Shadow Monsters by Philip Worthington is a wonderful interactive and digital form of shadow puppets, in which the programming generates fantastic and playful extensions to the shadows of participants bodies and hands, and quirky and wild sounds. (There are more YouTube videos).
The Shadow Monsters grew from a brief about technological magic tricks. I was looking at optical illusions and Victorian hand shadows particularly interested me as a starting point. The subtlety with which a character could be created was already very magical and I wondered if there was room to experiment with these techniques. Looking back to my own childhood, I remembered the feeling of casting huge shapes in the light of my father’s slide projector, creating monsters and silly animals. I enjoy working with simple intuitive things; playful feelings that touch us on a very basic level.At the same time I was experimenting with some software for vision recognition so slowly the monsters evolved. At first I made a puppet show with coloured pencils that had hair and eyes… and this slowly grew in complexity until I had a system that could go some of the way to understanding hand posture. The rest is history.
My daughter Anna’s new photographic work, Plastic Surgery, is on at the Canberra Contemporary Arts Space in Manuka until Sunday. The images are photographs of the human body form manipulated in different ways in graffiti art and fashion design in the urban environment. They are printed large on aluminium foil which gives them an industrial brash feel.
When my kids were little, lounge cleaning became cubby time. (Is it only Australians that call playhouses cubbies?) The sofas would be pushed together and blankets draped over them to make an enclosed space to play in while the vacuuming was done all around. Then, more often than not, the seemingly new spaciousness of the vacuumed room made for wilder plans and the cubby would be extended and enhanced with more blankets propped up crazily by brooms, the drying rack, and chairs. It gave birth to a new understanding of the old saying that nature abhors a vacuum. Inevitably someone’s temper would fray, or vital pegs would come adrift one too many times, and it would all collapse into a just an ordinary pile of blankets, and it would all be over until next time.
We had a favourite picture book by Shirley Hughes, Sally’s Secret, which was about a little girl who has a cubby in the garden. Sally has various inadvertent
visitors, one a ladybird, and then she and a friend dress up and play ladies with a little tea set.
Our kids and their friends played cubbies in spaces under shrubs or overhanging branches, too. Sometimes the houses were for games with soft toys, other times gang clubrooms. Later, one friend in the cul de sac used garden clippers to tunnel a cubby into a thicket of bushes in the nature reserve at the back of the houses. Nearby the kids made a treehouse, only to discover that a bunch of boys from another street (and school and religion!) regarded it as theirs. Exciting rivalry ensued with much messaging and spying, but strangely I don’t remember how it was resolved. There was also camping in the garden, which might be regarded as a kind of advanced cubby play?
For a few years on our Christmas beach holidays when my nieces came to stay, five of the six kids would share the bunk room and convert the whole room and all the beds into a maze of interconnecting blanket cubbies. So it would stay for days at a time, with the kids disappearing inside for long stretches between trips to the beach. It was guaranteed to produce tantrums from the littlest who was not always allowed in. Years later during a Christmas dinner when much wine had gone down and someone jokingly came up with the idea of a ‘family sorry day’, there was a confession of deliberate provocation, though at the time, of course, there was never proof.
The handful of children I taught at an alternative school in 1980 were seriously into cubbies, too. The school resided that year in a government house in O’Connor. The kids constructed an elaborate cubby in the pile of firewood outside, making passageways and rooms and furnishing them with odds and ends for their games. It would be outlawed at any school these days.
I’m guessing that the intimacy of a room of one’s own; the satisfaction of the process of construction; the collaboration, role play, decisions, secrets and power play of the group; and the way a cubby becomes whatever imagined world you desire must all factor into what makes cubbies such essential play.
The trailer of the long awaited Spike Jonze adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are has just be released on Apple (interesting choice!). The movie will be in theatres from 16 October 2009. It’s funny how recognizably Australian the forest and beach are in the opening sequence! I can’t tell yet if I’ll love this, but it is looking promising. For me it will probably depend on how much sentimentality has been allowed to creep in: I’m hoping for very little.
The design for Bidja the bunyip, the mascot that I made for the Pacific School Games, was transfered into this soft toy as part of the merchandising for the event.
The Coldplay puppets from the Life in Technicolour ii video are touring the world rather like those garden gnomes that get abducted and send back postcards from exotic places. They have been down under recently: above you can see them with the Perth city skyline in the background, and last weekend they were sunbaking in Bondi. You can follow them here.
The interview with Dougal Wilson, the video director, gives some information about the making of the puppets. They were designed by Wilson, and the idea was to make them look like Punch and Judy caricatures, rather than close look-alikes for the band members. They were sculpted in clay by Nonny Banks, rendered in fibreglass and painted to look like wood.
I’m pretty happy with my experiment of streaming FriendFeed here in my sidebar. It’s almost like a secondary blog because it is a way of noting and sharing stuff that interests or amuses me, but that I know I won’t get around to blogging. I wonder if the way these services enable including image and video thumbnails will further blow out the notion of tight copyright.
If you are a Chris Lilley fan – and I know that’s not everyone – check out vagueknitting‘s photoset Summer Knits High / We Can Knit Heroes with the byline: Cute finger puppet idea becomes preposterously overgrown Chris Lilley fangirl project. I specially like Jonah Takalua, but then I had a soft spot for him in the series, too.
