Last month, I had the honor of interviewing stop-motion legend, David Daniels, the inventor of strata cut stop-motion animation, and one of the founders of Bent Image Lab in Portland! Strata cut is a style of animation in which a block of clay is sliced and animated to reveal what's inside the block. I highly recommend watching Daniels' film Buzz Box prior to fully experience strata cut. He first experimented with slicing clay at the age of eight with his sister (a talented artist who went on to work on The Nightmare Before Christmas). A gifted animator even in his early teens, he eventually went to graduate school CalArts, where he ultimately invented strata cut animation. Daniels has also had a successful commercial career. Not only did he co-found Bent Image Lab, he has also animated for a variety of big names from MTV to M&Ms. Currently, he works with augmented reality...but read ahead to learn more!
David: Strata cut is a reinvention of a shitty medium. I shouldn’t say that. Clay is not a shitty medium once you shape, pack, layer, slice, and slap it back down on glass...it’s fresh and beautiful. It can endure.
I love clay because it reminds me of childhood, and because it’s a terribly impermanent thing. You don’t see a lot of plasticine clay sculptures in museums because they don’t last! *Laughs* You don’t see it on people’s walls because it doesn’t last. My answer to impermanence is to build time blocks that have extruded world lines that move through pre-programmed spatial contours. This dimensional flow motion design is strata cut. This was my effort to re-invent plasticine clay as art with longevity both when captured as moving images and then preserved as static art.
"I love clay because it reminds me of childhood, and because it’s a terribly impermanent thing."
You can take a strata cut block and drop it, kick it, or bang it down hard on cement. The large ‘fat mass’ protects the coherent information within the block. Yes, it will warp or distort a little toward the sides, but every time you slice it up, it’s a new clean fresh moment, no matter how dirty or messed up the outside looks. This ability for beauty to last, protected and hidden, is what compelled me from such a young age. I first tried cutting open the buried and invisible clay block patterns at eight years old. The strange ‘instant clarity’ from a single knife cut, really stood out in my young mind. Yet this potential remained as just a memory. It lay dormant and fuzzy in the back of my mind until I was 21 or 22. By then, I understood conventional animation and filmmaking pretty well.
Anisha: You have a really cool story! I like how you and your sister were just messing around with [strata cut] as kids and you created something amazing with it when you were older.
David: Thank you! Yes, Shelley Lekven. She made a child like ‘clay-cake’ when I was eight years old. It was a dumpy miniature hockey puck on the outside, but when sliced open - the clean color patterns showed up with each knife cut. She’s a really talented artist. Shelley is much better than me as a pure sculptor. I don’t know if you’ve looked at her work? Her technique is angelic: it’s like she has no fingerprints. She’s two years older than me and ‘Lily Pond’ is her recently published book. As kids, it was her sculpting ability that became my stalking horse, my greyhound ‘pace-rabbit.’ My sister was naturally great with clay, and I was looking at her thinking I want to be better! Working alongside her day after day as kids, by osmosis - I learned to sculpt. But eventually, I realized I was NEVER going to be better. *Laughs* So I reinvented it.
Anisha: What is your process while creating a strata-cut piece?
David: First, building strata cut blocks can be complex. Carefully imagine the ‘line flow’ of shapes that carry motion over time. They move along the z axis in depth. This z is perpendicular to the blade cut. When planning strata cut blocks, having dimensional sketches in your head or on paper can help. I ask myself what sheets and angles of thick and thin clay will pre program into the result? How will I sculpt the desired internal shapes that results in a sequence of 2D image surface cuts? With trial and error, you can develop your ‘minds eye’ to have this ability.
Nowadays, rather than just one camera, I currently try to animate these slices under a multiple camera array (with a dozen or more camera angles) to preserve every view as a digitized sculptural photo-grammetry. Computer vision now has an increasing ability to reconstruct all the details of the optical flow within it, and reconstruct 3D versions of each slice ‘step.’ After cutting and capturing, I save, mount, and present the remains of this animation process. These leftover slices are flat, clean, beautiful, two-sided works of art. They are 1/10th to 1/6th of an inch thin. Preservation and presentation then becomes the fight, as kid’s clay is so permanently impermanent. At its most simple, one can press a strata cut onto a sheet of plexiglass, and then lay a non porous backing against the other exposed clay side, then seal the edges with cloth tape or binder clips. Or better, make a two plexi sandwich, where you ‘transparent Oreo’ the slice.
Another profound material aspect is the ability to melt this stuff. To pre-destroy it in some way. This has become a key aspect to my renewed love for the static art. Bending, twisting, and partial melting or smearing are some of the unique things that can be done after the slicing has happened. Intentional heat liquefaction (smear and melt) came about during the making of Buzz Box. I was trying to backlight the clay with a warm 100-watt bulb. I was doing multiplane clay on glass, since there was no optical printing or After Effects at that time. Everything was done in camera. I was attempting to make the sculpt itself more visually electric when played back in motion. I took a light and I rotated it around the block maybe five times a second - 180 degrees - in an arc.. The light was two or three feet off from the sculpt. I would stop-mo rotate that flash around. It creates a sort of ‘kinetic-contour’ bath. It jumps off the screen, and gives your brain a subliminal visual impression that you’re looking at something physical and 3D - even though it’s a flat 2D medium. I was also backlighting the block (or any slices) and stop-mo moving a warm lightbulb underneath the multiplane glass at the same time. This tandem was the maximum ‘visual-electric.’
"When planning strata cut blocks, having dimensional sketches in your head or on paper can help. I ask myself what sheets and angles of thick and thin clay will pre program into the result?."
Accidentally, I realized this backlight approach would soften and slowly puddle up the clay slice if controlled correctly. So at the bottom of each block, after a sequence of animation cuts, I would often smear and strobe light the very last slice. This is one thing that plasticine can do uniquely well. It’s the BEST medium for this. Of course wax can do this too. They're not identical, but similar. I find wax is much harder to do fine finger-sculpting with. Controlled smearing and designed melting is not something that pottery clay can do, or any other medium can do well. Now when I mount these slices, I put a little even heat on it, to let a really subtle melt process eliminate any air pockets that form when pressing them to an otherwise clear surface.
I put slices on plexi then into the oven at around 230 degrees, but only for about three or four minutes depending on convection. This timing is art, not science. Clay melt is affected by thickness and the oil / calcium carbonate / pigment proportions. Keep looking for that moment just before it goes runny. Maybe five minutes with the oven door slighting ajar. Direct sunlight can do this if you have patience. Once it goes glossy on the surface but not actually drip or run, the clay has fully relaxed down onto the clear surface. This is how it sucks itself down onto the plexi. Oil-based plasticine meshes with the clear oil-based plexi sheet. It makes the mounted art gorgeous and vivid. The bright color material has merged with the surface and completely ‘wet puddled’ down onto it. Sweet. Again, how do I present and preserve this material? Make it useful for people to store, ship, present and to see? How do I improve these different preservation methods?
