Simple Automata and Mechanical Toys

Paul Spooner is a mechanical toy maker whose work is marked by simplicity, wit and wry humour. He would like to be known as a mechanicaljoke-teller and his stories make him laugh.He starts his toys with sketches of ideas some of which work and some that do not.His work fuses the worlds of conceptual art, cartooning, engineering and theatrical set design.His work has a sense of wistfulness, a halfway point between pessimism and optimism.

 I am interested to design moving puppets and toys like his that could be operated by the audience by moving of handles or pressing of buttons.

http://www.bbc.com/news/av/technology-21714090/twisted-toymaker-paul-spooner-on-his-wooden-cartoons

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjbUA0qdggs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVrtmDCD23U

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SiLFRz9rVYM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fukdvHCkHLQ

Ron Fuller and Keith Newstead are two other Automata artists whose toys are simple yet very effective.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHCkGyIddzM

https://vimeo.com/144049207

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGbTAU52os

William Kentridge

William Kentridge's work may be said to bear a similar relation to his nation's traumatic history of racial oppression, his animated films of a recurrent cast of characters in the penultimate moments of apartheid and its aftermath . Charcoal drawing as a process of marking, reworking and erasure questions history and memory, the decimated South African landscapes and cities , its human inhabitants and inheritors are in a state of constant flux. Kentridge has described the situation in South Africa as a struggle between forces of forgetting and the resistance of remembrance between amnesia and memory. He has also used shadow and shadow play of more antiquated visual culture which as opposed to his standard practice of altering charcoal drawings is composed entirely of torn paper cutouts and found objects photographed as they shifted across a translucent surface. Spectrality or shadow plays delights the audience in being fooled into a space of reality and illusion , between performance and performer. 

Critical Practice Programme Proposal

My work falls in the category of contemporary, post modern narrative.  I am interested in a certain type of narratives which are not grand narratives but comprise of moments which are fragmentary and inconsequential. I like to capture the gaps in the moments, or moments which might be unplanned or incidental opening up various possibilities and various meanings for the viewer. I am interested in exploring the relationship between the documentary and a staged events resulting in mutable, skewed, unreliable narratives . I like to employ obscure, peripheral characters and background details which do not focus on the tale itself but rather how they are told. My narratives constantly slide between subjective and objective reality. Imaginary events in my mind are indistinguishable from realistic events in the outside world. My intention is to cull together a set of characters and employ them to tell slippery, inconclusive stories .

My aim for the Critical Practice Progrmame is to use mediums and techniques I have not experimented with before like animation, moving image, performance sound and shadow play to create a not very plausible alternate universe. I would like to engage the audience to create an experience for them where in someway they can become a part of the work itself.