After listening to assumptions from fellow beach goers that it was a giant squid or a big chunk of spoiled meat that was thrown off of a cruise ship I went back to get my camera and my roommate who has a lot of fish cleaning experience. Clues that it wasn’t a squid or octopus included rough patches of skin that felt like sandpaper and ribs protruding out of it. What looked like a tentacle was mast likely a large intestine. I didn’t want to leave until I was certain what the creature was so despite how gross it was I decided to flip it over. The way it settled after the flip convinced me that I was looking at a significantly decayed ocean sunfish, especially since I’ve heard of sightings of live ones in the area.

Making the sea monster story even more uncanny is the fact that while attending Indie Grits I’m staying with Britt Hunt and artist Alejandro Garcia-Lemos who has a sea monster series. (click to see enlarged versions)

If you’re the kind of person that would approach a decaying sea monster carcass intrigued by the mystery and nature of death as opposed to disgusted and squeamish you should check out Dark Side Shorts 6:30 PM this Friday (4/27) at the New Nick 1607 Main Street. The screening has slugs, dirty kitchens, creepy abandoned houses in the woods, giant termites, apocalyptic visions, zombies, with an occasional dose of humor. If you’re looking for a model for a fresh, vibrant creative scene in the Southeast you should check out Columbia, SC, especially during Indie Grits. I had a blast here in 2010, I regretted missing the festival in 2011 after hearing about events like the Toro y Moi show, and every bit of my excitement and anticipation for this year has been well met. This year has actually been a sort of atemporal experience in the Bruce Sterling sense, I’m staying in a house that survived the fire during Sherman’s invasion in 1865 while attending a festival whose programming runs the gamut from puppetry and live scored silent film all the way to the best in contemporary independent cinema.

I didn’t expect to find sea monsters in the middle of South Carolina, but I probably should have.

“The thing I hate the most about advertising is that it attracts all the bright, creative and ambitious young people, leaving us mainly with the slow and self-obsessed to become our artists.. Modern art is a disaster area. Never in the field of human history has so much been used by so many to say so little.”

I might be getting slightly off topic by switching over to features, but when I was young we had films like “The Dark Crystal” and “Labyrinth” that could cater to even fairly young audiences. Is there anything like that now? Maybe some of Guillermo del Toro’s output like “Pan’s Labyrinth” or “The Fall” by Tarsem Singh (“The Cell” being a bit darker than the fare I’ve mentioned so far but maybe not by much over “Pan’s Labyrinth”)

Here are the shorts in question:

This past Saturday with a little nudge from my sister I went down to the Fernandina location of the 6th annual First Coast Air Potato Round-up managed by Kathy Russell (a Wild Amelia Nature Festival board member). I feel like I owe it to the native plants that provided me with such exceptional wildlife viewing experiences last year to help control the runaway pest plants they have to compete with. I know for a fact that if an air potato escaped into the lot next to my place there’s a tall, skinny Hercules club tree and a beautiful Passiflora lutea vine, both of which are significant butterfly host plants, that would be easily over taken by it. I knew the heart-shaped leaf from a single specimen that cropped up across the street from me a couple years back, but I had no idea how closely the propagule resembled an actual potato.

The week long hard freeze of the ’10/’11 winter was thought to have dealt with this plant pretty handily, but after such a mild past season they’ve come back so strong that I could sit in one place and fill a good sized tupper-ware with air potatoes that were all within arms reach.

From the Air Potato Round-up I headed downtown to the Amelia Garden Show. The Tent for Reflections of Nature‘s native plant offerings was right through the entrance and the native azalea was by far the most popular thing amongst the pollinators.

As much as I love plants my favorite mainstay of the garden show is the Avian Reconditioning Center of Apopka, FL’s booth. This year they had a little screech owl who’d lost an eye in a blue jay mauling and a handler who credited the birds she cares for with pulling her through a bout with cancer. I definitely want to visit their center in person one day.

This day was my sister, Emily Montgomery’s birthday and as the coordinator of this year’s Air Potato Round-up she said that all she wanted was for me to show up and help at my local site. We’ve been through some rough spots in our relationship as siblings but I’m really proud of her these days for the extremely important outreach work she’s doing on behalf of the GTM-NERR and Florida ecology. It feels like we’re a team again, Each of us trying to achieve the same goal with our respective talents. Namely, creating a future where another brother and sister can enjoy a moment like the one pictured below going off the trail in a pristine natural environment with curiosity and purpose. On her birthday both of us were ducking branches in different parts of North Florida doing our part.

More photos on flickr here.

