MOVING THROUGH THE IMAGE: EXPANDED ANIMATION FOR A SHARED PHYSICAL UNDERSTANDING.

Natalie Woolf (Portugal)¹; Carolina Martins (Portugal)²

1 – Universidade Lusófona; 2 – CLP | Universidade de Coimbra

Natalie Woolf
Natalie Woolf graduated from Leeds Metropolitan University (Leeds Beckett University) BA(hons) Fine Arts. After 12 years of studio design practice, she moved to London and completed her PhD in the Design Products at the Royal College of Art, under the research title ‘Plastic: A Material Metaphor’. She then progressed as a developer of smart technologies and a designer of creative solutions for Public Spaces and Urban Design. In the UK she worked as a Public Art Practitioner and Consultant. In 2010 she moved to Lisbon, where she works as a Professor of Drawing in the Animation and Design Courses of Universidade Lusófona and the Curator of drawing for the Design Curriculum. For the last 9 years she has also been engaged in her own art practices at Atelier Concorde developing personal creative projects. Current explorations include collaboration with Carolina Martins for an installation for her PhD thesis, and other visual research concerning drawing and experimental animated film.

Carolina Martins
Carolina Martins holds a degree in Art Studies and a post-graduate degree in Literary and Cultural Studies (University of Coimbra). She currently holds a doctoral scholarship from FCT and is currently a doctoral student in the FCT PhD Programme in Advanced Studies in Materialities of Literature at the School of Arts and Humanities at the University of Coimbra. She is currently writing a thesis on the perspectives of spatiality in graphic narrative installations, which focus on the potential of architectonic spaces as narration agents through an interactional dynamics with other spaces (paper, screen) that contributes for the development and unfolding of the narrative itself. The thesis will have a practice-based chapter for which the installation “VAST/O”, with Natalie Woolf, is being produced. She also collaborates in fields such as contemporary dance and comics and her personal creative views are better expressed through photography work.

Abstract

Taking as a starting point the potential of physical spaces to relate with an animated narrative environment, this presentation will focus on the analysis of an installation that has its basis in both literary and animated theoretical approaches. Thereby, the object/subject has the particularity of being constructed around literary processes that actually need animation to fully express the concept.
Drawing on Bachelard’s notion of vastness (built upon Baudelaire’s work) and his analysis of the sound of the French word, the differences between the open English word “Vast” and the closed Portuguese word “Vasto” lead to an exploration of the creative expression of psychological phenomena such as agoraphobia and claustrophobia and their physiological consequences such as of shortness of breath and vertigo.
“VAST/O” is an installation piece that aims to generate the sensations of paradoxical spatial experiences by combining actual and animated spaces, through static and moving images. The use of animation not only in its traditional channels, but also by means of augmented reality apps for interaction between viewers and spaces, will provide narrative layers that enhance the engagement of the experience.
Therefore, this presentation hopes to contribute to a discussion on the importance of expanded animation as a meaning making tool which allows a shared physical understanding.

Palavras-chave: Phenomenology, Augmented reality, Expanded space, Installation, Interaction