Friday, February 10, 2012

Rollin Leonard at Fa-g.org




Screenshot from "Pig Pile", video.

Last wednesday the online gallery Fach and Asendorf founded by Kim Asendorf and Ole Fach, featured a new show called "Rearrangements" by Rollin Leonard. I really like the different basic tools and ways Rollin used to create all the pieces at the exhibition. See more; 

Rollin Leonard tells us more about his pieces and their process;
"Pictures of my friends are rearranged by moving pixels around. Groups of pixels are shuffled, made to fill a container, dispersed, and smushed. 

The methods for making these animations were fairly crude, using the basic selection tools in Photoshop (some were simple enough that I could have used MS Paint) and simply defined heuristics. For the 'Pig Pile' video I moved the bodies down little-by-little until they hit the floor or were impeded by another stationary pixel. I did this until there was no space between pixels on the vertical axis. The basic rule was: move the pixels down until they run into something.

Like 'Pig Pile,' most of the images are self-decoding except possibly for 'Faro Shuffle, Bethany.' A Faro shuffle, also called perfect shuffle, is a technical feat that card magicians try to master. What I imagined was seeing the side of the deck with an image printed on it -- rows of pixels as the edges of cards. When the deck is arranged in the default position out of the box it would show the complete image of Bethany. As you shuffle the image would scramble but eventually, since the shuffle is perfect, it returns to the original arrangement. This was something I wanted to see that my mind's eye was having trouble picturing.

The outliers might be the 'Disappear' gif animations. The technique used to create them was a more complicated, automated process -- peeling away one layer of pixels at a time and scattering them along crisscrossing paths."

All images and GIFs courtesy Fach and Asendorf Gallery, see the full exhibition here.

Splat, Franky

Screenshot from "Bicycle Crash", video.

 
Disappear, Gillian & Shannon

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