Canvas Art, Animation and Illustration

Active since the early 80s, the Creemore, Ontario-based couple FASTWORMS (Dai Skuse and Kim Kozzi) have evolved an art/life cosmology that unites every creature, scrap of cultural detritus and social scene into one harmonious and hedonistic union. The arena for their aesthetic alchemy is subcultural style–working class, youth, stoner, witch, goth, queer, cat-fancier, pirate, country, anarchist, all filtered through pop mediation, camp adoration/irony and an amateur’s loving hand–and their methods are collaboration, craft, collecting, movies and manifestos. They have carved out their own burrow in the Toronto art ecology: home-spun and tactile unlike meta-media barons General Idea, cryptic and mystical unlike fellow maximalist Allyson Mitchell, and raffish and cute unlike the Dionysian John Scott. Art is not merely their life but their religion–and their apostles are everywhere. The WURMS’ breed of casual socializing-cum-performance has been a vital part of their practice from the beginning, making them not only pioneers of what is now typically called ‘relational aesthetics,’ but also catalysts in the dynamic Toronto art community as well. (As different as their styles may be, it’s hard to imagine artists like “service-oriented” collective Instant Coffee or even the prodigious Luis Jacob without the WORMS.) They have arguably served as a model for Dave Hickey’s view of art as a “mode of social discourse, a participatory republic, an accumulation of small, fragile social occasions that provide the binding agent of fugitive communities” in a scene that has changed dramatically during their three decades of production. Delighting in culture surfing and social scenic crossover, the duo mash up all manner of subcultural signifiers into a creolized, impure utopia.

The WURMS’ ethical system–which brings together the most radical and compelling elements of witch and queer cultures, or essentially, “do what you will, harm unto none”–is an animistic rejoinder to the restrictions of civilization with our humans-only burdens of guilt, shame and self-doubt. As media theorist Sean Cubitt states in his essay “Drawing Animals” (2005), “human desire is founded on loss and lack, while animal instinct is presumably ordered by presence and fullness, since it is never mediated by those prohibitions that shape humanity” Into id more than super-ego, their copious videotaping, photographing, mark-making, crafting and scavenging of objects–not to mention the excess of their display strategies–adds up to a radical art practice based on desire and pleasure. They have called into being a sprawling menagerie of plants and animals–cats, frogs, owls, bats, vultures, spiders, snakes and more–united in one voracious, polymorphously perverse supernatural clusterfuck.

In Jim Trainor’s animated film, The Moschops (2000), one of the two narrators is a female “moschop,’ a mammal-like reptile that lumbered about the earth over 250 million years ago. As is characteristic of Trainor’s unsettling anthropomorphism, she bears the weight of a soulful, articulate self-consciousness that usually only humans carry. Atone point she dryly intones, “We didn’t love each other exactly, but we all slept together in one big stupid pile.” Through accumulating nearly a decade’s worth of architectures, objects, drawings/ paintings and videos into one such “big stupid pile” at the dynamic duo’s recent survey exhibition DONKY@NINJA@WIWCH at the Art Gallery of York University (which then travelled to the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver), the artists’ similarly perverse worldview was bountifully on display.

FASTWURMS filled the long and narrow exhibition space with an overwhelming accumulation of, well, stuff. Considering how shiny and new the space still appears, two years into the AGYU’s occupation of it, the pair faced an enormous challenge in dressing it up in their fiber-accessible shabby chic, but they succeeded through sheer excess and reams of charm. Through the copious use of that old do-it-yourselfer’s standby, pegboard, they managed to transform the somewhat sterile and pristine gallery into a row of pseudo-flea market stalls that called to mind–and mocked–the booths familiar from the international circuit of art fairs. Their crafty aesthetic and practice, based on hoarding, respects no distinctions between round versus handmade or trash versus treasure in its relentless amassing of objects–talismans not tchotchkes–and their attendant pleasures. The pair’s imagery is viral: an object, symbol, figure or animal–horseshoe, pentacle, ghost or mouse–may first appear, say, on a denim patch but soon finds itself on a poster or a flag, painted on the wall or sculpted out of string (a practice called symmography), such as the monumental, grotesque bat crafted specially for the AGYU. By multiplying their elements, each FASTWURMS stall at the AGYU remixed and expanded projects from the past eight years that took place in various spaces on Queen Street West in Toronto, many of these installations-cum-rituals overseen by the strip’s grande doyenne, the gallerist and artist Andrew Harwood. (Both of these descriptors fall short, some how: “installation” sounds too formal, as they are more like the residual mise-en-scenes of crafting, socializing, play and performance; “ritual,’ meanwhile, comes off far too rigorous for the joyful libertinage of their projects.) It should be noted that the artists camped out in the AGYU in tents during the protracted month-long residency/ installation of their collection. Living space and exhibition space became muddled much like it does throughout their artistic process, with craft work at home happening in front of the TV when they are not editing videos, writing polemics, teaching at the University of Guelph or caretaking their homestead and their feline buddies.