As mentioned before, the other advance is shooting the animation slice-process with a ‘half-dome’ camera array (or light field) multi-image capture method. This preserves the internal sculpt’s continuity of shapes in dimensional motion. Computational imaging derived from an array of pictures is the future of dimensional filmmaking. It will allow strata cut to be more native in the future reproduction and multi-angle replay formats. Synthetic camera arrays for rebuilding dimensionality in post production and playback - this will affect all live action and animation methods. It will blow our collective spatial eyeballs over the next decade.
To sum up - Time sculpting was the primary insight for preservation, because every time you cut it’s a pristine moment. Fresh cuts are not messed up, not gouged, and don't collect dust. Slicing the block unlocks and releases the internal hidden programmed ‘motion’ and also outputs a bunch of leftover slices. Preserve each non-identical slice as long-term art. Adding a partial melt, smear or tear is also a statement to the viewer/collector of this art about impermanence itself. A little pre-destruction of the medium is part of the message. Like a fragile zen buddist sand painting delivered with a small part of it ‘blown away’ in advance. The ‘caution sticker’ is right in the art. You see ‘fragile,’ and so you take care.
In the wider world, I study everything, but only do things that other people are not. I rarely do better than others in conventional formats. Existing production techniques are well developed, and the people who do them are great! *Laughs* If I attempt an outstanding message or style using conventionally understood techniques I am then signing up to become a really good craftsman in a really tedious way. Not a good option because I have B+ artistic talent. My approach to clay is a developed talent. My core gift is patient study. To think outside and around the corners of conventional thought, seek the unusual and odd, then reflect deeply and concretely imagine. Then to be tenacious when little insights appear around the edges of normal life. That is my ‘natural’ talent. I am an eager, relentless diletante on many subjects of great variety. Strata cut is just one expression of this core. Cutting clay like this - was an accident of childhood. The early situation with Shelley just guided my patient thinking, tenacity, and imagination toward a deep re-consideration of stop motion clay.
"Time sculpting was the primary insight for preservation, because every time you cut it’s a pristine moment. Fresh cuts are not messed up, not gouged, and don't collect dust. Slicing the block unlocks and releases the internal hidden programmed ‘motion’ and also outputs a bunch of leftover slices."
What is my methodology to sculpt time as a predictable outcome: If I do this, what happens? If I do that, what happens? Catalogue each test, examine each result, and begin to develop a vocabulary. This vocabulary then allowed me to do enough interesting things with it so I then realize you can do more things. I became ‘fluent’ over time. In today’s world, Maker Bot and the 3D printing revolution gives anybody who wants to do strata cut, the perfect tool to visualize all this. I could have become much better at time sculpting (and learned much faster) if I had this visualization tool when I was young. CAD-CAM programs now easily analyze motion lines, and world lines…and how shapes change when you put them into a spatial extrusion. You can easily view these shapes synthetically inside software. You can physicalize this into 3D when printed. With this, anyone can self-teach many spatial sculpt methods that I discovered organically. But one caution - if you do this precisely enough - it’s boring. It becomes too perfect, too seamless and clear. Like extruded cel animation. Using computers is just another method to achieve dimensional sculptural shape animation, but there is no inherent natural beauty, because it’s too precise and predictable. While it cannot have the organic fun of clay, you can do a very different art with it! Computational strata cut can and will achieve other things that are not boring. It can be compelling art in different ways, just not the blobby, warped, spasmodic beauty of hand made clay.
The unruly clay itself makes me work toward figurative coherence. But I am careful not to squeeze out all the natural psychomorphic randomness. Embrace the strange textures and the buried accidents living inside the clay blocks. I like to juggle it and control the flow, but not suppress it. What does clay want to give me that makes kinetic, and visually impactful results? Example: cut up a sandwich of different colored slices - red, yellow, green - green, yellow, green. Stack and layer these up. Then extrude it smaller or thinner, and cut that, lay it over on itself at different angles of trajectory. This makes very interesting super quick patterns, which are put on shallow or steep diagonals. Diagonals are always your friend in stratamation. Diagonals must be offset from the exact ‘face on’ top surface. Change these angles or the knife cut angle, and you change degrees of speed or thickness when animated. If sheets of color are facing the edge-on view to the camera, it is parallel and static. It’s not moving anywhere at all! If sheets of color are perpendicular, this is a flash frame. It covers one frame of a whole area, then it's gone. Choices of shallow or steep diagonals and distortions to the slice plane is where the flow animation can be expressed and revealed later when cut open.
Side note - making exact parallel lines to the cut - that’s like millefiori, or fimo beads. They call it ‘caning’ or cane-ing. It resembles a stick or twig or thin log, so they called it a ‘cane.’ It’s an extrusion method for pottery of little art pieces and jewelry. It’s a technique actually four thousand-plus years old. There are very ancient baked clay pots that use this decorative repeated pattern cane-ing. The ancients would extrude it as a non animated line-art within the tube, then slice the virtually consistent repetitions. They would flip or flop them as press-layer patterns along the side of the pot. Humans be clever! This approach is not the intentional shape-over-time distortions of Strata Cut. There was no programmed distance of intentional distortion movements within the cane - nor any time sculpting animation in it. It was just a single linear log. When peeled off into slices, one then lays them down as patterns onto those pieces around the pottery as a way of creating decorative, repetitive patterns. It’s a very ancient idea. Beautiful stuff.
Anisha: That’s interesting! Did you intend to build on that technique?
David: No, not at all. But accidentally, unconsciously, yes. I had no clue what millefiori was when I did Buzz Box. Information came to me afterward, because people would come up and ask, “Are you aware of this? Did you know about fimo beads and pottery technique?” And I would say, “No. But huh, that’s cool!”
I did observe it happen in sushi, and head cheese and cinnamon rolls. After all, mimicking a baked cake is where it all started, yes? Also many natural analogies in nature - time lapse the grain of wood being cut or bulldozing earth layers in a mountainside. The random pattern design may be similar, but it doesn’t have “intentional programmed distortion over time.” They are not storytelling shape lines over time, where every frame is intentionally delivering a visual message in motion. I do not want natural random, nor linear tubes of repeated sameness. Just pre-visualize the distortion effect, and guide the micro-textures and patterns to fit the larger outlines of figurative meaning. Textures can be really effective and very easy once you figure out the 178 degrees of variable diagonals 180 degrees is static and boring. 90 degrees is a flash frame. So avoid these, and use the wide spectrum of dimensional-path geometry that is left. A strata cone is a dot becoming a large circle. A strata pyramid is a dot becoming a large square. You can get very clear, kinetic patterns that will be easy to make and can be stuffed in and around the central subject or representational object, such as blinking eyes and talking mouths.. When making faces, heads, or people, design various kinetic patterns of material that goes in and around the figure. It’s analogous to liquified mosaic chunks that flow over time, and are molded within a coherent ‘wood cut block’ large-shape outline. Differences of color, and the shape, and the motion, also help define the foreground and the background. The micro-kinetic clay sections work inside the figurative outlines …you don’t want to get rid of this psychomorpic effect. The motion-flow itself can also help ‘gestalt’ the meaning, and bring animation clarity the texture chaos out of the most confused single slice.