Lastly, a video edit of some of the day’s highlights (Pill bugs at the Air Potato Round-up, Bumble bees on the Reflections of Nature native azalea, and some of the Avian Reconditioning Center’s birds)

I sometimes think this flight must be an amusing out-of-body experience for the fish as it sees trees and houses in vivid detail for the first time, that perhaps the exhilaration could negate the sense of impending doom. Then I think of the closest possible analogous experience a human could have. It’d have to be under water because the fish is struggling to breath through its gills so the best thing I could come up with was being held, face forward, in the jaws of a large shark as you’re carried swiftly through a beautiful coral reef the likes of which you’ve never seen, but you probably wouldn’t be taking in the view.

I used to be way better at drawing sharks when I was a kid even though they were mostly in profile and ended up being mutant sharks with crab claws.

I took a video art class in college taught by Brian Mack who was a grad student at the time. Technique was an afterthought, the class was all about storytelling, exploring the genesis of our ideas, and recursively peeling back the layers of “why” and “what” inspired the beginnings of an idea as far back as we were willing to dig. One of the ways I was able to realize value in my work again after these surges of self doubt was to dig all the way back to three creatures that I was captivated by as a child. I believe that the fascination with minute patterns and details in nature that drives my work started with them.

Scoliid wasp Campsomeris quadrimaculata

When I was young I loved the idea of big, living things (think dinosaurs). Often the first place I’d run to in a department or video rental store would be the shelf where I thought I could find Godzilla movies I hadn’t seen yet. I was pretty familiar with insects and wasps in general but I had a few misconceptions with this one. First off, I almost always simply referred to it as a ‘killer bee’ and observed it from a reverent distance. Secondly, I think I never appropriately distinguished these from two or three other species of large wasps. My family always referred to these as ‘cicada killers.’ The insect pictured above isn’t a ‘cicada killer’ but this very well could have been what I was seeing on several occasions. Regardless, I was impressed by their size and the distinctive markings on their abdomen.

Red velvet-ant Dasymutilla occidentalis

Continuing with my fascination toward oversized things it was always exciting to find one of these fast moving, wingless wasps which I thought were giant solitary ants because of their name. One interesting thing tying together all the insects I’ve mentioned so far is that the female incapacitates the larvae or adults of some other species and lays her eggs on or near them so her young can emerge to a meal. Apparently they have a pretty vicious bite, the respect I always gave them was due to the fact that I imagined that sting was directly proportional to size and they were hundreds of times larger than other ants I’d seen and been bitten by.

Eastern fence lizard Sceloporus undulatus

There was nothing I considered cooler than spiky reptiles (I already managed to mention Godzilla and dinosaurs in a paragraph about an insect). The zoo’s reptile house was one of my favorite stops and although they were relatively smooth there was no greater disappointment than finding that the komodo dragons weren’t out. My favorite nature pop-up books featured gila monsters and horned toads. The fence lizard was the closest thing that I could see for myself up close and in it’s natural habitat. They were spiky reptiles, I was smitten.

I was more likely to find these three on brief trips inland from where I lived, a coastal town in Northeast Florida. They flourished in sandy soils and I’d often see them when visiting my grandparents in Lake City, FL or when visiting a place on the Suwannee River that had been in the family for generations. This was probably for the best as at some point in my youth I got pretty sucked into video games and since the portable ones weren’t quite as good yet I could pull myself away on these trips. Some of the games I played constitute positive core influences in my work, but they don’t go quite as far back as these three beings.

Steven said that he created the video as a procedural example for his students but that they wouldn’t be replicating it exactly (the mark of a great educational exercise). The rolling of dice determined the timing and editing of the video that he created and set to John Cage’s “In a Landscape.”

I have recently read about the push to change STEM to STEAM, adding Art to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Having taken discrete mathematics in college I know for a fact that being exposed to something like die-randomized video editing in a creatively taught high school music course would have given me a really interesting frame of reference for similar, practical computer science and math concepts. For more proof that STEAM is already being implemented by Steven and some of the other faculty at Loyola High School through mature, cross-disciplinary collaboration that would be the envy of many practicing new media artists see his recent post on Fiskabur 2011.

It’s also really fun to have a poke around his vimeo channel and watch things like “Pure Data Bee Movie” (below) or see what he and his students have been able to do with the open-source reacTIVision framework.

Also, check out the LHSMusicClass youtube channel for the full Fiskabur 2011 playlist. I’m proud that my work could be used in even just a small part of this guy’s teaching.

I wanted to thank the staff at the Guana Tolomato Matanzas National Estuarine Research Reserve for inviting me to share my experimental animation with them and the reserve’s visitors. The facility is great for multi-media presentations and the questions from the audience underscored a genuine interest in my art. NERRs around the country do really important work. The GTM’s “State of the Reserve” on Dec. 2 is a great way to get an idea of what they do through a full afternoon of compelling presentations (Free registration here).

Though an intimidating prospect at first I love to present my work to people with strong backgrounds in ecology and science. Collaborating with people in these fields can give my work a context that allows it to connect with and inspire a wider audience.