Activating the spaces they create through a combination of socializing and performance is a key component of the FASTWURMS’ approach. At the AGYU, two projects in particular testify to the important role played by Harwood and his Zsa Zsa Gallery (1998-2005) in the FASTWURMS’ practice. House of Bangs (1999), is a hair salon of your wildest dreams, with walls covered in an assortment of wigs and implements both for hair styling–driers, curlers, blades–and seamier purposes (such as a big blue glass corncob virtually begging to be inserted into a hungry orifice). Hair clippings from the exhibition’s opening night collected on the floor are all that remain of the TLC doled out to an appreciative public by hairdressers FASTWURMS and Harwood. Blood and Swash (2002), meanwhile, is a shrine to denim and drawing, to the art brut of bored high school students doodling on their blue jeans with Bics. A tattoo parlour for dilettantes and dabblers who don’t want to commit to anything permanent–unlike the braver convicts, sailors, bikers, metalheads and punks whom the space invokes–Blood and Swash was like a clubhouse for worshipping the transformative potential of the pen and marker with Harwood, the WURMS and other friends playing badasses and inscribing the temporary tats on all takers during the show’s opening night.

Projects such as these can be seen as allegories of the role of the artist in post-everything culture; there is an eschewal of aesthetic authority and mastery in favour of the devising of stimulants for social exchange. Thus, artists become tradespeople and craftspeople, embracing nonelitist and collaborative creative forms (craft, specifically textiles, has a particularly prominent place in Toronto’s scene). They also bring to their work a very casual and mundane approach to materials that resists any lingering post-Nauman mystique around the artist’s studio and the mythic, hard-won labours that emerge from it fully formed into the light of day. “Artist” is instead seen as a role to be self-consciously performed. The WURMS playfully enact the artist as bohemian, as arbiter of cool, as party animal, as shape-shifting magician, as mediator between dangerous and exotic subcultures and a culture-hungry educated elite. They fulfil out desires for transgression with the bravado of an adolescent poseur’s game of dress-up, wielding the universal language of style and the emblems of a cult we all want to belong to.

The projects the artists undertook at Zsa Zsa were provisional, limited by what could fit into a car, and, because they took place in the summers–when the FASTWURMS have time off from their shared professorship–outside the commercial art calendar cycle, they avoided the pressure of having to make sales. Attesting to Zsa Zsa’s openness and its status as an interactive, semi-public space, its bite-size floor plan blending with the street life outside, the hair salon and the tattoo parlour were service-oriented projects where enthusiasm trumped expertise and everyone who walked in–artists, queers, mental health patients and neighbourhood residents–could depart transformed, not only by their new ‘do and Sharpie tattoo, but by the class-mixing, queer-inflected sociability encountered within.

In a 2004 article in C Magazine that was originally written for the 47th Venice Biennial, “Show’s Over Folks, More Along: The Institutionalization of Art and the Secret Life of the Underground” curator Philip Monk discussed how what were once considered transgressive subcultural expressions are now completely integrated into the mainstream entertainment industry and thus rendered banal, leaving art desperately searching for new margins: the “show really and truly is over.” (1) He suggests that “the ‘underground’ today is a “representation” and that the idea of an underground became the subject of the generation that came of age after the 60s, who began to make work in the 80s (as the FASTWURMS did): “Can an image alone sustain some reference to the underground without being its actual documentation? Are reprising roles enough to keep a dialogue with the idea of the underground at least intermittent?” These are the images and performances that compel young people to become artists and join art scenes. With the AGYU exhibition, the FASTWURMS were a perfect case study for Monk’s concerns. They employ forms of sociality and marginality that Monk associates with the suburbs and their denizens’ distance from and desire for the underground and its pleasures, for which art is a “compensation.” Like Larry Clark, for example, but with greater irony, FASTWURMS remake and re-embody the underground from a geographical and temporal distance through performing its roles and rituals. They do this not from an American suburb, but from the relatively provincial position of Toronto in relation to New York. Riffs on self-fashioning are endlessly replayed in their work, promiscuously cobbling together subcultural identities from bits and pieces of whatever is around. This form of stylistic self-creation as collage has deep roots in the FASTWURMS’ Ottawa punk youth, while Monk’s curation explicitly aligned the duo’s witch identities with the queerness of the West Queen West scene.

