pluto exploded (2020), 2 animations: Street Love Festival ft. Adam Anderson & Kellie O’Dempsey @ Felicity Park, Gabi-Gabi/Caloundra.

Title/Date: pluto exploded (2020)

Author(s): Sophie Reid-Singer.

Place of Publication: “Street Love Festival” at Felicity Park (Caloundra).

Format: Machinima.

pluto exploded (2020) was exhibited as a large-scale projection artwork high on a building found at Felicity Park in Caloundra for the Street Love Festival. I shared the spotlight with Adam Anderson and Kellie O’Dempsey who produced their own equally colourful aanimations. In my artwork, which consists of two machinima, dual scenes unfold of Pluto and our Solar System’s Sun exploding.

I produced these looping machinima using my Muliebrity[i] technique, an image of Pluto drawn using Copic markers and an image-reel ripped from a 10 year time lapse published by NASA around this time. Originally I had developed the Sun imagery for closed event: a joint birthday-celebration of members of Leonie Rhodes chosen family. I gave it a second life here, complimenting my explosion of Pluto. This was my first engagement with Pluto as a stand-in for my experience of disability, being that we are both dwarfs on the fringes of a identity. I expand on this point in-depth in description of a future artwork, i still love you pluto (2021). On theme with the Street Love Festival, but in line with my personal stance on most-everything, this artwork celebrates in absurdist glee that all things in the universe are cyclic, merry-making in the face of absolute oblivion.

Findings:

TLDR: In this artwork, the cyborg is the voyeur; the audience, and myself as the choreographer, sharing in the spectacle of time and space while firmly planted on Earth.

Imagery of cyborgs in this videogame did not emancipate disabled peoples from the strict legal conditions imposed by the Australian Government.

However, these machinima were my first trials with applying the strategies I had developed during my first experiment with Muliebrity[1] On the machinima of pluto exploded, I used Photoshop to pull my drawing apart (which is pictured unedited atop my lightbox below) into eight elements. This was the same strategy I used with the Sun imagery. These elements were assigned to the eight parameters of the FFT operation, and further modulated by the opacity control script I had written for Pollinator. However the Pluto machinima was created from several iterations of recording the Unity game space, which then through many iterations was reintroduced as layered content, similarly to how I produced the imagery for enable (2020).

To produce these machinima I used audio produced from my modular synthesizer, an ambient ‘outer-space’ composition. Unfortunately the videos below (which I provided for the event) don’t include the audio, so that element cannot be archived.