I allow strata cut to be, not random, but a little out of control. Parts of it are visually ‘almost’ out of control. The audience needs to see the core shapes and directions of large intentional distortions are very much in control. People watching can then feel that they’re in good hands. They enjoy being guided. It’s going somewhere. They know the creator of this dense massively kinetic animation is not feral, nor out of his/her mind. The audience needs a backbone of clarity as a mouth is talking, eyes are blinking. These fundamental shape guide rails need to be really coherent. The micro-texture color choices are similar to Seurat/Van Gogh pointillism or combined primary color strokes. This lower ‘frantic level’ can be shaped to better help define the clear results. The blow by blow and low level choices within the sculpt are hard for me to convey or talk about.
"I want to allow strata cut to be, not random, but a little out of control. Parts of it are visually ‘almost’ out of control. The audience needs to see the core shapes and directions of large intentional distortions are very much in control. People watching can then feel that they’re in good hands."
In The Adventures of Prince Achmed there’s a sort of wax dream moment, and a little horse shape is apparent. You would have to say that’s the ‘cave painting moment’ of strata cut. *Laughs* That’s the first time somebody was trying to make a narrative sliced shape distortions be revealed in animation over time. Walter Ruttman was the lead wax animator and the wax-cut horse he made is like the first vacuum tube transistor, long before computers. It wasn’t yet a time-sculpting language. The instinct was showing, but vocabulary was not yet developed.
People say, what did you really invent? I say, well it’s the coherent use and repeatable understanding what complex shapes will reveal when put into a time sculpture. With extruded world lines, the result is not an accident.. It is like code. It’s a program in time, full of if/then decision points. A full language of inputs and results that deliver visual meaning. If you do this, you will get that. It then needs to be arranged with thousands of those choices, into a full programming code to do amazing time-space things with it. With the right series of shape distortions over time, you can tell any narrative you want. I just think strange, weird, twisted subjects are more easy to achieve here, so the medium pushed me toward that message.
Anisha: That was actually something I wanted to ask you about! I liked how that even though was a lot of chaos in Buzz Box, I still understood your point and intention while watching it. I was reading that you used maximalism a lot in your work, and I was curious what drew you to that art style?
David: Ahh, thank you! I would define maximalism as ‘attack style hypnosis reaching almost overload.’ Right up to the line of way too much, but not over, so the story thread still hangs together. The effect of Strata cut itself can be ‘everything is moving all the time’ on the surface slice of every frame. Often no texture is static from one frame to the next. Pixels are flowing and crawling everywhere each animated moment, and can lend itself to squirmy or creepy narratives. The ‘speed’ of this crawling is rare to see in real life except with maggots or acid trips, and is part of the natural hypnosis of watching it. It’s very nature suggests maximum visual input. So that’s what the ‘medium’ suggested to me. Maximalism.
This random effect of the medium always fun to watch for maybe ten seconds. People and kids cut clay all the time. Anyone can stop-mo cutting this random chaos clay. An example is the brief ‘melting computer’ in Closed Mondays created by Bob Gardiner and Will Vinton in 1974. They stop-mo’d a lot of clay into an ‘exploding computer malfunction’ moment, then knifed it apart. There are ten seconds of this animated thunder egg effect: a cut-away kaleidoscope. It was very appropriate to a drunk character having ‘visions.’ This slicing is ‘randomized’ strata cut. There is no coherent, planned or programmed idea of the way the motion and the shapes were supposed to be revealed as they were cut. Like millefiore, I saw this effect much later in my own development. I had already done my first extended clay movie by 1972. My early work was about the same animation level as Closed Mondays but my stories were much more juvenile. My narrative brain was not fully developed, but the animation - as a twelve-year-old - was already at a really promising level.
Point is - ten seconds is the average ‘random strata’ limit to keep an audience with you. After a brief ‘Oooh-ahh’ - they move on. This alone gets old. How to keep people watching? Next please. It was Drew Neuman who did the amazing Buzz Box soundtrack. My recollection is that he was first to suggest the word ‘Maximalism.’ In my search for new ways to present clay that isn’t damaged, maximalism served three purposes. First, push way too much information into all corners of each frame, so this overload effect would help hide and embrace the damaged clay and it’s cuts, nicks and bruises. No one cares about flaws when the image is in overdrive. The second reason is to keep audiences hypnotized past the 10 second random threshold, yet don’t push so far as to make complete noise. This is why figurative images and story are important to length of subject, etc. Mostly, it’s what the strange medium told me it wanted to be, so I evolved an aggressive ‘maximal’ story technique around it.
The underpinning of both technique, story and style in Buzz Box is seduction and abuse. Innocent and perverse. Childlike and corrupt. A kids view of an adult shit storm. A naive art and composition style, jammed against a complex and demented message. A crawling warped ‘folk-art’ full of icon symmetry and unsophisticated compositional angles - mashed against jagged, angy, dynamic off-kilter hyper-activity, The strata cut parts are primary and direct. They flow with seductive, figurative, sensual innocence, uncorrupted by adult compositional thinking. This hits the wall every 10 or 20 seconds with angular, corrupt, sophisticated, jagged, dark, non child-like ‘change-ups.’ The impression of fear and dread is more demented since the colors and compositions and smiles are often child like. These two piston back and forth throughout.
Childlike things mix with dark angry demented things. After five, ten, or twenty seconds of psychomorphic, Buzz Box cuts to stroboscopic hard things. Chop, cut, melt, smear, a fork in your face. This is to jolt a viewer in and out of the mesmerized state -- going back and forth. It demands your full participation against your will. Shocking and abusing your eyeballs, then back to something seducing again. A ‘ringing in the eyes/ears kind of numbness’ is the goal of this gas pedal / brake pedal editing. A mental exhaustion should be felt by the end.
Maximalism tries to keep the audience’s eyes glued hypnotically to the strata cut part of it, by inter-splicing jarring narrative intrusions and shocking shape destruction in between the seductive parts. Intensity was driven by intertwined modulation between soft, happy and morpic, to dark, hard and abusive. Good maximalism also needs a lot of coherency to not get lost in the attacking swamp of chaos. It juggles various aggressive visual fireworks against each other as contrast to gain rhythm and control. I was trying to alternate variations of these two very different things - to sustain 16 minutes of overall strata cut that turns the dial up past 11. I threw stroboscopic lightning effects into the animated melt smears only added to the variety of shock and abuse. The hard things that come after soft things. Rinse and repeat, faster and faster.
