive motions, looping infinitely in mundane tasks. The effect is like a virtual video terrarium, an ant farm. The video screens read like a painting, revealing on careful examination many individual movements orchestrated over time. Elements such as the sky could shift color over time. Clouds drift by from screen to screen.
My animated worlds are mostly imaginary but also representative of places I visit, from the photos I collect, current events and places popularized by the media. I would also like to explore using live actors filmed on green screen that could be composited into the set, mixed with the drawn animated characters. Using real textures from photographs, mixed with illustrations of my characters to make up the environment. My portrayal of the urban landscape will reflect the contradicting beauty and horror and human infrastructure.
In 2009, I completed a residency in Belem, Brazil as part of the CALQ Quebec studio exchange, where I developed my work in print-media and video. The vibrant Amazon culture inspired new thematic direction to my work. Although a large metropolis centre of 2 million people, the city of Belem is enveloped by jungle plants, as the rainforest creeps through every crevice and crack, thriving vines engulf buildings, plants push out of the sidewalk, and giant palms grow at the top of sky rises. Street vendors collect mangoes from the city trees, to sell roadside. My experiences in Brazil will surely influence the landscape I construct in this project. I am eager to make new works influenced from my experiences and stories I collected in the Amazon.
THANK YOU FOR VISITING!
allison moore [2011] www.looper.ca
