CHAPTER 17 | Metaphors to Performance

Puppets

The movements of animals may be compared with those of automatic puppets, which are set going on the occasion of a tiny movement; the levers are released, and strike the twisted strings against one another; or with the toy wagon. For the child mounts on it and moves it straight forward, and then again it is moved in a circle…. Animals have parts of a similar kind, their organs, the sinewy tendons to wit and the bones; the bones are like the wooden levers in the automaton, and the iron; the tendons are like the strings, for when these are tightened or leased movement begins. However, in the automata and the toy wagon there is no change of quality…. In an animal the same part has the power of becoming now larger and now smaller, and changing its form, as the parts increase by warmth and again contract by cold and change their quality. This change of quality is caused by imaginations and sensations and by ideas.

— Aristotle, On the Motion of Animals, 7, 350 BCE. ¹

From Aristotle’s writings, we gather that puppetry is an ancient enterprise. Some scholars suggest it is even older than theater based on human actors, originating around 30,000 BCE. It therefore boasts a lineage at least as old as cave paintings and petroglyphs. Fast forward to today, and we’ll see clear a metaphorical extension of puppetry in the 3D arena. Pixar even called its in-house software Marionette before it became Presto.

Human controllers

The goal of puppetry is to create an entity that occupies another reality than that of the puppeteer. Most strategies involve a calculated deception of the audience. The puppeteer attempts to remain unnoticed, if not hidden. Some of the oldest expressions of the form include shadow casting, in the case of Javanese Wayang Kulit shows. Others include the black clothing of traditional Japanese bunraku.

The manipulation of the intricate Wayang Kulit shadow puppets occurs from below, with puppeteers moving entities using simple sticks. The contrast in form between the complex figure and the simple controller is enough for us to “forget” the controller. A different contrast occurs between the brightly colored and patterned surfaces of bunraku puppets and the featureless, saturated black of the puppeteers.

We can certainly draw useful metaphors from those expressions. But Pixar pegged it: the marionette uses very complex manipulators of rigid sticks and tensile wires to control the figures from above. Clever multiple-finger triggers allow mouth movement or eye blinking. The puppeteer must develop the skill and dexterity of a musician to effectively control the puppet.

British artist Gerry Anderson invented an innovative technique for the cult favorite Thunderbirds TV series. He used the slightly unfortunate moniker Supermarionation to describe his method. It perfectly synchronizes the movement of a marionette’s lips with pre-recorded dialogue. South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker revived this in 2004 for Team America: World Police. However, where Anderson tries to repress the visibility of strings, Stone and Parker exaggerate them for satirical effect.

Digital controllers

In Maya, it’s unnecessary to worry about strings. The manipulations of the puppeteer exist in the timeline and spatial coordinates. But the principles and complexity are the same. An entity-body contains rigid, “compressive” members to maintain form, and fluid, “tensile” elements to achieve motion. We create the “skeleton” using the Joint Tool, along with the IK (Inverse Kinetics) Handle Tool “tendons.” These are analogous to the primary movement found in a marionette. Deformers contribute minor but life-like motion such as eye-blinking function in the same capacity that finger-triggers perform. Blend Shapes create repetitive motion akin to a crank or pedal.

Joint with IK handle

Deformer

Blend shape

However, the movements possible with a Maya entity go far beyond what’s possible with the most complex marionette. Aristotle makes the distinction between puppets and animals as primarily one of “quality.” By this, he means the morph-ability of an animal part, “becoming now larger and now smaller, and changing its form…” in response to the environment. The morphing capabilities of an entity in Maya approach the limits of animal motion to a perceptually undetectable degree. But it can also exceed those limits for comic or dramatic effect. Nevertheless, in many ways, the animator has become less of a graphic artist and more of a performer: a puppeteer.

Other art machines

The machine is a way of establishing your distance from the object.

— Marcel Duchamp ²

A puppet functions as a kind of art machine, using visual elements and principles in a narrative-driven context. Largely a phenomenon starting in the 20th Century, works of art that use either a machine aesthetic or machine strategy have by now become a mainstay of art practice.