"Maximalism tries to keep the audience’s eyes glued hypnotically to the strata cut part of it, by inter-splicing jarring narrative intrusions and shocking shape destruction in between the seductive parts."
I chose the mental zombie nature of television for Buzz Box because I grew up watching a lot of it and ‘feeling’ it’s effect, but because the pace and focus of society has been greatly transformed by it. Movies, television, and now the internet have pervasively changed the way we act and think. Our minds evolve to handle this non-sequitur warp speed. Attention must keep up, like a hummingbird on meth. It affects how our entire species learns, thinks, and pushes rapid fire garbage-in garbage-out decisions. It’s kinetic-rich and information poor. I made a funhouse mirror, a child-like lens, to mimic a dark media addicted culture. No real world images. Not the actual hyper random world, but an slipping/dripping day-glo impression of the thing. This forces an audience to abandon their ‘filter’ as they endure the seduction and abuse. People watching Buzz Box in 1985 would walk away dazed, saying, “I don’t know what (the ‘eff) just happened there, but it was disturbing!” *Laughs*
Buzz Box mimics our schizophrenic media overload condition, and after the numbness wears off, it hopes you can ‘wake the fuck up.’ It does not allow any single clear thing to emerge, just an onslaught of happy/horror impressions. Take any single photo or image out of this film, and no one would say it’s clearly terrifying, or perverse, or scary. It’s just a partially melted moment. A smear. The banality of this evil, is to slice and dice the dark significant threats and real problems - then blur and demean these - against spectacular illusions of luxury, wealth, and the absurdly iconic branding of all these objects and things that don’t really matter. Grand advertised solutions for non existent problems. This ‘twilight circus’ distracts us from what is really at stake, and our pocket is picked. The cumulative effect of successful maximalism makes it so. The ‘ah-ha!’ gestalt happens in between the actual frames. The actual images are not definite, but when connected in your mind they subjectively glue together.
Strata cut slices
I made very fast cuts then allowed a few slow ones to let up the pace. Seductive in the psychometric animation, then very hard during the stroboscopic destruction of the objects. I was smearing them and violating them as a way to keep the viewer's attention. This mimics what commercials do. This apes how ‘free’ media gets paid. The birdshot volley of 15 minutes of ads during every TV hour, destroys coherent thinking. The wider fragmentation of the internet, also has its own version of this effect. With web and video games, you at least get minimal agency where and when to click. The brain is like a relentless butterfly fluttering to find endless ‘new’ moments. This tends to destroy coherent thinking because it’s putting a blizzard of never ending ‘now’ things into your feed, along with lots of dis-information disguised as fact, The great machine responds to what you click and creates a solipsistic (self reinforcing) bubble-loop of skewed information. It’s goal is to increase ad clicks disguised as content, not to improve critical thinking.
"I made very fast cuts then allowed a few slow ones to let up the pace. Seductive in the psychometric animation, then very hard during the stroboscopic destruction of the objects."
When I grew up, I saw the Vietnam War intercut each night against jingle ads for Pepsi or McDonalds. Every two minutes it would bounce from 250 US soldiers dead this week, then over to “I’m loving it!” Back and forth the TV wheel goes between these so many absurd non related things! *Laughs* It was certainly very violating! It was seduction and abuse. It destroys the ability to hold a single thread of narrative in the public mind. It destroys democratic conversation because the oxygen for facts that matter has been sucked out of the room, replaced by lumpy drips of brain noise, distractions and mis-information. Each week, thousands of civilians and soldiers die in Vietnam... meh. And then another junk food ad. Ho-hum. The non essential fluff is more excited, better produced and more thrilling. The ad has prettier colors with more active eye-popping stuff going on. Then ho-hum, a brief short dose of absurd news. The result is numbness.
Regurgitating this kind of attack led to maximalism. An condensed impression of overload so an audience must ask themselves, “Why am I not getting up and walking out? Why am I sitting here after one minute, five minutes, ten minutes watching Buzz Box, and continuing to watch?” It was just hypnotic enough to keep you there, but almost abusive enough to make you walk out! *Laughs* You know how scary this goal was, as a filmmaker? This tightrope? Abuse your audience just enough to squirm, but seduce them back so they do not actually leave! *Laughs*
Other people could say, “Maximalism should be going over the edge. You should make your audience walk out. Balls to the wall. Go ahead and make it too difficult to watch.” I would disagree with them. It’s elitist to throw up on people so hard, they respond with full rejection. Unless you want to do that for your own fun. Or it could be you are communicating to a future ‘not here’ yet. That, I cannot judge. I prefer to go up to the edge, but not over. It’s more interesting and more difficult to challenge your audience hard, yet still bring them along. Maximalism over-delivers everything all at once without going over the edge. It brings viewers somewhere they were not when they walked in.
"Maximalism over-delivers everything all at once without going over the edge."
Anisha: That’s amazing that you mention that, as that was my exact reaction while watching Buzz Box! I was completely overwhelmed, but for some reason I couldn’t look away. What was the reaction of audiences while watching Buzz Box?
David: *Laughs* Drew Newman needs to be given high regards for the soundtrack, because the audio fun house mirror actually glued together much of what the images are trying to say. The soundtrack actually completes the maximalism. Without Drew’s flowing audioscape of bizarre, warped, mimicry of jingles and words - and other acoustically weird stuff - the film wouldn’t hang, or be as effective. Listen to this 1985 soundtrack. It’s incredible! *Laughs* Because you must remember what technology was like thirty-five years ago. Drew brought audio madness to riff on the happy/horror. It began upbeat and sparkly, then kept evolving darker and more relentlessly full of dread. This sonic almost-overload, really accelerates and deepens what the images were doing.
Once, we were watching from the back of a large theatre for the first time, we would lay bets: Would ten percent of the audience leave at ‘Tuesday?’ The punchline of Buzz Box is Tuesday. After a five minute Monday onslaught, a second day of the week? Time to laugh, and cry, and cringe all at the same moment? *Laughs* Your mind asks, “What does this mean? How long is this crazy?” Monday has its own little micro-climax. It speeds up towards the end and stops. Black. A grand deep voice announces, “TUESDAY.” The puzzled audience quickly calculates, “Okay, I just watched a lot of shit going sixty miles an hour. And it’s only Tuesday? What the fuck?” *Laughs* Of course, I timed every day of the week faster, and faster, and faster, so you’re never repeating the same pace. Monday is five minutes long. Tuesday is three minutes. And Wednesday is even shorter.
