Frames from Kaboom, PES, 2005
The work of two young directors, Kris Moyes and PES, reminds us that moving pictures of all kinds rely on manipulating the gaps between...moments...of...perception. Moyes and PES have both created exuberant short-form work using stop-motion animation and, although they each have a slightly different approach to this decidedly low-tech medium, the strength of their work, like the pioneers of cinema and animation before them, comes from the careful omission of...
Woman Walking Downstairs, Eadweard Muybridge, late 19th Century
...mid 1870s British expatriate photographer Eadweard Muybridge developed a photographic technique called stop-motion photography using a series of cameras and an electrical trigger to capture progressive movements within fractions of a second. Muybridge's research was funded by the future governor of California, Leland Stanford, who had supposedly made a $25,000 bet that there was a moment during a horse's gallop when all four of its feet were off the ground. Muybridge's first stop-motion photograph showed conclusively that Stanford was correct. Despite this inauspicious beginning, Muybridge had already laid the groundwork for the invention of motion pictures and spent the rest of his life...
Peenut, PES, 2006
...firm grasp on the history of stop-motion animation. His short film Kaboom for example clearly references Ray Harryhausen's pioneering work for the Army Motion Picture Unit during World War II and his surreal choice of materials is indebted to Stephen R. Johnson, The Brother's Quay and Nick Park's work for Peter Gabriel as well as 16th Century Italian painter Giuseppi Arcimboldo who created portraits out of collections of objects like fruit and twigs. This strong foundation has helped PES land work with Wieden + Kennedy for clients like Bacardi and Nike, but his self-initiated projects show a much more perverse sensibility. Roof Sex is a bizarre porno starring two comfy chairs and there is a recurring theme of violence involving peanuts. It is this twisted sensiblility that keeps PES' work from seeming nostaligic. The moments when...
Nude Descending a Staircase No.2, Marcel Duchamp,1912
...decades later Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase caused an uproar at the 1913 Armory Show in New York. The fragmented depiction of the subject's motion was clearly informed by Muybridge's photographic work but uniting the different frames in a single image was a revelation in the art world. Duchamp's work as well as that of the cubists greatly influenced the Futurist movement in Italy whose work explored the aesthetics of speed (among other things), although they went on to...
Heart Made of Sound, video by Kris Moyes, music by Softlightes, 2006
...recent videos for the Softlightes and the Presets demonstrate his gift for bringing the mundane objects in his surroundings to life. In his video for Heart Made of Sound, Moyes orchestrates what appears to be the haul from a trip to the craft store to create a joyful study in color and typography. His particular strength is the syncopation of elements like the crumpling of paper and the tactile approach he takes to the mechanics of motion pictures. His video for the Presets' song Are You the One? incorporates a variety of imaging technology, such as video-feedback, test cards, ultrasound and surveillance cameras. These are integrated with stop-motion sequences that mimic pixillation of digital distortion. The hand-crafted motion found in Moyes' work may lack the sophistication of contemporary computer graphics, but it captures...
Frames from Battleship Potemkin, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, 1925
...1925 film Strike, Eisenstein intercut between striking workers being attacked by police and a shot of a bull being slaughtered. Omitting the spatial and temporal distance between these images creates an intellectual concept (workers are being treated like animals) that does not exist in the individual shots. Through his extensive writing and work on films like Battleship Potemkin and October, Eisenstien developed a theory of montage as a way to recreate the quality of human thought, in which juxtaposition of images is not used simply to maintain spatial and temporal continuity, but to create meaning. His theory of montage...
...the fundamental technique necessary for creating the illusion of motion — omission of intervals of time. Muybridge's discovery that the perception of motion is based on the inferred connection between discrete still moments ultimately changed the way we tell stories and imagine ourselves. The work of directors like PES and Kris Moyes (among countless others) is compelling partly because they build motion and meaning one frame at at time. The rudimentary technique of stop-motion animation remains vibrant because it puts us into immediate contact with the way we experience time and movement.
