STICKING HIS NECK OUT FOR INTERACTIVE ART
Calgary brings his augmented reality to animation festival, GIRAF
Artist Brandon Hearty had some frazzled nerves upon learning that members of the Quickdraw Animation Society planned to check out his exhibit at Emmedia Gallery earlier this year.
It was a showcase of work Hearty had created as part of his thesis for his master of fine arts degree at University of Calgary, using a relatively new approach that goes by the trippy, sci-fi sounding name “augmented reality.”
The artist admits, though, that he felt very much like a beginner, at least when it came to animation.
“I got really nervous that it was going to be evaluated by actual animators,” says Hearty. “I got selfconscious a little bit.”
But members of the group were supportive and eventually enlisted Hearty to be one of its featured artists at this year’s Giant Incandescent Resonating Animation Festival (GIRAF), where Hearty will host a workshop on Saturday that will introduce students to the history and concept behind augmented reality.
It’s a relatively new movement in art and advertising involving technology that superimposes computer-generated animation onto a user’s view of the real world through a device such as a smartphone. For Hearty’s work, it involves placing the device in front of a print, which triggers the image — usually of an animal or insect — to spring to digital life on the screen.
A multidisciplinary artist who has worked in painting, sculpture and printmaking, Hearty was introduced to the concept while on an exchange program at the Royal College of Art in London. While there, he took in an exhibition in Liverpool, a one-off collaboration between an artist group and an animation group using augmented reality technology.
“Just like anything else in art, a lot of what happens for artists and people who are actively trying to be creative, it’s a matter of finding something and tweaking it,” Hearty says. “I saw this and immediately thought I wanted to experiment with it. A lot of my artistic practice has revolved around adopting new and exciting ways of making things.”
Hearty had already been doing printmaking in England. When he got back to Calgary he started created the animation for the project. He was so excited by the results that he turned it into his master’s thesis.
In August, he presented Chaotic/ Neutral at Emmedia, an exhibition that mixed “animal symbolism, mathematical geometry, and the fusion of old and new technologies to distil a narrative about escapism and the social forces of competing subcultures.”
“It’s a juxtaposition of ideas, there’s this old and new being combined and existing together,” he says. “I went through this process of using a 200-year-old printing press and creating a printing plate for it and hand-printing every single print with old rollers and old ink and old technology. It was this idea that any transition into the new always incorporates the old. Every new technology we have is based on old technology and we just build in steps.”
What augmented reality might mean for animation has yet to be determined. It is still a relatively new movement.
“What’s exciting about it is that it’s a new application for things that people already do,” Hearty says. “I’m just excited to see what people can do with it, what people will do with it. Ultimately, it’s just a new venue or platform for distributing animation. What any augmentedreality app does is take an existing animation — you created it and it exists on its own as a cartoon or a stop-motion or a 3-D animation — and inserts it into the reality. What’s exciting about that is that it makes people interact with that animation in a different way. Suddenly it’s something that is real. Even though it’s not tangible, it’s something that occupies space and something that you can see and play with. It’s interactive in a way that normal animation isn’t.”
Brandon Hearty will hold a workshop on Saturday at noon at the Quickdraw Animation Society. Giraf runs until Sunday. Visit giraffest.ca