APD Week 7 - Play & Objects

Theme:

Play & Objects - to consider how the novel use of objects can create playful interactions or experiences.

Method:

I will create a perpetual motion animation using simple 3D objects in Autodesk Maya.

Context:

Andreas Wannerstedt - https://www.instagram.com/wannerstedt/?hl=en

This week’s response is inspired by Wannerstedt’s “Oddly Satisfying” series, where he creates animation loops using simple 3D objects with mesmerising results. His approach to animation design is quite playful, choosing to ignore certain physical limitations of the real world in order to create and explore a perpetual sense of motion and wonder.

 
Play and the Experience of Interactive Art - Brigid Costello + The Ambiguity of Play - Brian Sutton-Smith

While Huizinga claims that art is not play if it is “dumb, immobile” and not performative, Gadamer argues that the act of experiencing the art puts it into the space of presentation, in which play operates. With this in mind, playfulness would come from the audience experience of the rhetoric of the imaginary, i.e. an illusion of motion & movement that could not exist in the real world.

Response: 

I tinkered with some concepts that use object rotation to create perpetual motion, deciding to move forward with my third idea of a ball bouncing on the edge of a triangle and thus propelling it. I modelled the 3D assets in Maya, animating a 25 frame loop of the ball moving up and down on the Y-axis while the triangle rotates 360° easing out. After relearning how to import shaders (Arnold shaders provided by VisualAct) and adjust shadow renders (special thanks to Chris Jones), a simple bell sound effect was added to enhance the overall quality of the work.

Reflection:

My primary goal for this exercise was to create something that instils a sense of wonder and amusement in my audience, inviting them to rewatch the animation loop at length. While the act of rewatching isn’t entirely ‘playful’, it is an act of spectatorship, i.e. vicarious play.

My secondary goal was to see how playful I could make a task which I knew I disliked, i.e. 3D animation. Coming back to 3D animation after several years was almost as frustrating as when I first picked it up. In this case, while I understood what I wanted to do in Maya, relearning how to access all the sections of the program I needed prevented me from building a consistent work momentum. 

Additionally, I struggled with all the same things I used to have difficulties with, e.g. the render aspect of the exercise, trying to figure out how to correct the gamma in the video export. Unfortunately my frustrations overpowered my sense of play through the non-conceptualisation elements of the task, but working with the concept of perpetual motion definitely inspired a playful rethinking of real-world limitations.