I animated a collage

Turns out every year at The Phillips Collection, they have a staff exhibition to show off all the crazy talented artists who work here. Or they did until the pandemic hit, putting the kabosh on most things until recently. This year was the first iteration in a while, running through the winter months. I almost didn’t submit something but I’m really glad I did!

Made up of over 500 hand-drawn frames, Fold is a digital collage of film, animation, paper craft, stolen coffee stirrers, and choreography. A dreamlike self-portrait, the multiplying figures create a sense of unreality, thoughts half-started and running together, spiraling and repeating.

Inspired by the illusion of depth created by fabric folds, crow’s feet, and sunlight through linen, this eclectic collage uses rotoscope animation to move across mediums – from live performance, to film, to photographs, to illustrations, and then back into film. 

About the Work

About a year ago, I was generating raw material for my more typical medium—i.e. dances for film—when I recorded this snippet of choreography. It was completely improvised dancing, done on my cell phone in my living room, wearing nothing more than my house coat. I quite liked these raw materials but I wasn’t sure what to do with them, so they lived unrefined and unused for a year and a half in the cloud while I marinated on them.

To me, these bits of choreography have the recursive, tortuous quality of stream-of-consciousness writing, themes that loop and repeat back on each other over and over with slight variations. Ghosts of repetitions that loop in on each other and degrade. I see movement that is very much my own, comfort movement that come easily to my body, but with the surprises that improvisation brings, interrupting those patterns with gravity and momentum.

At the Phillips, I work as the Multimedia Designer, meaning that I work on digital and print graphic design for our Communications Department. I work across the museum, creating custom artwork as well as using photo and video to capture and portray the work we do. As I was considering what kind of work I could submit to the staff show, I found myself wanting to transmute some of the work I do at the museum. It was at this point that I remembered my festering improvisations. Diving back in the archives, I found this small snippet you see repeated in Fold.

Though at first glance quite minimal in its presentation, Fold contains a number of layers that loop back on each other as the film progresses. The core layer is an animated recreation of this original improvisational dance score using rotoscope, a technique where you draw over each frame and stitch those tracings together. Rotoscope has a number of benefits from an animation perspective; it gives you an extremely life-like quality, easily capturing the subtle shifts of weight and gravity that act upon the human form in motion.

These rotoscoped animations form the bulk of the labor involved in Fold as well. The animation of the dancing alone is made up of over 400 individual frames of illustrations. In rotoscoping, it’s advisable to work quite quickly since each frame represents only a fraction of a second of video. I challenged myself throughout the process to work faster, to etch just a suggestion of gesture. However in each new frame, I found myself getting more and more obsessed with the folds in the fabric of the dancing figure, the way those folds carried and highlighting the meaning of the dancing.

Through happenstance, that day I was wearing a shapeless shift, which means that the specific limbs of the figure are somewhat obscured. Movement can be traced through the distal ends but is mostly implied through the folds in the fabric. Movements originating from the torso are obscured and mysterious. These folds and their humanoid symbolism became the narrative center of the work. I’m reminded of the practice of still life drawing, of figure drawing, that studious practice which teaches the eye to see how 3d space is rendered out of 2.

At first, you see a single figure on a dreamy linen background. This background emerging from the fog is a video itself, a wrinkled linen sheet with the winter sun shining wanly through it from behind. The wrinkles in the fabric are layered with an illustration, tracing their folds.

Throughout the video, wind gently buffets the fabric, but the illustration remains, marking the original position. Very subtly, the background shifts and morphs, creating an unstable footing for the figures of the film. At times, the background seems almost to breathe, inhaling and exhaling, something strange and animal against this lifelike but two-dimensional human form.

The body of the dancer is further complicated by an additional rotoscope layered over top, a mouth, at first idling, pursed slightly with some murky emotion, and then mouthing something—to us the audience? To its own audience of copies?

Shortly after, the second loop begins, the movement we’ve seen once is doubled. The figure performs a duet with itself, displaced in time and space. The movement you have seen already gains new meaning as it intersects with itself. One figure eclipses the other, fills the negatives space between them. Where before, the figure was moving in a void of white space, now the depth of the imaginary space is revealed; as one figure retreats, the other advances. The duet is abruptly interrupted by the next segmentation of the body. A pair of eyes meets yours as you watch. Again, the emotion of the eyes is hard to parse, removed of their context within the face.

The final loop is a riot, the figure now repeated five times right on top of itself, creating a cascade of choreography. Each layer is given a different color. If you so choose, you can zero in on one color, picking out the now-familiar movement from the wave. Or you can let the rainbow of movement wash over you, an amorphous, many-limbed shape emerging from the chaos.

The film ends with a wall of eyes, tightly clustered, bursting into frame suddenly. The background fades, leaving the eyes crisp against the pale lavender of the background. The body’s outlines have been disregarded entirely, leaving only the many eyes of the film and the audience to stare back at each other, through the portal of the screen.

Fold is designed to loop forever—or at least until its iPad battery gives out. If you missed a detail on the first viewing, you’d have may opportunities to watch the short loop, looking for new interpretations. Indeed, the film repeated 24/7 in the galleries at The Phillips Collection for months, whether someone was there to watch it or not. Never tiring and never faltering, the figures of the film diligently cycle in on themselves, creating a meditative ebbing and flowing.

The visuals are accompanied by a gentle soundscore, made up of found sound and very subtle vocal inflections; like the figure on the screen, the voice of the performer is also transmuted and distorted throughout the score. As you approach the work in the gallery the barely-heard susurrus of the score gets louder, drawing you towards it. As you depart, it follows you until it passes just out of hearing.

The final layer of Fold is the frame itself. Mounted in a thrifted black frame, the glass surface of an iPad screen is nested withing fanned, matte-black paper. The folds of the paper have obvious narrative significance but also provide support for the heavy screen. The regimented paper folds are stronger than the material of the paper alone, providing architecture on which the screen can rest.