Choreographers of time
Carol and Bruno met at Goldsmiths University in 2011 and started collaborating on exploratory artworks using the technique of animating concrete objects through selective attention. Using a technique that combines Gestalt grouping with projection mapping, they breathe life into inanimate objects. These works not only combine their mutual interests in creating embodied interactive art‚ but also are a result of a unique marriage of skills. They work from a studio based in South-East London.
The artist and researcher‚ Dr Carol MacGillivray comes from a background of animation and film editing and spent 20 years working across documentary‚ drama‚ music videos‚ and commercials. Carol taught film at the Royal College of Art and became a senior lecturer in animation at the University of West London‚ where she was awarded both a Teaching Fellowship and Enterprise Fellowship‚ going on to become Associate Dean of Research and Enterprise in the Faculty of the Arts at that university in 2009. An increased interest in combining theoretical research and practice led Carol to undertake a PhD by practice in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths University. Her PhD thesis, Choreographing Time: Developing a system of Screen-less Animation researched the grammar of the D-Scope® as a new medium.
She exhibits as an independent artist and sculptor under the name Coral Woods
BOLT (2010) Kinetic sculpture (Wood‚ perspex‚ brass)
Bruno Mathez is a French audiovisual artist living in London. His creations can be referred to as experimental visual equivalents of different types of media or stage practices. Bruno hascreated visuals for music concerts‚ operas‚ dance and theatre shows. He has exhibited Photophonics‚ a light-to-sound installation made in collaboration with Mike Blow in the UK since 2008‚ including at the Royal Festival Hall in London. He is part of the interactive audiovisual group The Sancho Plan with whom he worked for the Ars Electronica Center in 2009 and toured in Europe and in the US. He is currently doing a Master of Fine Arts – Computational Studio Arts at Goldsmiths‚ university of London‚ where he’s discovering new tools towards his investigation on the themes of visual music in space and interactive video sculptures. He is also leading the film-making course of the Masters programme of Composing for Moving Images at City University in London.
THE EXQUISITE MEDIUM (2011) Interactive audiovisual sculpture (found objects, videoprojector, speakers, Processing software)
How Trope started:
The D-Scope® was born in the summer of 2011 following a chance meeting in a Processing for Artists class run by Dr Eleanor Dare at Goldsmiths. Dr Dare invited Bruno Mathez (then an MA student and feeling at an artistic impasse) to present some of his work in audiovisual sculptures to the class. Carol, already some way into her doctoral studies in Arts and Computational Technology at Goldsmiths was attending the class:
“Bruno is a digital native and his work which married sound and image closely was visually stimulating and fascinating to me as it reminded me of my days in pop promos. It was clear that we shared artistic interests, so we arranged to think about collaborating – originally on synchronising sound with image. At our next meeting, Bruno showed me a brief film he had made the previous night of projection mapping white light on some clothes-pegs in a series.
As he showed the footage that scanned back and forth along the line of clothes pegs, Bruno knew on an intuitive level that there was something there and said it was ‘a shame he could not make them move‘. Even as he said this, the film changed to include three clothes pegs in an arc and a clothes-peg turned through 90 degrees, lying on its side – what the animator in me saw was a clothes-peg taking a pratfall! ‘I think I can make it move’, I said, and so began our collaboration on the D-Scope® project.”
The first thing we animated was a bouncing cube.
Choreographers of time