Looking Outwards 09

The artist I looked into was one Marina Zurkow, who I became interested in because I saw that she does interactive cartoons. I’ve always wanted to experiment with interactive cartoons, ever since I started becoming interested in animation. So it felt like a good fit.

Marina Zurkow is a media artist who likes delving into issues that are typically controversial and often have a sort of activist bent, but takes a wildly different approach. I couldn’t see where she went to school or anything, but she appears to have worked with a number of universities. She is based out of the United States.

The project of hers I focused on was the animation Mesocosm, which depicts a large man and a number of animals, people, and other paraphernalia all moving around. According to her website, it is an algorithmic work, meaning that “One hour of world time elapses in each minute of screen time, so that one year lasts 146 hours. No cycle is identical to the last, as the appearance and behavior of the human and non-human characters, as well as changes in the weather, are determined by a code using a simple probability equation” I found this fascinating, and it reminds me of the clock project I had worked on earlier this year. At certain parts of the animation the man does get eaten, (by birds, but only nibbles I think, not sure. No way to completely tell how far it gets) which is kinda graphic, but that’s okay its not horrid.

*NOTE, the animation requires Adobe Flash Player to view