Excerpts from 'Artifact Cartoons' - MFA Research work on environmental imaging at COFA, UNSW
Developed with assistance from the Australia Council for the Arts, Visual Arts Board.
(Some of these images are in stereoscopic 3D so if you have Anaglyph glasses look out for 3D sections)

This work explores the animism of nature as well as the phenomenology of the camera. Beginning from Tompkins and Bird's 1973 book "The Secret Life of Plants", these animations draw the superficial camera image (determined from a human perspective) to unveil itself though the reductive time scale of rocks and trees. Through difference mapping, compositing and 3D stereoscopic imaging, these samples are reconfigured to question notions of the solidity of matter. Particalisation of matter draws attention to its relative impermance. The offset image also indicates an impressionism in seeing (only seeing part of the picture) and the need to anthropomorphise nature and to locate 'life forms' in order to find confluence with it.

video: Samuel James
movement: Victoria Hunt
sound: Melissa Hunt