Some call this practice “queer world-making” and one could draw provocative parallels to the demonic invocations of avant-garde wunderkind and Crowleyan occultist Kenneth Anger, who similarly patched together a huge range of styles and scenes–from sparkly Hollywood glamour-pusses to depraved bikers–in his indelible films. In conversation, FASTWURMS point out that the definition of the word “occult” is something hidden, and their work uncovers the buried codes that make styles legible. In their videos, which have become prominent pieces of their installations, pop culture found-footage is juxtaposed with performance, thus casting every visual artifact as a kind of artifice or drag that anyone can accomplish simply by roping in one’s friends and improvising some costumes.

The animal is also central to the FASTWURMS’ oeuvre. The way we look at and represent animals cuts to the heart of our unspoken collective anxieties about the limits of the human. When I mentioned how little academic attention the phenomenon of animal cuteness receives and the oftentimes physical, gut reaction felt in the face of cuteness, Skuse dubbed the feeling a “heart orgasm” and slyly pointed out that this visceral response is precisely what many find lacking in contemporary art, a cool detachment that some blame for art’s inability to attract a lay audience. It is no surprise that animal imagery is so omnipresent in visual culture, considering how its pleasures are so instinctive and affective, or, as some see it, generic, easy, even Pavlovian. But for the FASTWURMS, cute animals are never the paradigm of pitiable innocence, fuzzy vulnerability and disempowered objectification that cultural critic Daniel Harris suggests they are in his book Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic (2001), but in a very real way they are treated as equals–within the heart orgasm can lie the most intense expression of empathy. Opening up their cosmology beyond the human widens the FASTWURMS’ sphere of community to all creatures. Jumping off from Commoner’s first law of ecology, that everything is connected to everything else, Cubitt proposes that drawing animals as the FASTWURMS consistently do becomes the “conduit” for “trans-species identification” In their artists’ statement, “Witch Nation: Directive from the Ministry of Information,” they declare that “in the Witch world, the ‘other’ is understood to include all peoples, animals, plants, the vast web of life, the universe.”

A “web of life” in microcosm, Gusset Nation (2004) is an ode to pussy power and pussy play–both feline and vaginal. Giant spider webs built from geometrically organized panties span the room (crotchitecture?) intertwined with colourful yarn to form a pet pussy’s wet dream. On a video monitor near a catnip crafting station, Pussy Necropolis (2004), one of the duo’s most downright entertaining tapes, plays on a loop. It is a rousing collage of post-mauling Siegfried and Roy headlines and clips, B-movie ancient Egyptian cat myths, cartoons and footage of their wickedly cute quartet of identical, yawning kittens in their own roiling, “big stupid pile” of striped ginger fur (all to the strains of AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap”). Animals are frequent stars in other FASTWURMS videos as well; one is unlikely to forget the vultures in their mesmerizing Red of Tooth and Kaw (2001), for example. Untrained animals rarely do what they’re told when the camera is on, permitting us to witness creatures simply being themselves, free of the burden of serving as our metaphors: at the end of Pussy Necropolis, a cat proudly tosses a delicious rodent at the cameraperson’s feet, while an enthusiastically leg-humping dog steals an already slapdash scene of rowdy pirate play in the video for the installation Pirate Head (2004). Meanwhile, trans-species communication is satirized in their short video Telepatbacats (2003). Here the FASTWURMS’ convoluted, incantatory language of hand gestures attempting to manipulate a couple of cats in the snow is juxtaposed with a scientist engaged in very similar “magic” to control the operation of a dauntingly high-tech piece of machinery. Here, science and the supernatural collide, and neither offers a satisfying prescription for dominating the Other, whether animal or mechanical.

DONKY@NINJA@WITCH served to underscore the radical uniqueness of the FASTWURMS’ practice–perhaps paradoxical, considering its relentless game of cultural call and response, and its staging of the artist as go-between for seemingly disparate subcultures and species. Their lusty, righteous, all-encompassing belief system has included and influenced many other artists in Toronto, animating much of what is most exciting about art in this city. In fact, their soaring Woodpecker Column (1997) with its two bird-priests situated near the Skydome stands guard over–and at night, illuminates–Hogtown’s pagans, queers and other artists not far from that other tower (the straight one): a bent signpost for a whole metropolis’ carnal and creaturely urges.

A Multimedia Bargain?

Animation is the illusion of motion. Animation makes exploded diagrams explode, procedures proceed, and working models work — all in front of the user’s eyes. And, in the world of multimedia, animation is a bargain. On the “bang-for-the-Buck-Mark-or-Yen” scale, animation is right up there with video for effectiveness but at half the cost or less. It’s definitely worth looking into.

Use Animation for What it Does Well

No medium is a bargain unless it is used effectively. Use animation for what it does well. Use it to convey change, movement, and progress. Use animation to

* Show things that move and change. Use animation to

explain a complex me chanical device with many

moving parts, such as a laser printer.

* Analyze processes. Use animation to reveal repeated

patterns of action, bottlenecks, and the relative speed

of processes, by giving viewers a new frame of

reference.

* Explain abstract concepts. Animation may be the

only way to show ideas and abstractions present only

in the mind.

* Improve comprehension. One study showed that for

improving the comprehension of business

presentations, animation (without transitions)

outperformed text, static graphics, transitions, and

their combination (3M Meeting Management Institute

1992).

* Increase interest. Animation increased interest and

was strongly preferred by computer-science students

studying algorithms (Stasko, Badre, and Lewis 1993).

In business presentations, animations combined with

transitions increased audience attention and the

presenter’s persuasiveness (3M Meeting Management

Institute 1992).

* Focus the viewer’s attention. Use animation to

emphasize important aspects of a graphic or display.

* Handle sensitive subjects. Animated characters are

better than videotaped real characters for sensitive

subjects like sex education, ethnic relations, and other

subjects where the animated characters let the viewers

concentrate on the idea and not on the identity or

appearance of the actors.

* Show dangerous subjects. Animation lets you create

a world of hazards without danger to the user or to

the cameraman. Wiley Coyote fell from cliffs, was run

over by cars and trucks, and was blown up many

times in pursuit of the Roadrunner. Yet he sprang

back to life to continue the chase. Beep. Beep.

Use the Right Type of Animation

There are several different ways to create animation, each with its own costs and benefits. The first step in bargain-hunting is picking the right type.

Cel animation. In classic cel animation you produce a separate drawing for each frame of the animation. (Cel is short for cellophane, the material early animations were drawn on.) Each drawing differs slightly from the Previous one (Shapiro and Rubin 1988), as in this sequence for turning pages.

The file consists of a simple series of static images. Several industry-standard formats are defined for such a sequence of images: PICS, Video for Windows (Audio-Video Interleaved), or QuickTime. But because each frame requires the storage of a whole image, cel animation can consume storage space as well as processing power. However, if there is relatively little difference between subsequent frames, compression algorithms can often reduce the storage size.

Sprite animation. Sprites are two-dimensional images that move in front of a fixed background. These sprites can change their appearance to simulate movement within the sprite. Sprite animation is probably the most common form of computer animation because it is simple and economical. With sprite animation, the book with the turning pages would look the same, but the page that turned would be a sprite in front of a background drawing of the other pages of the book. Here is the background:

Storage and processing requirements are moderate because the unchanged part (background) is stored only once. File formats, however, are proprietary: Macromedia Director and Animator Pro, for example.

Color cycling animation. Color cycling creates an illusion of motion by repeatedly redefining the colors in a static graphic. Color cycling is easier to do than to understand. It relies on the fact that computer colors are just numeric codes. A palette or color look-up table specifies what color each numeric code actually represents. With color cycling you draw one picture that shows the moving object in successive positions. In each position you draw the moving object in the color of a different numeric code. In the palette, however, all of the codes used by the moving object are defined as the same color as the background, except the one that shows the object in its starting position. For example, in this endview of a book, all of the page positions are defined as different numbers. All but one of these numbers is defined as the background color.

To simulate motion, the codes for successive positions of the moving object are redefined as the visible color while all others are the background color. Here’s how the animation appears to the user at various stages.

Color cycling is especially effective for animating repetitive movement in an enclosed area as long as successive positions of the moving object do not overlap. It works well for showing flames or flowing liquid. Because it does not require storing and displaying many separate drawings, color cycling is economical. There are, alas, no industry-standard formats for color-cycling animation.

3D model animation. Three-dimensional models are sometimes used to create animations. First, the designer builds a detailed model of the objects to be shown in the animation. The computer then calculates what the scene would look like from a particular viewpoint and with particular lighting conditions. This is called rendering the scene. The model or the viewpoint is shifted slightly and the process repeated to generate the next frame of animation.

Rendering richly detailed 3D scenes requires vast computer resources. Creating the models for a one-minute 3D animation can take three to five days (Apple Computer 1993). Rendering one second of ray-traced animation at 600×480 pixels can take one hour on a 86040 Macintosh. As a result, 3D modeling is seldom used for real-time animation. It is almost always used to generate the individual frames for cel animation. Furthermore, if the subsequent images are highly detailed or differ greatly, compression algorithms will have little effect.