During any screening there would be about one person in twenty that would actually leave. We would watch everyone squirm. A very few would ever stand up to exit. It was great! *Laughs* They would be shifting in their seats, wanting to get out of there thinking, “This is so bizarre!” It was slippery and dripping: they didn’t know what they were watching, trying to make sense. This is why the funhouse mirror approach was necessary. If the newscasters (or the blabber-casters as I called them) were real…if I edited in the real Cronkite or Brokaw, your mind would dismiss it as a readymade box. If you see film of atom bombs going off, you could go, “Okay yeah, that’s an H-bomb.” But I was creating psychomorphic inspired faces and horrors that you recognized, just in a really hypnotically distorted and strange way. A rapid-fire series of events taken from real media as media, would not be effective nor linger. Content needed to be shoved through these strange alternate alien effects, to force the audience to see it as fresh and new.
One other interesting thing is that it all looks so slow to me now. At the time, it was crazy fast. At the time everyone was like, “You have waaaaaay too many cuts! People won’t watch this. It’s going so fast, I can’t even tell what’s going on.” And this was always generally older people. I was at twenty-four, a part of the first generation to be fully raised watching T.V. The people in their thirties or forties were raised on a much slower narrative style. My teachers would step back and say, “You’ve done some nice technical things, but don’t you think it’s cut too fast?” Now I look at it and think it’s effin’ slow! It’s not actually all that fast. The perception of what is overload has changed in that thirty-five-year stretch.
Anisha: You mentioned that you used to find Buzz Box fast, but now you find it slow. I’ve noticed in my generation, our attention span is even shorter than previous generations because of YouTube, Snapchat, and social media. As Buzz Box was released in 1985, and you discussed how it countered a mass-attention deficit problem, do you believe your intentions for creating the film have stood the test of time?
David: Yes. Attention deficit from overload, is absolutely a mass disease, with many spectrums. The current president is clearly unable to focus on anything deep or long or difficult. He mentally fidgets like crazy. He is at peace showing off his alpha-bark in high adrenaline moments of confrontation. His base is a mirror of this. They want simple answers that fit pre digested massively repeated preconceptions, and with great impatience. It’s a byproduct of dis-infotainment overload. The blur. Real information in all directions can be good, like on a battlefield. But most of what is spewed forth is shit. It’s not real or useful, and our ability to process it is terrible. We are changing the speed of our brains to fit this. We shift into new rituals to fit this speed. It is moment by moment of accelerated fragmentation in social media and by smartphones. We are evolving into these hunched over fetal-position postures - staring down at our screens. Before Covid, we were already social distancing in a way. I just felt this normalizing of increased speed of junk information and random intake was clearly apparent after post WW2 society. Rock and Roll baby. Noisy music that speeds you up. In the 60’s and 70’s, and with the cocaine MTV 80’s, the variety of all things speeding up was already happening. Now the level of seduction and abuse is x100. Order of magnitude. Seven Sigma. It continues to ramp at an ever more ginormous scale. It’s Moore's law of exponential mental dis-info and recursive specifics. Seduction and abuse is not good for democracy. Fragmentation of meaning is rampant, It destroys coherency. Incoherency is everywhere. And like fish immersed in this new ocean of noise, most don’t notice. It’s just the water we swim in.
It used to be that information and entertainment were both slow and separate. Information used to be the news, and a fact-based explanation of an event. Entertainment for my parents was Cary Grant, a Judy Garland song, and Rockettes kicking their legs up. But over time, the two became blurred, and the blender went faster. Walter Cronkite looks goofy! *Laughs* Networks would then move to get entertainment-newscasters. Every anchor person after the 60’s had to look good. They realized it was a visual medium, so let’s make info-tainment - blurred and smashed together. That’s what Buzz Box is. Here’s your information. Here’s your entertainment. Let’s just jam those two back and forth and blur them, because that’s the effect of maximalism on our brain and our society. Since the 80’s, this has been increasingly perfected another step into purposeful dis-info-tainment. The intentional, designed, systematic machine that lives to dis-inform you. Fox is the leader in entertainment tools to achieve propaganda, while mimicking the archaic form of hard news.
A mesmerizing abuse generator is perverse. Like Trump is today. He’s like Andy Kaufman and Roy Cohen’s adderall injected love child. He delivers his audience a rage-roid WWF ‘kayfabe’ character, dishes out alpha male insults, then exaggerates insincere compliments using con-man level transactional tricks. This over-drives past the buffers and institutions to control it. Even my criticism feeds his attention, since it’s all accelerated pretend-fight. He plays the tough guy, and zig zags with daily distractions keep your eye off the evil being done in secret. A hyper-accelerated daily-dose shock-doctrine. A manic gaslit spew. A relentless gish gallop. The smears of melting truth are obliterated with repeated abuse. These are too overwhelming and slippery to put your blurry finger on. Multiple incomplete positions and thoughts in one run on sentence. Tremendous! Like nothing else! Very Powerful! The Best! He confabulates a made up past but exhausts reality down the collective ‘memory hole.’ This seduction and abuse can never be pinned down, so interpret as you wish. Real democracy only functions with coherent civic debate, truth, science, and shared facts with some straightforward meaning. Everything else is blur and smear manipulation to seek dominance in your mind. Thus, we are adrift.
"That’s what Buzz Box is. Here’s your information. Here’s your entertainment. Let’s just jam those two back and forth and blur them, because that’s the effect of maximalism on our brain and our society."
Anisha: What art styles have influenced your work?
David: I am a sculptor, experimental filmmaker, technologist, and artist. It was good that I went to CalArts because I spent half of my time in the art school, and half in experimental animation. In the art school, they tolerated my childlike textured clay horror-dread sculpted-painting techniques. They just wanted me to think harder about what is the enduring nature of any message at all? It’s okay to have a warped, distorted expressionist mirror but why? One of my faculty, John Baldessari said “You should go sell those as temporary paintings. The whole point of soft clay paintings should be that they will not last.” The purpose and intent should be put ‘decay over time’ in the viewer's face. He was a conceptual artist. His advice turned my struggle with the preservation of clay on its head, and it was funny. A good prank to sell art that melts away after you bought it. If I can get people to collect it for exactly that, then it’s a feature not a bug! You pay for ownership, precisely because it falls apart! Makes you look, laugh, question and think.
My worldview really came out of impressionism, expressionism, pop art, conceptual art, and postmodern art. All of these were antecedents. My teachers wanted to explore things that evolve beyond figurative, modern, and pop art. The Pops rejected the moderns. The Moderns rebelled against the figurative artists. I was rejecting both conceptual and performance by doing expressionist angry post-pop. But I absorbed it nonetheless. John said we should no longer make ‘boring art.’ While subjective, the story of any object is almost more important than the material object. The energy of any creation, is a performance, etc.
