Site Specific, Interactive Animation

Over COVID, I developed the concept of “site specific animation” when I really wanted to make augmented reality (AR) artworks, but knew nothing about software and felt my priority was immediately responding to the times. Using low tech computer skills, I discovered I could overlay digitized hand-drawn animation on top of still photos of a site. In this way, I was able custom design animated works for a certain viewing location and create animation that behaved like it physically interacted with the conditions of the site IRL.

In May 2020, I was invited to exhibit a “socially-distanced” solo show at an artist-run space in Lincoln Heights, Los Angeles. Interested in developing a project that could be experienced from a parked car across the street, I wanted to play with a multi-screen design that collapsed the space between near and far, large and small. I naturally thought of the “head crusher” character from Comedy Central’s “Kids in the Hall.”

I placed a giant QR code next to the gallery window so that a phone scanning it from a parked car across the street would be in perfect position to receive the illusion of a sheltering in place figure leaping out of the gallery window and into the viewer’s cell phone. Once free of the barred window cage, the figure was able to hug her baby nephews in a GIF that played in the viewer’s phone.

Another project of this kind was for an artist-run art fair in August 2020. I designed my animations to break outside of the rectangular phone or movie screen. These animations wove around the architecture of their installation sites, in a ratio of cartoon to real life imagery similar to the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). I geographically dispersed laminated QR codes in and around local businesses who gave me their permission. Viewers could find and experience these artworks, using a hyperlinked map I created online, much like a scavenger hunt, Pokémon Go, or geocaching.

That same year, I received a grant to create a large-scale, interactive public artwork at the Central Library in Glendale, CA, for exhibit in 2021. This time, I put the QR codes linked to animated phone GIFs in the video projection itself. Now viewers’ cell phones weren’t just in the correct position, but also carefully timed to receive the illusion of a multiscreen experience collapsing distance. These fleeting QR codes at the edges of the massive projection screen had the unexpected effect of keeping viewers on their toes, sprinting from one end of the parking lot to the other to catch each “Easter egg” before it disappeared for ten minutes.

The lamppost bisecting the view of the windows could not be turned off for legal and safety reasons, so I incorporated it into the stories of my ten chapter animation: It became a clown nose between two blinking eyes of a bucolic gaze, a flame that popped a bubble, the center of an explosion, or the sun at the center of the universe in “So you think the world evolves around you?,” for example.

Lastly in 2022, I was invited to create a temporary outdoor sculpture for a solo show at an artist-run space in Long Beach, CA. The QR code that I placed in the physical sculpture led to an animation which ended with another QR code. Subsequent “nested” animations could be discovered when two or more viewer’s got together to collaborate; scanning each other’s cell phones at the conclusion of each GIF to unlock the full artwork.