Stop-motion. In stop-motion animation, you photograph real objects, shifting or modifying them slightly between photographs. Stop-motion animation can show the assembly or disassembly of a complex piece of machinery. It has a magic, comical feel as inanimate objects spring to life.

Stop-motion is really digital video, albeit minus intervening frames, and is a storage and processing hog. The file formats, however, follow industry standards, such as Quicktime and Video for Windows.

To recap the trade-offs among the various animation techniques:

Keep Animation Cost Low

Regardless of what type of animation you use, you can take steps to keep costs in check. As always, good design leads the way.

Simplify. Simplify. Simplify. To reap the bargain of animation, you’ve got to keep it simple and design for low-cost production and play back. Fortunately, you can do so without compromising communication effectiveness.

Don’t overload the viewer with meaningless animation by showing too much too fast (3M Meeting Management Institute 1992). The display becomes distracting when we try to show too much spatially by crowding the display, or too much temporally by changing too rapidly or abruptly (Baecker and Small 1990). Remember that users can pay attention to only one moving object at a time. If the animation includes simultaneous movements by separate objects, let the user cycle or repeat the scene.

Do not put a busy background behind animated characters. Leave large areas with a plain background on which animated characters can move. Avoid intricate details, bright colors, high-contrast figures, or anything else that will draw attention away from the animated character.

Also, users cannot attend to intricate details in moving objects. In animation, pay more attention to the overall contours of shapes. If these are right, few interior lines win be needed. Make all critical events clear from outline contours alone. Do not disguise pertinent information in a tangle of lines. Remember that single pixel lines may not display correctly after the image has been compressed and decompressed (Apple Computer 1993).

For animation, you seldom need more than a dozen colors. Use flat color as in cartoons and on the comic pages.

Create Reusable Components. Make your animations modular and reusable. Design elemental animations that you can combine to compose more complex scenes. One way is to draw your animation components in paralline perspective rather than true perspective. In this way, when the components are combined, they can be placed anywhere in the display without having to worry about vanishing points.

Make your animation sequences reusable. For example, create an animation showing a screwdriver removing a screw and you can use that module in every procedure that requires removing a screw.

By choosing the right type of animation and designing it carefully, you can communicate some tough messages effectively and economically.

There is a perception that the Flip animation festival, organised by Wolverhampton’s Light House Media Centre, is hoping to change. As festival director Peter McLuskie puts it, ‘The original thought behind the festival was to raise the profile of the animation work that goes on in the West Midlands and to generate interest in the region. An animation festival helps to celebrate the range of talent in the region and persuade animation graduates to develop their careers in the West Midlands.’

Consequently, McLuskie has helped put together a programme for the two- year-old, three-day event, which features international screenings, including the mesmerising Howl’s Moving Castle by Spirited Away director Hayao Miyazaki, a showcase from the National Film School of Denmark, plus an exclusive preview of this year’s animate! TV commissions, co-funded by the Arts Council and Channel 4. There are also talks, forums, workshops, and industry panels, including an interesting one looking at non-traditional media delivery routes for animators, such as mobiles and gaming.

But the focus will be firmly on local talent, of which there is plenty, McLuskie believes. ‘All of the main universities or art schools (Wolverhampton University, Staffordshire and University of Central England) in the region provide animation degrees,’ he says. ‘It is very easy for animators, studios and agencies to work in isolation and to gravitate towards London to source commissions, talent and networks. We often come across situations here where companies in the region go to London to source animation, not realising that these services are available locally.’

The London creative drain described by McLuskie is, of course, nothing new. It’s a frustrating situation for many regions, which could take inspiration from Flip’s fightback initiative – a region-centric event that aims to offer something for everyone. Local interest is addressed by festival attractions, which include work entered though open submission by professional animators living or working in the West Midlands region, and the SE3D animation scheme, which features a showcase in the festival and offered access for 12 groups of animators to the powerful HP Labs’ experimental Maya Rendering Service from their home or office. There is also an industry panel offering the Animators Survival Guide to the Midlands, and, for innocent Nick Park fans, rather than world-weary South Park ones, the chance to see the work of five Wolverhampton Primary Schools, which worked with animators to produce short films. As McLuskie says, ‘We recognise that talent has to be developed at an early age and that working with schools and young people can foster long-term interest in animation.’

Best of all, for anyone who’s ever tried to ‘do’ the London Film Festival and ended up humbled and exhausted, McLuskie promises Flip will be ‘small but focused, friendly and welcoming, with a programme that’s easy to understand, but not too many parallel activities, which frustrate festival-goers’. Which all sounds attractive enough to make a trip to Birmingham’s Custard Factory worthwhile.