The first half of my presentation was a short program of my animation. The last video in this part of my presentation entitled ‘gtmnerr’ is a sample of preliminary work made from Florida native plants. I received lots of questions about my technique and some great suggestions of things to animate including Resurrection fern and bee patterns. This next year I want to compile a significant body of work that reflects the biodiversity of Northeast Florida. Presenting at the GTM NERR is a great stepping off point.

The last half of my hour talk was about the social object or sharable device as described by Hugh MacLeod here and here. Success for me is when my work becomes the social object that starts a conversation about nature’s presence in our everyday lives and helps to solve problems like “plant blindness.” I proceeded to run through a list of my favorite ecology-based social objects and the studios, artists, and scientists who create them.

-Jurgen Otto’s Peacock Spider video and images – I was impressed at how Jurgen didn’t have to go far to find a little known species to study and document whose behaviour very nearly rivals the birds of paradise displays captured in those great BBC documentaries.

-Whale Fall – a beautiful, hand-crafted film serving as an educational companion piece to the public radio program Radiolab‘s “loops” episode. Sweet Fern Productions

-Nervous System – a design studio that works at the intersection of science, art, and technology. When they sent a tweet about a biomedical engineer wearing one of their pieces in a Science Friday video I thought “this is how the internet works.” Fans of Nervous System’s work would likely be interested in the content of the video in addition to the necklace cameo. A perfect example of the social object as a node where audiences interested in science and art converge.

-Coral Morphologic/Morphologic Studios – perhaps the worlds only multi-media aquarium studio. I aspire to be the ‘Coral Morphologic’ of Northeast Florida native plant gardening. They’re another great example of serious science and serious art converging.

-WWF “The World is Where We Live” – a sleek and effective creative work. The audience at the GTM NERR was already prepared for dual channel or split-screen work since I included Pollenating II in the program.

-Miraslaw Swietek – I recently discovered his unique take on the insect macrophotography niche. I was impressed by the dedication required to seek out these shots.

-Jennifer Angus (FastCo Design slideshow/homepage) – My new favorite installation artist also working with insects.

-Another FastCo slideshow just because I like their layout and functionality.

-Gale McCullough’s Flickr-based, citizen science humpback whale tracking (CNN Story).

I’m always looking to collaborate with scientists and researchers. It was my hope that the common threads in my presentation would give people ideas on how to leverage the web to make the great work done by NERRS and similar organizations accessible to the widest possible audience. Feel free to share your favorite art or science based ‘social object’ in the comments or send me an email.

In 2009, the music video for Moray McLaren’s “We Got Time” (below) by David Wilson Creative made a similar impression. At the time I was still mostly working with a flatbed scanner so frames-per-second and shutter speed were things I hadn’t worried about about since school. The “in-camera” effects syncing camera frame-rates with record player rpm’s barely registered with me, but I watched the “making-of” with interest and wanted to build my own praxinoscope (though I never did).

Fast forward to 2011, Tim Wheatley‘s “the Cyclotrope” (below) is posted on Cartoon Brew. Just as compelling as a “making-of” video Tim Wheatley posted a production report detailing what worked, what didn’t, and even the make and model of the camera that he ended up using in the final product. I had been transitioning to a DSLR (for stills and video) for some of my work so I had become intimately familiar with ISO, shutter speeds and framerates again. I also had a spare bike wheel after getting aluminum rims for my beach cruiser. A light bulb went off in my head, through the proxy of a camera connected directly to a screen or monitor you could create interactive, live animation in a public context. This is somewhat redundant given the existence of a simple zoetrope, but with the camera you can zoom in and out, pan, and get an altogether better view of things than when you’re simply peeking through narrow slits.

Up until this realization I’d been struggling to figure out how I could apply my artistic practice to the kinds of meaningful outreach I’d seen going on around Jacksonville such as the Cathedral Arts Project or Amelia Arts Academy‘s collaboration with Communities in Schools. This might just be the kind of tangible, interactive presentation that could make my process compelling and accessible to those who don’t spend countless hours in front of the computer using video-editing and compositing software. I was also excited about showing people my process with wheels made of flowers, leaves, or shells instead of telling them about it.

If you visit either Tim Wheatley‘s or David Wilson Creative‘s websites you’ll quickly find that they openly share most if not all of the techniques used in many of their experimental animated films, not just the ones I’ve mentioned above. There was a time when I was fairly protective of my methods out of a fear that my technique was so simplistic that someone might take it and run with it farther and faster than I could. I was wrong on several counts. First, many artists have taken approaches to “replacement animation” similar to my own: Stan Brakhage, Al Jarnow, Paul Bush, Max Hattler, Michael Langan, Nina Paley, Helena Marikova… just to name a few whose works are quite compelling. Secondly, no one has taken my particular breed of flat-bed scanner stop motion and run with it, it’s absolutely too tedious for most people. Finally, I have nothing to gain from hoarding knowledge and everything to lose. I would argue that what makes works like those of David Wilson and Tim Wheatley much more than sensation-of-the-moment, viral videos is that they’ve shared their process so openly that people return again and again to learn from them. At least I did. The value system of these artists is completely in sync with the participatory vision of “Art in Strange Places” and projects like “Imagination Squared” that have become cornerstones of Jacksonville’s art scene.