Cirque Calder

Alexander Calder’s Cirque de Calder bridges the gap between so-called “fine art” sculpture and “low-brow” puppet entertainment. In Calder’s work, there’s a fine line between the object and the skeleton. He often “draws” in space with wire. Under the whimsical veneer of the proceedings, we marvel at Calder’s mastery of physical equilibrium and the exceptional use of common materials. More episodic than narrative, elements of the Cirque became the physics laboratory for a practice that went on to develop what Marcel Duchamp named mobiles.

Dada and its offspring

Calder developed the Cirque in Paris. At that time the city was filled with avant-garde artists who had toyed with machines, figuratively and literally. Duchamp, as we’ve seen, was making the transition from mechanical-erotic metaphor embodied by such objects as the Chocolate Grinder to the hardcore mechanical action of the Rotoreliefs. Man Ray was pushing beyond photography toward the Object to Be Destroyed (a.k.a. Indestructible Object). Russian Constructivist Naum Gabo was transforming a line into volume with such works as his Standing Wave. These mechanical works laid the foundation for the later self-destructing art machines.

Homage to New York by Jean Tinguely and the installation documented in The Way Things Go by Fischli and Weiss are their offspring.

Such is also the family tree for contemporary art machines like those of Joe Holliday, Martin Creed, and Andrew Huang.

Andrew Huang, Doll Face, 2005

Performance Art

I want to depict the most romantic idea in the most detached form.

—Oskar Schlemmer ³

Some uses of puppetry might be considered the intersection between art machines and Performance Art. A term coined in the 1960s, Performance Art has a lineage that stretches back to Dada poetry readings at the Cabaret Voltaire. It also owes a debt to Bauhaus instructor Oskar Schlemmer’s theatrical experiments with light, sound, and costume. In particular, he designed the mechanistic costumes of the Triadic Ballet to make performers feel like puppets. Schlemmer considered the movement of puppets to be superior to human dancers.

Oskar Schlemmer, Triadic Ballet, 1922

Art with the body

Schlemmer was unable to emigrate along with fellow instructors Josef Albers, Anni Albers, and Walter Gropius to Black Mountain College in the wake of the Nazi closure of the Bauhaus. But his spirit of avant-garde performance continued there unabated. Such figures as choreographer Merce Cunningham and composer John Cage were on the scene. These artists constitute the foundation for the Happenings and Body Art performances that started cropping up in the 60s and 70s.

By that time, Performance Art meant something was live, that it was art, and that it was not theater. The distinction is that it was a kinetic image, episodic and not sequential. It also existed as an artistic critique of the mechanisms of art marketing in a capitalist economy. After all, collectors could not buy or sell it. Thus a performance work subverted galleries, agents, brokers, and auction houses by its very nature.

The list of performance art practitioners includes people whom any artist should get to know. Yves Klein to Joseph Beuys. Vito Acconci to Chris Burden. Marina Abramović to Bruce Nauman. Ana Mendieta to Matthew Barney. Ant Farm to Yoko Ono. John Baldessari to… well, it is a large slice of the art world to explore. For inspiration, peruse images of these and other performance artists at work by visiting The Art Story.

Singing sculpture

Of particular interest to the 3D modeler are strains of performance that heighten awareness of body movement and/or the use of technology. The British group Gilbert and George, with The Singing Sculpture, implies both. They employ a slightly trance-like, robotic aspect in their movement and use of a synchronized soundtrack.

Interview with Gilbert and George, including footage of The Singing Sculpture, first performed circa 1969

By the 1980s, proliferating media technologies began to make their way into performance works. Laurie Anderson’s episodic music performances come to mind, using simple movement in profile (reminiscent of shadow puppets?) and synchronized with sound.

Laurie Anderson, O Superman (For Massenet), 1981

The most dangerous shows on Earth

Taken to the extreme, we find a melding of performance with art machines in the work of Survival Research Laboratories, founded by Mark Pauline in the late 1970s. Dedicated to “re-directing the techniques, tools, and tenets of industry, science, and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare,” according to SRL’s website, they have produced some of the most extreme mechanical performances in history. These mix pyrotechnics, robotics, and animal parts, generally living up to their motto: “Producing the most dangerous shows on Earth.”

