Here’s a little cartoon I whipped up this morning on Xtranormal, the site that lets you create and distribute your own animations without needing to really know what you’re doing. (When it comes to CGI, that pretty much describes me…)
It’s pretty much California Native Plant Week meets Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf meets Hello Kitty. And it’s a test of how well voice synthesis can deal with some common (and less common) scientific names.
Pixar, my number is (619) 555-0213.
Los Angeles artist Jennifer Steinkamp has been creating computer-generated botanical video installations for the last decade.
A spectacular new work, Madame Curie, just opened at the downtown gallery of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. It fills a 4,500 square foot gallery with swirling computer-generated flowering shrubs and trees based on a list of plants Madame Curie tended in her garden. YouTube doesn’t have any examples of this work yet, but you can see documentation at the artist’s own website [ here ].
The new work places the viewer into clouds of branches and flowers that swirl against a dark black background. This is a garden growing without a sun, reacting to an un-felt wind, out in space or down at some sub-atomic level. It’s all mysterious, exhuberant and flat-out beautiful.
Enjoy these short clips of some of her other works. And if you’re in San Diego through our flowery late winter or spring, stop by the museum for a look at this new piece. Meeting the work face-to-face is totally more engrossing than watching snippets on your computer. (Madame Cuire will also be on view in Los Angeles at ACME from February 12 – March 12 of this year.) It makes the plant world of Avatar look like bland Etch-a-Sketch drawings. And just imagine if this work were in 3D!
And here’s a final one that isn’t botanical, but it’s oh so cool, especially when you get into the space and interact with the projections: