Here’s a short looping animation, just in time for the Remembrance Day for Lost Species – I’m taking part in a pop-up exhibition tonight at Baumhaus Berlin, organised by Jenni Ottilie Keppler, together with other illustrators, poets and sculptors. ‘Huia (exquisite corpse)’ deals with cultural memory, and builds on two existing interpretations of the huia – which was one of three native New Zealand wattlebirds. The huia was driven to extinction before photography was prevalent, and before audio recordings could be made of its song. (The last confirmed sighting was in 1907.) The artist J.G Keulemans’ 1888 illustration of a huia pair appeared as a plate in Walter Buller’s A History of the Birds of New Zealand. His illustrations of native birds have become iconic representations, much reproduced in New Zealand and around the world. Keulemans was based in London and did not travel to New Zealand. Although he had done some work in the field, he mostly worked from stuffed skins – dead specimens, sent to him from around the world. The audible ‘bird calls’ are human imitations, recorded with Henare Hāmana in 1949. As a young man, Hāmana was familiar with the huia and had also been part of an unsuccessful search team in 1909. His whistles are created from 40-year-old memories. This animation that results is also a rather unreliable interpretation, hence the name ‘exquisite corpse‘ – its movement is based merely on videos of the Tieke, a surviving (though endangered) relative of the huia, which I’ve never seen in the wild. Further reading: Wikipedia’s Huia article is fascinating, particularly this section: “While we were looking...
About Prototype Fund Prototype Fund is a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany, which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Individuals and small teams receive a grant to test and develop open source tools and applications in the fields of civic tech, data literacy, data security and others. The Prototype Fund team support the candidates in their application process, keeping things as unbureaucratic as possible and adjusting it to the needs of software developers, hackers and creatives. In short: the Prototype Fund brings iterative software development and government innovation funding together. In the next three years about 40 projects will be funded. In total, the BMBF will grant 1.2 million euros in support of these projects. The video is based upon the design of the Prototype Fund identity and website, developed by the wonderful team at Rainbow Unicorn. I used Inkscape for design, Synfig for animation, and Kdenlive for editing. The video is © Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland licensed under CC-BY, and the music track, ‘Prototype Fund’ was specially composed and recorded by Javier Suarez (Jahzzar) of BetterWithMusic.com, and when used separately is licensed CC-BY-SA Jahzzar. You can find the music track and all project files for download and reuse on Gitlab. In addition to the video, each of the 5 word-pair animations were made into looping GIFs for use on social media, and I set up a graphic and edit template for the team to use for their video interviews which will be cut and published over the course of the 2-year project. I have also been making interview...
Op3nCare is a global community working together to make health- and social care accessible for all, open source, privacy-friendly and participatory. I made a number of short icon-based animations to be used in presentations, videos and websites to illustrate their themes. Source files for the animation can be found on...
