Collaborative Animation
Project Statement
What happens when we approach animation as a generative practice that anyone can engage in? For a medium that is so often associated with play, joy, and experimentation, there are few opportunities for people to engage with the creation of an animated project outside of the regimented workflows of the professional animation studio. Due to this narrowed view of possible production modes for animation, there are undiscovered opportunities for the practice of animation to facilitate new modes of collaboration and socialization. This thesis research explores what animation can reveal about the connective fibers that hold a group together and the differences that can make the same connections dynamically come alive.
In this installation, viewers join in the effort of bringing an animation to life by stepping up and cranking the Peneletrope Cinematic Oppositional Device, a film projector built to play collaboratively designed fabric film strips. These film strips, inspired by the craft practices such as the sewing circle and developed over the past year in settings as varied as coastal preschools and textile festivals, present an innovative method of designing a collective space for people to come together and build a shared animation by adding to the reel through embroidery, painting, drawing, quilting, and creative destruction of the fabric. This installation invites the viewer-participant to become a collaborator as well, investing them with the power to see the animation in motion. Named after the Homeric figure of Penelope, the Peneletrope Cinematic Oppositional Device is a similarly astute machine that allows the participant to ‘weave and unweave’ the animation, providing a defamiliarized approach to how we view the seemingly passive reception of a piece of animated or filmic media.
Artist Bio
Charlie C Wilcox is a designer, animator, embroiderist, musician, artist, collaborator, and friend who hails from Lindstrom, Minnesota, also known as “America’s Little Sweden.” Charlie’s social practice involves exploring what it means to turn the creation of animation into a hands-on event that can focalize and generate community. By developing animation into a collaborative act that integrates qualities from textile craftwork and participatory art, Charlie explores new situations and purposes for animation as a method for collective expression and visioning. His work creates methodologies for representations of social design and collaboration that favor embodied realities beyond sheer logicism and consensus. Charlie also makes his own embroidered animations, curates and organizes the Frombelow Microcinema, helps organize Portland Textile Month, and plays tuba in the punk band Horsebag.