"My worldview really came out of impressionism, expressionism, pop art, conceptual art, and postmodern art."
Conceptual artists wanted to make things that made your mind interested in the idea of what they’re doing. The object is not the point of the art. What’s going on in your mind while you look at the documentation or explanation of the object - that’s where the art is. Pop art is very cool and cynical reappropriation. It is not passionate, except as a comic book color tantrum. I like that snark about mass culture. I like gaudy and trashy if hoisted onto a nice sarcastic pedestal. I re-recycled diseased glam-alternates of Marilyn and Elvis cross bred with Frankenstien. I like mocking the industrialized nature of image creation, and pop culture is often a primary source subject. But I had made a new visual syntax full of custom objects from scratch. This did not fit. I borrow both low and high culture, but not directly from pre-existing icons, photos, or tongue in cheek reappropriation of existing image forms. I am a neo-expressionist, and created my own angst-driven narrative look from whole cloth. This passion and artist driven hand work is anti-Warhol. But the repetition of variation I can multiply out with strata cut - is an indirect offspring of graffiti stencils and pop art. That sloppy repetition was a core thesis of the 60’s. My Dozen Santa slices do have sloppy repetition, but a handmade mendacious evil is sculpted into his manic smile. My fourteen Hitler slices have a cold dark woodcut expression of psycho banal evil (abuse) and then gets framed with different genders, fabrics and hair do’s (seduction) before he or she melts upwards into oblivion. It’s visually absurd with a vengeance, speaking to the banality of evil-icon images.
Doing hand made figurative ‘fine art’ was out of date by 50 years in 1980. Painting or sculpting uniquely expressed objects or faces, had stopped being cutting-edge cool with mid-period Picasso. I also wasn’t just taking a pre-existing dada ‘readymade’ and riffing on it. So my work, along with many in the 80’s became neo-post-pop-expressionism. Pardon the hyphens. In ‘79 this didn’t much exist. By ‘85, it was everywhere. Raw Magazine. Gary Panter. Wayne White. Ric Heitzman. Ozbert Parker. My post grad 1986 orbit was Pee Wee's playhouse / then Peter Gabriel / then Idiot Box and Freaked. I had a lot of pop cynicism and post tongue in cheek referencing, but the delivery was not cool. I was angry and emotional. These were Reagan-era variations of The Scream by Edvard Munch, but put into motion. I felt artistically alone when I started art school, but wound up in very good company half a decade later when it premiered.
Anisha: I read in some of the articles you sent me that you sometimes regretted not creating a narrative that could reach a larger audience. I have two questions. One, what audience were you trying to reach with your art? And two, well I think strata cut is in a way narrative because you are telling a story, but if you were to create a more conventional project, what you make?
David: Excellent question. If I was already a master of Strata Cut in 1981, I could have used it very well for traditional linear animated narrative, seeking a wider audience by conventional story understanding. This never-to-be-made short would have had a few stretch and squash strata characters, with plot motivation and with story obstacles to overcome in time. Maybe a Kubrik in Clay movie. The hallucinations would be in the ‘mind’ of the main character. Pee Wee’s Clockwork Orange Adventure on Acid. One flew over the Strata Cut Nest. That would gain a much larger audience with smaller doses of seduction and abuse. More people would know me, because that is less of a narrative challenge to watch.
Instead, I was learning a vocabulary. This material exploration, led me to animate like ‘jazz improvisation’ on a theme, to test all the approaches and methods under the camera. Every day, what if I try this? There is no clear motivation or ‘intentional’ character. The neck up disembodied head ‘watching’ the tube changes shape, color, design constantly through my film. He’s white, then black, briefly a woman, then a tube-zombie, then whipped around in circles and hacked with silverware in the face. There is no ‘through’ line to his/her/its purpose there. It’s all of us, everyone, and it just is. It builds, it makes no sense, it happens, it goes faster, it gets more crazy, it re-cycles, it never stops. No linear sequence leading to a conclusion. Just re-runz. Just more. That is not an ‘audience-award winning formula. Great conventional work also usually requires a bigger budget and a larger team. Instead, I create manic strange images of seduction and abuse for five years, while Drew riffs on manic happy / horror sounds for six months. We end up doing 16 minutes of improv glued to an accelerating theme. It takes the narrative straight jacket off, but denies a larger conventional audience. It also runs at 36 frames per second to help the hipnosis,, but save that for another day.
Strata cut could have a consistent character narrative, but this also eats many hundreds of pounds of clay like nothing else. It’s financially and spatially impractical. Certain colors get used in massive, giant amounts. Every frame slice uses about one or two dollars of clay in 2020 dollars. Yikes. Also, it gets boring to repeat a design sculpt with slight animated pose to pose distortions for yards and yards of cut up length. Expensive idea, boring to make. So for practical cost, a mainstream movie would have been stop-mo characters having strata cut flashbacks and bad dreams.
"I have a complete second career. You have to see it as beginning, middle, and end. I am in the last part of that, but the middle was all commercial."
Over time, I became a commercial director. It’s a complete second career. Making commercial art was in my middle career, which led me into technology R and D, and strata cut was the beginning and now comes back again differently at the end. I’m now pitching my last two innings, however the middle game was all commercial. Conventional animation, live action, efx all have bigger budgets, and larger teams. They can follow a storyboard that is more ‘predictable’ to a client than the nail-biting adventure of one take, no re-do strata. Happily for me, Pee Wee’s, Big Time, Freaked and other efforts used what I did naturally within their commercial goals. Intensely weird can occasionally be commercial. But Strata cut is hard to teach, and does not scale. Some people help me with the basics. Like ‘sou chef’ the element textures for me, or cut away at a block under the camera. But not sculpting in time stuff - which is slow, and is too complex to quickly teach. I ended up burning out to meet deadlines. Like three weeks for Freaked or four weeks for Big Time, means Extreme 24/7 coffee, with enough pot to take the manic edge off. This is not a long term strategy. Being true to my gift, and trying to succeed just in shorts and fine art, would have been poverty. From 1987 on, I was also increasingly into computers. I also loved motion control robots, as a way to shoot stop mo and strata cut. I directed the first ‘modern’ M&M commercial in 1995. I directed the animation and CG characters in the first twelve of those spots, done over two years. Along with Robin Ator and BBDO (the agency) I did the storyboards which dictated the live action shoots. These kinds of efforts paid much better than any strata cut projects.
