Rainbow Squared
Watching and waiting for the colors to emerge in real time, I made weekly stop-motion photo animations and corresponding personal essays following the rainbow grid. With a few exceptions, I rarely knew my subject matter ahead of time, instead snapping or arranging it as it came up. This became an unintentional invitation to synchronicity, to be amazed at the surprising ways the colors seemingly showed up in just the right place and time. It is also when my writing became more autobiographical, expanding from short aphorisms to essay-length personal inquiry.
As with the previous years, I both shot and edited the photos from my phone to capture moments as they emerged as well as to manufacture the illusion of freely moving objects and stop-motion paintings. For me, animation is a means of documentation that exposes and embraces its artifice. Video captured at 30 frames per second is all too easy to accept as a representation of “real life,” while the choppy nature of improvised photo animation never pretends to stand in for the actual event. When so many of us have a camera on us at all times, how does being able to “capture” any fleeting moment in your own daily life actually alter it? The addition of the camera to our phones fundamentally mediates our experience of reality and the means by which we document, share, and live it.
Using my phone as a tool is another way to poetically mediate my making: it is a computer I always have at hand so I can leap into production in even the smallest moments of free time. However, compared to a larger computer, animating from my phone requires an elaborate sequence of hacks and workarounds. By documenting and sharing my life through the painstaking labor of organizing frames and phrases from my phone, my participation in the content machine of the Internet is also a process-oriented performance.
See the full interactive grid for Year 4 at arainbowsquared.com/year4.
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