"Creation of a Universe: A Vision" is an interdisciplinary 'vessel' in which fine arts, digital arts, film, and poetry become one expression to be exhibited in multi-dimensional environments; noting, spectators will gather in the traditional sites of the individual expressions but will witness the deconstruction of each of the other media. I.e., poetry becomes performance becomes film becomes computer generated animation becomes art becomes poetry; film becomes art becomes performance, and so on. To paraphrase Friedrich Kittler, German philosopher and literary theorist, the separate flows of data streams are given the opportunity to stream through one instrument as a single data flow.
The paintings, Creation of A Universe, were created in the South of France while a guest lecturer at the Universite de Nice in 1986. At the time of their creation, I made a conscious choice that these works would not be exhibited until the 'right time' . . . to date, they have not been exhibited. It should be noted that the 'universe' being created in these works is, in fact, an act of creation creating itself. While inspired enormously by the "heavens", this project should not be understood to be a scientific or theological illustration. Animation, in its purest definition, is 'to give life to'. "Creation of A Universe: A Vision" gives life to a vision of creation creating itself as it streams through the instruments of fine arts, digital arts, film and poetry . . . it is its own Isness.
"Creation Of A Universe: A Vision" is a marriage of an experimental, media arts film to a fine arts exhibition. The combination of creating experimental animation, computer animation, optically-manipulated footage (vfx), direct filming of the original paintings, and the production of images (digital and hand-painted) yet to be created, is the material of which this project is made. In the same spirit, the film will be exhibited as an interdisplinary project, as well. It will be exhibited theatrically, as a video, as a fine arts exhibition, as a DVD, on the World Wide Web and in venues not yet explored ... such as IMAX and, perhaps, planetariums/observatories.
Essentially, research from numerous perspectives of elements which particularize performance art . . . visual art which sounds, which moves, which actively engages the viewer through technological interactivity . . . is in harmony with visual art which lives in stasis as "simultaneous time". Visual elements investigated are done so from painterly and filmic perspectives. This film will present a study in the role of non-narrative time inherent in the gestalt of painting imagery in relationship to the linear experience of animated film imagery - an exploration in the marriage of art and film, illusion and reality, time and light in matter, in the creation of a hybrid form of art which embraces science and technology that encompasses monumental space. (copywritten 2000)