Hi Steve,

First dispatch – setting up my piece outside the St Pete Times Forum. Serendipitously, the circus is performing during Lights On Tampa, right inside the building adjacent to the parking lot on which my piece is projected, a huge drive-in movie vibe.

Here are some set-up shots, and first tests of the projector. The opening is on Saturday.

marina

Slurb (2009)
18 minute loop, animation and sound
Concept/ direction/animation: Marina Zurkow
Music by Lem Jay Ignacio
Additional animation: Jen Kelly

Photo: Marina Zurkow

The animated, carnivalesque tailgate party of Slurb loops and stutters, like a vinyl record stuck in a groove. Slurb – a word that collapses “slum” and “suburb” – sounds like “slurp,” “slump,” “slumber;” it encapsulates the dreamy, melancholic ode to the rise of slime, a watery future of toxic seas. In Slurb, there is a sense that everyone is waiting – but a cataclysm already occurred. People have been forced to move onto the water, where the jellyfish now have dominion. There is a history of satirical illustration, epitomized by J.J.Grandville in the 19th century, in which animal-headed humans are deployed in the telling of troubling social narratives. Slurb is that kind of story. Facts of the ocean’s radical changes in acidity and oxygen levels form the backbone of the animation; overfishing, dumping, and climate change’s heating of ocean currents have already triggered a reversion toward a primordial sea in parts of the ocean larger than the state of Texas. Slurb’s surface is inspired by fictions, like J.G. Ballard’s prescient 1962 novel Drowned World, in which inhabitants of a flooded world feel the tug of the sun, and dream of a return to their amniotic past.

Chris Doyle, Ecstatic City

Day time shots for “Ecstatic City,” Chris’s project – this, the permanent part in the Tampa Convention Center.

marina

CONCEPT

“I employ animation in much of what I make. In fact, my interest in animation goes beyond technique, extending to the idea of animus, an energizing spirit, that extends to places as well as things. Ecstatic City (Tampa) is a project about animating a place, in this case, a district of the city that has as its hub, the Tampa Convention Center. For Ecstatic City, I am deploying seventy rotating mirror balls throughout the area. Brackets supporting the balls, as well as integrated spotlights are attached to palm trees and light poles surrounding the Convention Center and the Riverwalk. Beginning at dusk, pedestrian areas of the city will be bathed in a gentle wash of spinning light. By taking a conventional, off-the-shelf object typically used in the disco and re-contextualizing it in the city, I am attempting to amplify the sense of atmosphere, the mood of expectation and possibility that is so important to the life of a place and the experience of its people.”
– Chris Doyle