Fig 17 Survival Research Laboratories in an apocalyptic performance from 2006

Virtual performance

Let’s return to body-based performance — but this time, in a virtual way. We’ll conclude this exploration of precedent with a work by Eva and Franco Mattes, who go by 0100101110101101.org in cyberspace. Starting in 2007, in a series of original works and several reenactments such as their homage to Gilbert and George, they pioneered the idea of a synthetic performance in a virtual environment:

Forget about museums, galleries and biennials, stay home and play video games. Synthetic Performances are online live gaming sessions inside the virtual world of Second Life, performed by Eva and Franco Mattes through their avatars, which were constructed from their bodies and faces. People can attend and interact with the live performances connecting to the video-game from all over the world.

— Eva and Franco Mattes ⁴

Just a couple of years earlier, Marina Abramović had produced an homage to early performance works at a Guggenheim NY event with the ironic title Seven Easy Pieces. Here, she reenacted works by Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, and others. Of Eva and Franco’s Synthetic Performances she said, “It was such a good idea, I’m sort of jealous that it never crossed my mind.” ⁵ In many ways, the Synthetic Performances are a digital re-manifestation of Oskar Schlemmer’s idea to create the “most romantic idea in the most detached form.”

Eva and Franco Mattes (0100101110101101.org), synthetic performance in Second Life in a Reenactment of Gilbert & George’s The Singing Sculpture, 2007. The video is a capture of a live stream from Second Life.

Figure reconfigured

Now the sole reason why painters of this sort are not aware of their own error is that they have not learnt Geometry, without which no one can either be or become an absolute artist…

— Albrecht Dürer ⁶

As the names imply, Performance Art, Happenings, Body Art, and such are devoted to the presentation of the human form, in real-time and real situations. The 3D artist works in a virtual environment. This is simply a contemporary way of saying he or she works in a representative environment and therefore must use representation of the body and/or movement.

The figurative counter-revolution

Starting in the 60s, that heyday of Modernist abstraction, some artists revolted against the revolution and revived figurative expression in their work. The artists who conducted this counter-revolution were largely schooled in a Modernist milieu. They had to advocate for the relevance of figurative study in a fairly hostile climate. Figure drawing had not been dismissed from art school curricula, but it did take a back seat to the prevailing dogmas of abstraction. This generation of figurative revivalists often resorted to expressionism or technology to create their work.

The contemporary rise of 3D modeling has led to a new revival of figure study. As it was for figurative painting and sculpture that preceded the Modern movement, thus it is now for certain kinds of digital modeling that life drawing is a critical skill, and understanding of anatomy is a necessary knowledge base. A 3D artist working in animation, gaming or any environment where representations of biological entities are created and manipulated is disadvantaged without this knowledge. It is a deep irony that the detached, immaterial digital world would compel artists to return to the figure!

Study of the figure

While it is beyond the scope of this article to deeply delve into life drawing or anatomy, we can observe a very interesting precedent for the concept of polygonal figure modeling in the work of German artist Albrecht Dürer. Like other artists of the Renaissance, he became fascinated with the study of the human form and perspective, paralleling many of the same discoveries made by da Vinci. We see Dürer’s interpretation of the proportions of the Vitruvian Man — the same subject seen in the more familiar da Vinci rendition.

Proportion and deformation

Out of Dürer’s fascination with proportion came a unique study of the volumetric relationships of the body with space. Artists under his influence began drawing stereometric figures. These distill the body to volumetric form to better understand its relationship to perspective foreshortening and other pictorial-spatial phenomena. These stereometric humans bear an uncanny resemblance to the low poly 3D modeling performed in Maya, a testament to the effectiveness of visualizing and drawing figurative entities in this geometrically abstract manner.

In the third part of his comprehensive treatise Vier Bücher von Menschlicher Proportion (The Four Books on Human Proportion) of 1528, Dürer adjusts and distorts ideal human proportions to develop extreme examples of the variety found within human form. He uses geometric transformations of varying kinds. For example, we can observe the drawings of various facial proportions using affine transformations that maintain horizontal parallel relationships by translating planes vertically. Dürer’s proportion grid acts much like a Lattice Deformer in Maya. Visit the Mathematicas Visuales website to learn more about affine transformations.

