These samples are greatly reduced for the web as most of our animations are multi-channel and difficult to present. If you're interested in viewing these or other animations at a higher resolution please contact us.

Photography, by its nature, fixes a moment in time. The camera's position at the instant the photograph is taken is as firmly frozen as the subject's due to the lens' solitary point of view. We began to challenge this paradigm several years ago by working with a three-dimensional scanner and using it as a camera. Because its lens surrounds the subject it provides an unlimited number of viewpoints. This ability, providing the simultaneity sought by the Cubists, removes the camera from the constraints of time, and allows us to move the camera around the subject, thus choreographing moving images, or animations, from still objects. Since the camera and viewer occupy the same physical space this also serves to place the observer outside the limited time frame of a photograph.

The animations we create, originating as they do from still images, visually seem to retain a sense of stillness, much as a photograph does. As such, we allow them to remain silent. This silence brings a weight to the animation and, like a photographic image, allows one’s imagination to fill in the void.

Initially, we sketch a storyboard for an intended animation. The storyboard changes as the animation develops and is ultimately completed last. As the storyboard and video progress, we often make prints and drawings that are extracted moments from the animation, built from many layers, and revisited from multiple perspectives at the same instant in time. Over the course of this process the storyboard, prints, drawings, and video influence each other in an intimate way.

The frailty of the human body has been an ongoing theme in our work and in manipulating it we often fragment and reorder its parts. Because only external information is recorded the figures are hollow, and in sectioning them they become ribbons of flesh. These calligraphic shards of sliced figures are meant to emphasize our human vulnerability. They become painterly abstractions, at times like brushstrokes, of varying weights and intensities. The hollowness of the whole figures contributes to a sense of derealization, the feeling that nothing is real, and at the same time the shredding of the figures makes them anonymous and universal.