If you’d like to see, spin, or create your own disc for the wheel I’ve fashioned stop by Main Street Park in Downtown Jacksonville during the Aug. 3 Art Walk from 5PM until whenever people stop showing up. I’ll be set-up with the wheel, a monitor, and two screens that will be unfurled around 8:45 when it gets dark enough. I’ve enlisted the help of Brian Oakley, his students, and members of the animation club at the Jacksonville Arts Institute to help create content for the wheel as well. This installation will be part of the “Art in Strange Places” debut of the Pop-up galleries going into Main Street park for the next few months. Below you’ll find a video shot in 24 frames per second (much faster than what will be showing Aug. 3rd). Any circular disc evenly divided into anywhere from 12 to 24 (I’ve used 18 just like Tim Wheatley) sections with a diameter of 21″ or less and a hole 4″ in diameter in the center will drop down right onto the wheel, so feel free to create your own before hand and bring it with you. Contact me (david@silverfishcloset.com) if you have any questions.

Inspired by fireworks from the 4th of July holiday earlier this month and the idea that fully embracing free culture would be comparable to the dandelion’s reproductive strategy (as acknowleged in this Cory Doctorow post from 2008) I rendered out several HD clips featuring this r-selected species and posted them to archive.org:

http://www.archive.org/details/DandelionFreeCulture

Below I have posted documentation of this set of visuals being projected in a marsh in Fernandina Beach, FL on a free standing screen. Many of these clips will be playing on the same screen at the Main Street Park in downtown Jacksonville, FL for the August 3rd art walk. If you’re in the Southeast US and would like to contract out the screen and any of my visuals to create alternative cinematic experiences that interact with elements like wind and water, let me know. Also, many of the animated clips featuring seed dispersal can be provided at much higher resolutions. Feel free to contact me if you have any special requests and we can work out the details.

Update: As always feel free to share what you’ve done with these clips and I’ll highlight or link to it on this website.

“I have always marveled at the way older homes become more organic as they age… …They seem to grow more alive with every passing generation…”

Russ Wilson – Yellow Bungalow IV

Through animation I tried to bring the architecture of Riverside-Avondale to life in an almost literal way. It was great to see an artist in another medium identify the organic, living quality of aging structures.

“I advocate for a contemporary art world where artists in all mediums return to the primordial purpose of art, which is to make the magic that connects the seen with the unseen, to fathom the dual nature of reality and to understand the shifting balance of the physical world with forces that affect it…

…The universe is revealed in the sacredness of the small and insignificant and in the intervals, pauses and quiet moments of active doing…”

David Hansford – Winged Victory Statue

One of my films was actually included in an exhibition entitled “Unseen” at The Arc Gallery of MOSI Tampa, FL in 2010. I also strive to celebrate the small and insignificant whether it’s the weeds in my yard or the aged stonework on a building facade.

“My work takes something extremely familiar and already magnificent and through the manipulation of the point of view I develop a new creation which takes the viewer beyond the expected.”

Sean Patterson – Memorial Park Angel

I enjoy doing this with my own art and one of the greatest comments I received at the opening was that my video “looks like the way you think.” In a future post I’ll identify a few other artists throughout the world who’ve explored very similar filmmaking techniques to the ones I employ, but one example that comes to mind is the way in which effects artists tried to illustrate the way Temple Grandin’s mind works when she thinks of something like a doorway or a shoe in the HBO biopic.

“As a native of North Florida and as a Jacksonville resident for the last 47 years, I continue to be inspired by the forms and patterns found in the natural environment of Riverside-Avondale. The springtime is diverse and is the catalyst for seasonal renewal, both in spirit and new art works. The flowering trees never cease to inspire me…

…Perhaps it is true that visual patterns are imprinted on one’s being from birth onward, and this impression is manifested in any form of art expression…”

John Bunker – Springtime: Riverside @ Memorial Park

I shouldn’t be surprised that John Bunker’s inspiration so closely resembles my own since his work has been included along side mine at the MOSH as well. Since I started growing native plants out of my own passion for nature and art the spring has taken on a great deal of importance in my own life. If you’ve seen the exhibit or get a chance to catch it before it ends July 31st feel free to comment. I’d be curious to know if you recognized the same threads connecting the artwork that I have or if you saw entirely different ones based on your own interests, perspectives, or feelings toward the community.

Photo courtesy of Riverside Avondale Preservation