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...
(click on CC for English subtitles) Frag den Staat (Ask the State) is a website for submitting, tracking and archiving Freedom Of Information requests in Germany- making it easier and more efficient for citizens to ask their public authorities for information. Software: Animated with Synfig, a vector-based 2D Free Software program. Initial vector illustrations were created in Inkscape, the video was assembled in Kdenlive, and audio was mixed in Audacity. The project files are open source, available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, so that any other Freedom of Information site (such as those run on Alaveteli or FROIDE) can adapt, remix and improve the video for their own language and location. Fork the project on Gitlab! Credits & Attribution Video CC-BY Open Knowledge Foundation Deutschland e.V Concept, Illustration & Animation: Sam Muirhead | @cameralibre Additional Illustration: Judith Carnaby | @judithcarnaby Text: Maria Reimer | @malienamadrina Stefan Wehrmeyer | @stefanwehrmeyer Stimme & Aufnahme / Voiceover & recording: Fiona Krakenbürger | @arduina Music: XXV CC-BY Broke For Free | @brokeforfree Toneffekte/Sound Effects: The following sound effects can be found on FreeSound.org, a community of audio enthusiasts who create, share and remix sounds – the majority of these sounds are available under libre licenses such as Creative Commons Attribution, Attribution ShareAlike or the ‘no rights reserved’ public domain mark, CC0. Check out the artists’ other sounds, or consider contributing yourself! Sounds used under Creative Commons Attribution: letter-box.flac CC-BY qubodup peugot-206-car-exterior-engine-stationary-horn-claxon-reverb.wav CC-BY jorickhoofd spring-door-stop.wav CC-BY liamq deep-air-woosh.wav CC-BY cosmicmembers whoosh.wav CC-BY ztrees1 envelope-handling-rustle-vtkproductions.wav CC-BY vtkproductions-com chev-350-start-then-die.wav CC-BY lonemonk flashlight-switch.wav CC-BY jesabat stickwhoosh.wav CC-BY plingativator vent-wind-1.wav CC-BY glaneur-de-sons writing-with-pen.aif CC-BY jasonelrod clock-fastticking.wav...