The M & M’s are interesting and compelling characters because they are such totally flawed creatures. Comedy is interesting when the characters are neurotic and driven in stupid-human ways. In advertising, it’s easy to have mascots, but you don’t reach audience empathy (or engagement) when characters are an inch deep and a mile wide - like the Pillsbury doughboy (cute, safe and boring). Instead, you want characters that are venal, corrupt, petty, and stupid. Deficiencies are fun. For the M&Ms, they are short. Their vulnerability is that they can be eaten. They’re also afraid to be squished, cracked open, licked, oogled or rejected as not fully human. We sympathize with their physical struggle, like they are children. They can’t quite climb onto the chair because their legs are too short. They will be afraid of being run over by a truck, but emerge lucky and alive, because they are too short to be run over. The red M&M is an egomaniac. Why? Because he’s insecure. It’s fun. We laugh at him because he’s an insecure guy who wants to pump himself up all the time. And then yellow is kind hearted doofus, so we laugh at him.
Going to CalArts with all those amazing character animators - that rubbed off on me. I hung out. I saw what they were doing and studied the principles. A lot of my commercial art career is character animation, most people just do not know it, since it is nothing like my personal art form. I directed an enormous amount of mixed-animation and live action and started my own company with two partners, Bent Image Lab. It began after 9-11 to keep animation in Portland, and has survived quite well until Covid. It’s now shrunk a little bit, to fit these times. Also, my partners are developing long form projects or future spatial technologies, like computer vision software for communal sharing of AR spaces.
"A lot of my commercial art career is character animation, most people just do not know it, since it is nothing like my personal art form. I directed an enormous amount of mixed-animation and live action, and started my own company with two partners, Bent Image Lab."
Why Portland? I had worked in New York for a couple of years on Big Time and Pee Wee’s, then I moved back to L.A. and worked on a lot of MTV and Michael Jackson stuff there. I was competing as an LA director against Will Vinton Studios, and winning jobs with fresh mixed media designs and with unusual clay approaches. They offered me to join the pacific northwest studio instead. So I moved up to Portland as their first ‘outside’ director hire, and to help reinvent the techniques, styles and approaches, to broaden their look. PDX is an amazing little town for animation and personalized expressive art. It’s like Venice beach without any egos or showing off. The weather helps that because it doesn’t get so hot that your clay melts. And we had to do work better than everybody else. Why? Because we’re in bumfuck Portland. We’re NOT in L.A., or New York, or Chicago, or any major city of advertisement or media entertainment. We’re the afterthought as you’re flying to Seattle from San Francisco! I worked really hard to reinvigorate Will Vinton Studios with computer animation and digital post-production. I tried to add styles and materials in their animation that were not clay. Other outsiders joined, and they evolved into a full-variety animation house by the early 90’s. These were techniques I had learned from my time in New York and L.A. - but it was important for this animation town to survive. And the M&Ms are still going on here, even today! They’re still being done here by some folks who worked with me in those first two years! Isn’t that crazy? Isn’t that amazing? Why would Portland, Oregon be the place you go for great character CG?
What is common to all these efforts? I have come to see myself as a spatial engineer. A dimensional time artist. To me that includes live action, visual effects, software, anything that conveys itself on a path over time, using space to capture images or things in motion. I come at everything from a sculptural background, even the 30 years of conventional live action, mixed-media, and special effects. This whole ‘second-career’ has very little to do with strata cut, maximalism, or experimental animation. It goes back to really only having three talents. I think deeply. I imagine spatially. I am persistent and tenacious. I will continue on strange long shot bets, long after others have stopped working and the lights are out. I have grown to embrace and encourage teams. Great talent is everywhere, and teams are all about finding the right place for everyone to support each other. Animators and coders and editors and producers are the nicest people, and it is wonderful to see them sparkle.
Anisha: What projects are you working on currently?
David: For the past five years I have been deep into the technologies of spatial engineering. I’ve been working in augmented reality (AR/XR) which involves computer vision, the localization of where you are, and how your device is moving, and the positional accurate social sharing of spatial information among many devices sharing virtual objects in the real world, in real time.
"For the past five years I have been deep into the technologies of spatial engineering. I’ve been working in augmented reality (AR/XR) which involves computer vision, the localization of where you are, and how your device is moving, and the positional accurate social sharing of spatial information among many devices sharing virtual objects in the real world, in real time."
I spent a lot of time (and more than a bit of money) to help create these amazing computer vision and multi map tools with great coders and engineers. However last summer, the physical drain of it all made my auto-immune issues worse. Many years ago it was fibromyalgia. But this year has emerged into costo-condritus. The chronic pain problems have dropped my effective output from 14 hours a day, to 4. The AR team is fine, and still barrels ahead with iterative improvements. Recent tweaks and breakthroughs make this cross-platform ‘spatial joining service’ amazing. Sharing and altering dimensional overlay content that lives on top of the existing real world -- that’s what the future is all about. It’s a ‘second life’ in real life, or the multiverse, or mirror world, or hyper reality or any alternate reality you choose to share in real spaces along with digital doubles of these places that exist off location. While still awkward for consumer level ease of use, spatial sharing will take off soon. Like movies are to nickelodeons, the coming world of Hallucidations (Digital Hallucinations) will be far beyond Pokemon Go. Also offsite VR will explode to better share AR, so only a few need to be actually there onsite. Location based experiences in the global holodeck are going to mostly be experienced with full share and edit ability, only done remotely. XR tries to describe this mixture of location and remote spatialization. It may be ten years away before it’s a commonplace ‘ho-hum sure of course’ economic necessity. Much more powerful than today's internet. Someday even your mom, dad and uncle will be doing this - like smart phones today. Combine this with the many technologies that will penetrate our minds and help us dimensionally share thoughts as never before (like neural link) and post-covid, we will be living through a phenomenal synergy moment. A phase change transition in the very act of being human.
There is a dark side. In order for what I describe to work well, nothing can be a secret. Every space needs to be mapped. Your position needs to be known all the time. The amount of data being gathered is going to increase exponentially, and there will be greedy data farming there to exploit it. Great power, great responsibility. The spatial understanding of where you are every moment, and what you’re seeing. This is coming soon. The YOUar project is a small part of building this future. (youar.io)
My very private goal is - make spatial understanding of strata cut - project into a physical space at a human scale level. The foundational R and D to create dimensional virtual reality is pretty much here, but it’s not cheap, you cannot get it off the shelf, and the parts aren’t put together in any ergonomic software toolkit...yet.
Anisha: What do you mean when you said that strata cut is a mix of 2D, and 3D, with a 4D metaphor?
David: By that I mean there’s a 2D front face. Each moment a new face is revealed when you then cut it with a knife. Two-dimensional means I’m sculpting for the final flat cut result to camera. So traditional perspective illusions have to be built in time, to fit the visual needs of the final sliced image. When I’m designing this time-sculpt, 3D is the extruded bulk of all the lines flowing through the length of the block. I’m thinking where will the world line or shape line be at this moment on the flat cut? Where will it be on the next flat slice? And the next slice? This is a 3D sculpt problem. The three dimensions are because it’s an extruded tube. You ‘see’ time from the side. All the slices are connected to the next, when the block is seen from the side, from the 3D sculpt view. It’s a continuous line in three-dimensional space that’s being shown to you.
