Pow! Students bring Marclay’s comic-book vision to life

Computational Arts students at Goldsmiths have worked with internationally renowned artist Christian Marclay to deliver his major new exhibition at contemporary London art gallery, White Cube.

Antonio Daniele and Haein Kim (MFA Computational Arts) and Diego Fagundes (PhD, Arts and Computation) worked with Marclay to create animations for the show’s centrepiece - a large-scale, dizzying, Pop Art video installation which projects across four walls.

In its opening week, Marclay’s witty ode to onomatopoeia was described by the Guardian as “the most exciting contemporary art show in town”, with “stunning” visual and cognitive effects.

Goldsmiths: pioneering digital arts

This collaboration between Computational Arts students and an internationally respected artist is just one of the unique work experience opportunities that have been made available to students studying at Goldsmiths.

In addition to an MFA in Computational Arts, Goldsmiths is the only university in the UK to offer an undergraduate degree in Digital Arts Computing. This pioneering programme is designed for students to learn and develop a fine art practice, a critical awareness of contemporary art, and the technical skills to enable them to programme software that fulfils creative aims.

Working with Marclay

Director of Creative Computing and Computational Arts course leader Dr Mick Grierson recruited students for the project at the start of their first term.

Visual and media artist and student Antonio Daniele explains how he got involved, and how working with Christian changed the way he approached animation:

“During our induction, Mick told us about an opportunity for us to work with an important contemporary artist on a new piece.

I applied for the internship just few days after my MFA started, was interviewed, and met Christian at the end of September.

My background is in visual communication and I have wide experience in film making, motion graphics and graphic design. Christian’s project didn’t sound like it was going to be difficult from a technical point of view. In fact, the animations he wanted had to be simple and almost naive.

So that’s where my challenge started. I had to start ‘taking out’ from animation, simplify my habits of making animations look slick and cool. It was very challenging and stimulating.”

Concept to reality

As you walk into the gallery housing Marclay’s installation, animated words – the sound effects used by characters in superhero stories - burst into life around the walls. ‘Boom’, for example, is no longer static, as it would be on a comic’s pages, but bursts into life in a sequence of colourful explosions, while ‘Whooosh!’ and ‘Zoooom!’ travel at high speed around the walls.

The work fuses the aural with the visual, and immerses the viewer in a silent musical composition.

Antonio continues:

“The concept itself was making the words ‘sing’ their noise without the use of any sound. The idea is brilliant and I had so much fun imagining this silent concert while animating the words. 

I used to go to Christian’s studio every week, working around my course commitments, and sometimes worked from home as well.

Every week he came up with new ideas for the kind of movements the words could have had but we were also very free to experiment and propose our own ideas. I found brainstorming with him really stimulating.

After few months of production we moved into the gallery where we had the projectors, and started creating the final movie itself.

The last two weeks were really busy with five of us animators working full-on, late into the night.

Christian’s a giant in art. He's becoming one of the most influential artists of our time, with a very long and respectable career. Despite all of this, he’s an extremely humble and caring person. He has his own ideas and respects and values everyone else.

He expresses his ego through his art and never overshadows someone else. I’ve learnt a lot from his human side and from his generosity as an artist.”

 

Find out more about creative computing at Goldsmiths

Visit the Goldsmiths website for more information about our BSc in Digital Arts Computing, MA in Computational Art and MFA in Computational Arts.

Read more about Christian Marclay’s exhibition at White Cube.

Christian Marclay is at White Cube Bermondsey, SE1, until April 12. The exhibition is open Tues-Sat, 10am-6pm. Admission is free.

 

Image: Ben Westoby, courtesy of White Cube