Abstraction and expression

Dürer’s morphological games evolved in the hands of other artists. One such set of works is the System on Physiognomy of Charles Le Brun. This is a series of engravings exploring the resemblances between human forms (and presumably the personalities embodied therein) and their animal counterparts.

In his work, he combined projection alignments with a controlling geometry based on a triangle. Presumably, the angle formed by the eye and brow line predicts an individual’s proclivity: if angled upward, that individual would be a noble and spiritual entity. If angled downward, a vile and hedonistic character prevails. While the science behind physiognomy has fallen out of repute, Le Brun’s resemblances remain a useful source of inspiration for artists who wish to communicate the content of an entity’s character through metaphorical, outward, and exaggerated signals in appearance.

Entities, animation, and CGI

No amount of great animation will save a bad story.

—John Lasseter ⁷

We’ll conclude with a necessary but all-too-brief examination of machines and figures expressed in digital artworks, noting especially the impact that computer-generated imagery (CGI) and particularly computer animation have had on these in cinema. Like the subjects above, to delve into this history with any depth would make this title onerously long. However, it is a fascinating topic, and several online resources exist that amplify the brief exploration below.

For starters, visit the Film Milestones in Visual and Special Effects pages on the American Movie Classics website. Find at what point in cinema history computers began to dominate the visual effects of Hollywood. A bit more “listy” in tone, the timeline of CGI in films at Wikipedia condenses specifically digital effect history into one page for easier, if less comprehensive, reference. If you wish to explore the beginnings of CG realism in depth, visit Section 19 at A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation. This academic site gives the visitor a taste of the technical hurdles that have been overcome in the past generation to bring CGI to prominence in today’s visual art world.

The Works

The current players in CG dominate the film industry. But many of them started in the back halls of computer science departments at colleges, in their dorms and garages. They invented conventions as they flew by the seat of their pants. Most histories rightly credit Pixar with creating the first feature-length CGI animated film in 1995 with Toy Story. But a scrappy group of pioneer computer graphic artists at the New York Institute of Technology attempted a full-length film titled The Works, starting in the digital Stone Age of the early 1980s.

NYIT Computer Graphics Lab, The Works, circa 1982

The project was too ambitious for its time and was never completed. But out of the ashes arose a phoenix of alumni who went on to Pixar, Pacific Data Images (now PDI/DreamWorks), and other major animation houses, CG schools, and digital companies. Without cutting their teeth on The Works, who knows how long it would have been before someone had the guts to try it again? Proof that failure contains the seeds of success!

Progenitors of Pixar

Still, we certainly must give credit where credit is due: the list of CG “firsts” compiled by Pixar is astounding. Before becoming a stand-alone powerhouse, it began in 1979 as a graphics subdivision in the computer division of Lucasfilm, Ltd. It was spun off and acquired by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs in 1986 and is currently a Disney property. In 1984, as The Works was sputtering, future Pixar guru John Lasseter and his future Pixar team created their first animated short, The Adventures of André and Wally B.

John Lasseter et. al., The Adventures of André and Wally B., 1984

By 1986, the iconic Luxo Jr. made history as Pixar’s first independently produced short. It was the first CGI film to be nominated for an Academy Award. The cocky lamp has become Pixar’s mascot, opening each film by squishing the “I” in “PIXAR” like he did the little ball.

John Lasseter et. al., Luxo Jr., 1986

Content is the driver

Luxo Jr. and Sr. have both made cameos in Pixar feature films, and the small ball has made an appearance in every Pixar film. Luxo Jr. was such a phenomenon that Pixar kept producing short films like Red’s Dream and Tin Toy, the precursor to Toy Story. The Pixar shorts revived a cinematic tradition when the company started pairing shorts with feature-length films, but the shorts provided an important laboratory for effects. Knick-Knack, for example, experiments with water environments and particle effects that are used in later films like Finding Nemo.

Nevertheless, while effects were important, the critical lesson Pixar teaches us is that content is the driver. The reason Pixar’s films are so enduring is that they are well-crafted narratives, not because the effects are whiz-bang. We can look past what now seems like comparatively primitive animation in the first Toy Story because the story is so compelling, if a bit sentimental.

