Puzzling News / Jul 2000


	SCOTT KIM’S PUZZLING NEWS / JULY 2000 Visual Music

I've always loved animation. In high school I thrilled to independent animation festivals in theaters and on public TV. My father took me on a memorable tour of Walt Disney's animation studios. I made my own super 8 animations.
     What thrilled me most was not conventional storytelling, but purely nonrepresentational animation. The movie Fantasia, is merely the tip of the iceberg. For over a century there has been a breed of sculptors, artists, musicians and animators working outside the mainstream creating a sort of "visual music". Most are not well known, but their influences can be felt through MTV, movie titling, screen savers and Sesame Street.
     Norman McLaren created a large body of exhuberant work for the National Film Board of Canada. Begone Dull Care was animated by painting images directly into the film. Canon visualizes the structure of musical canons like Frere Jacques. Spheres sublimely choreographs spheres in space to Bach's music.
     John Whitney's films and writings made quite an impression on me. I even worked with him for a summer. See my animated tribute to Whitney in this month's inversion.
     Larry Cuba has made my favorite films in this genre, including Two Space and Calculated Movements. Recently he started the Iota Center to archive the history of visual music. Visit the Iota Center web site for links to artists, notice of events and a video store. The Center's annual touring show is devoted this year to the work of Oskar Fischinger, whose work played an important but uncredited role in the creation of Disney's Fantasia.
     The Visible Language Workshop, started by former book designer Muriel Cooper at MIT's Media Lab, has spawned major interest in interactive, animated, and three-dimensional text. I taught briefly at the VLW in 1989, and have been especially impressed by the work of John Maeda, head of the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the Media Lab, who creates graphic/textual works uniquely suited to the computer medium. His recent book Design by Numbers includes a programming language for graphic designers.
     As much as I love animation, the process is so tedious that I decided as a teenager to wait for better animation tools. Thirty years later After Effects arrived and I completed my first film, Watch Your Language, premiered at the 1996 Siggraph computer graphics conference. I'm now doing animation in Flash as part of my graphic and puzzle design work.

WHAT’S NEW JULY 2000

Inversion of the Month: John Whitney. Interactive animation in tribute to a pioneer of computer animation and visual music.

NewMedia Brain Candy. Frequency and other Flash puzzles.

Discover Magazine Boggler. July: Touchy Subject, Queens at Peace, Quadrilateral Thinking.

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