Edifice

Gregory Bennett is an artist who works with 3D animation, motion capture, projection mapping, interactive media and virtual reality. His research is situated in an art practice that embraces 3D computer animation to explore themes and tensions around nature and culture, and conceptions of the utopian and the dystopian, through the rendering of complex digital ecosystems.

Bennett’s practice considers the database as a creative methodology, and a key organising principle in the generation of a series of 3D digital animated artworks. His inquiry explores the relationship between technology, process and artistic intent, framing this within relevant emergent critical frameworks around digital creative practice.

Working directly into 3D modelling and animation software (that is typically deployed in the entertainment industry) and taking the actions of a generic male figure as a point of departure, animations are created in a modular fashion, building up units of performed movements, loops and cycles (both animated and motion-captured), creating a sometimes complex movement vocabulary.

This recalls Lev Manovich’s notions of the database and the loop as engines of (non-linear) narrative in digital media work, in particular his principles of modularity, automation and variability as intrinsic to new media objects. In working with complex software tools acknowledgement in the fabrication process is also made of what Rachael Kearney has termed the ‘synthetic imagination’, and Malcolm Le Grice’s conception of submerged authorship in the interaction with the ‘intelligent machine’ — the creative act as a collaboration with the embodied intellect of the software itself.

Drawing on and remediating a range of sources including the photographic studies of Eadweard J. Muybridge, the Hollywood choreography of Busby Berkeley, nineteenth century optical toys, the digital video game space, and motion capture aesthetics, these works present figures which occupy a space between the animate and the inanimate, between automata (devices that move by themselves) and simulacra (devices that simulate other things).

A recent ongoing series of works imagine infinitely revolving structures situated in an infinite void. Homogeneous human figures appear as often precariously placed performers, enacting ritual-like scenarios, sometimes coalescing into complex moving ornaments trapped or enclosed in ceaseless loops and cycles in a form of animated stasis. The individual is collapsed into multiple uncanny digital doppelgangers, set in uncertain environments that simulate at times a machine in perpetual motion, without obvious purpose.