The rise of Maya

Another important lesson can be found in the work of Chris Landreth. An engineer turned artist, Landreth was one of the first animators to test Maya as a production-quality software package. His work, which he dubs Psychorealism for its use of exaggeration and surreal effects, does not create a realistic world. But it does create a believable world. That is, the distortions and manipulations of reality create a world that permits the audience to suspend its disbelief in the face of the fantastic elements Landreth employs. See for yourself in his works Ryan, The End, and Bingo. 

Chris Landreth, Bingo, 1998

Bingo was released by Alias/Wavefront to demonstrate the capabilities of Maya for the software’s general release in 1998, but this was not Maya’s first use in cinema. Before the merger with Wavefront, Alias had been adapting an earlier non-animation product for animation purposes. Code-named “Maya” after the Sanskrit term for the concept of illusion, this pre-release version of the software made its earliest film splash as the generator for the Cave of Wonders in Disney’s Aladdin in 1992.

John Musker and Ron Clements, Cave of Wonders sequence from Aladdin, 1992

Proprietary and open-source

Maya software has continued to play a major role in animation and special effects creation. A partial listing of major films that use Maya includes:

This is not to say these films used Maya exclusively. Practically every film is created using a combination of software packages, renderers, and compilers.

Most of the large animation houses combine commercial software with in-house proprietary software. We’ve already mentioned Pixar’s Marionette. Another notable in-house software is Weta Digital’s MASSIVE developed for the battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Sony Pictures Animation’s Arnold is a spinoff of the commercially available standard shader in Maya. Another is PDI/Dreamworks’ e-motion, and there are many others. These software packages are carefully guarded proprietary assets, and little is known about them out-of-house. This should reinforce the message that software skills are a fairly ephemeral and transferable knowledge base. The animators in these studios instead rely on building their skills to tell a good story. They know how to use observation of the world to work with and manipulate the laws of physics through animation.

Blender vs Maya

What is an aspiring animator to do if the door is closed on these in-house assets, and Maya is too darn expensive? Blender is a solid open-source alternative to hone modeling skills. The age-old Maya-vs-Blender debate is chronicled well at Sculpteo, but we think it’s pointless to take sides here. In the studios where I teach, we are a Maya shop for a simple reason. Blender is free, both gratis and libre, and anyone can pick it up at any time without a problem. Maya is unaffordable if you’re not a company or studio, so teaching Maya through an institution makes it accessible for people to learn.

The famous Blender donut tutorial by the Blender Guru

Principles of Animation

Art Babbitt, a famous pre-CGI animator for the Walt Disney Studios, is attributed with saying, “Animation follows the laws of physics — unless it is funnier otherwise.” Riffing off of this basic idea, colleagues Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas formulated a series of 12 principles of animation. They detail these in their 1981 book The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation. We’ll close by listing them. Look to this article on Frank and Ollie’s website to elaborate on each one (or, better, buy their book!):

Cento Lodigiani, The illusion of life, 2014

As a finale to this topic, we recommend the article The 12 Principles of Animation, Updated for the Modern Age by Gene Turnbow.

1. Aristotle, trans. Farquharson, A. S. L. “On the Motion of Animals.” eBooks@Adelaide | University of Adelaide. 2007. Web. 26 Jan 2011. http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/a/aristotle/motion/[↩]
2. “CAD Text -Computer Aided Duchamp.” Through the Large Glass: An installation of computer work based on the Art of Marcel Duchamp. 1997. http://www.p22.com/projects/roomd.html[↩]
3. Quoted in Oskar Schlemmer. 2010. Web. 26 Jan 2011. http://www.schlemmer.org/[↩]
4. Mattes, Eva and Franco. “Synthetic Performances.” 0100101110101101.org. 2010.
   http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/performances/index.html[↩]
5. Quoted in Mattes, Eva and Franco. “Synthetic Performances.” 0100101110101101.org. 2010. http://www.0100101110101101.org/home/performances/index.html[↩]
6. “Albrecht Dürer.” The History of Painters. 2010. Web. 26 Jan 2011.
   http://www.historyofpainters.com/dure.htm[↩]
7. “John Lasseter Quotes.” BrainyQuote. 2001-11. Web. 26 Jan 2011. http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/john_lasseter.html[↩]