The 4D is simply time. If you ask any physicist or mathematician, “What’s the fourth dimension?” They would say, “It’s time.” In a sense, every aspect of strata cut, is like real life dimensions, only reduced by one dimension each. The result is 2D not 3D. The implication of time is 3D not 4D. The time itself is animation time, time over sequence - not physics based 4D, etc. I’m using time as a metaphor via the ‘block’ of animation cut away -- to make a four-dimensional time statement about the fact that we are three dimensionally extruded. In real life, where is our extrusion? Our trace trails? The continuity of steps in every motion we take. Here in reality, we are time blind to it. I hint artistically about this deficiency in perceiving time moments as connected.. You can see yourself not as a series of photos, who writes words, but as shapes connected in distortions where everything is connected and evolves in time depending on the cut angle you see it as. When the two-dimensional cut angle changes the way you’re going to reveal the three-dimensional program inside, the result is actually an extruded continuity of blobby spaghetti lines or dense connected ribbons and ripples in four-dimensional time space.
However, digital (computer imaging) sculpts mean you can change the knife to be an ice cream scoop. Or to be corrugated. Or to be an animated wobble itself. The knife does not need to be flat. The knife could be cut on any shape or angle. Or the knife could be like a swinging door. It could swing one way, and then swing back another. This blurs what the outcome of 2D top slice is, what it even means. These are things I would love to see in strata cut. Stuff that hasn’t been done. It needs to happen And the best way to do that is synthetically in a computer, not physically with a knife because it has its limits.
Did you see the live action ballerina strata cut? It was very different because it’s not wavy or clay. It’s a live action ballerina. She’s still being extruded, and she’s dancing inside a block with cavities and caves being cut out, along with unusual non linear knife cuts.
Anisha: Where do you see the future of strata-cut?
David: The slices from the sculpts will always be zen buddist sand paintings. Beauty that will blow away in a heat wave or direct sunlight. My struggle to preserve this work is sisyphus. Not going to last. A temporary struggle to bring that rock up the hill. Enjoy it for one moment at the top. Poof. In the static clay slice-art, I want to use the pre-destruction, the melts and smearing as an essential statement. To me, this medium can now begin to speak about global warming, and the melting of reality, the smearing of truth. Truth and lies today are more absolutely smeared than ever. While falsehoods are everywhere in human history, we have more facts and science than ever. It is the willful turning away from fact, toward truthiness, leading to corruption and deceit, that the melting speaks to. While I accept a 10,000 year arc of inter-glaciation now just continues in overdrive, I also know billions of folks being individually industrialized is melting our future in front of us as we speak. I’m taking my slices and putting them on glass or plex, and then intentionally heating them up and destroying, distorting, or smearing them. Much as I was naturally doing in Buzz Box, or again in Freaked. This will be a static statement to somebody watching it, not a moving statement in animation.
The animated sculpted time-blocks will be digitized photogrammetry. You can scan the block so well at every frame that the flow of the INTERIOR three-dimensional block shapes can be understood in addition to the front slices frame. That thing can be preserved in a digital form that allows you to recut it any angle you want. To cut it with a boolean scoop. To cut it with a corrugation. To scale it up so it actually exists in any scale you want. Imagine strata cut blocks that are your height. Then imagine strata cut blocks that are the size of a building. Imagine merging the live action ballerina approach, with the artistic combination between chaos and control that I show in traditional, handmade, plasticine strata cut. Imagine that.
This process will preserve each new time sculpt in a way that the in-betweens can be understood. It’s called optical flow. If you cut every slice, you can go back with a computer and create the optical flow, which is where is the shape, color, and edge from this pixel going next. From that you can reconstruct the sculptural, volumetric pixel that allows you to actually recut it from any direction. It preserves what was inside it as kinetic potential again. When you build a block, and it’s not yet animated, then it sits dormat and hidden. It is only potential. The kinetic has not been revealed. When you actually slice it, you create energy or power, revealing the kinetic energy.
Dimensionalized virtual reality via some form of synthetic light field is privately my goal. This will surpass film making and gives us ‘view shed’ of all actions. When the viewer moves his or her head, they choose the actual spot to reveal the unique view this shot angle is seen from, as the fully dimensional shapes in the beyond-film or beyond-movie storytelling goes merrily along. It’s a necessary tool to make augmented reality on location communicated with virtual reality off location. In order for us to be connected, you need to have access to a digital double of everything you want to share or look at with everybody else who’s not there on location. 6D or six-dimensional is what augmented reality actually is. It’s three dimensions of x, y, z, which we all understand, the space in which we are in, and the three dimensions of your device. The phone itself has another three axes. AR (augmented reality) locks to the original, physical space. The device is changing its world space to fit what it’s supposed to look like on that three-dimensional plane. It’s really a six-dimensional experience. I don’t think it will be as confusing in the long run as it is now, because it’s a pioneer, over-the-horizon thing.
When you have dimensional virtual reality, you could see your strata cut as big as you and move your head around it. In augmented reality, your device, your eyes, your glasses could tilt around to see. If that’s done in strata cut, people’s jaws will drop again. That’s why I stopped in 2000. Everyone started saying strata cut was computer generated. When I began in 1985, people’s jaws dropped. Nobody had seen anything like this! *Laughs* Sometime after Jurassic Park, around 1996 or 1997 people started to think it was computer animation.
"In augmented reality, your device, your eyes, your glasses could tilt around to see. If that’s done in strata cut, people’s jaws will drop again."
Anisha: Any final thoughts?
David: Time blindness is a big deal to me. We have five senses. We developed those for survival. But nobody needed a sense of time. Although curiously, as humans, that’s our strength. The degree to which we can understand a sequence of events that are going to happen based on things that have happened is an intellectual foresight. We can see that this event that happened here will lead to that. That’s why we rule the Earth. We remember the past, and we project the future. That’s why we do art, and that’s why we do stories, poetry, paint, music, all of it. Art is useless, economically stupid, and self-indulgent. But it’s also can be the MOST important thing - because it’s a way to create time binding. It’s me telling you something you can take and despite never having experienced it, can vicariously understand and pass it to the next person. This is what stories do. Good art is trying to carve out pieces of the story that have never been told.
"Art is useless, economically stupid, and self-indulgent. But it’s also can be the MOST important thing - because it’s a way to create time binding. It’s me telling you something you can take and despite never having experienced it, can vicariously understand and pass it to the next person. This is what stories do. Good art is trying to carve out pieces of the story that have never been told."
If you would like to learn more about David Daniels, check out his links below:
Website: www.stratacut.com
Vimeo: www.vimeo.com/stratacut
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