For the creative response, Lauren and I decided to collaborate on piece. One of the first few ideas we had was to go digital or at least traditional-digital hybrid because we felt it reflected his current art practice in going digital.

We thought of highlighting aspects of our partnership, ideas of movement, parallax visuals, animation, tracking shots from the tasks I did. The idea of Liminality, in -betweenness that he talks about from his work of Retainers of Anarchy. Ideas of creating a more immersive experience using and referencing traditional mediums.

We thought about how our experiences, our remote tasks, in seeing how Howie works first-hand, how chill he is, learning more practical sides of art practice, the feeling of the studio like a ghibli movie, new appreciation for martial arts, interest in animation frames etc.

Initial ideas of the creative response included creating a stop-motion animation, creating a VR documenting our experience, creating a DIY Lenticular print we found online, and a couple of martial art related ideas, from having photographs of us in martial art poses, animating them, to having a live performance of martial art poses.

In the end, we decided that one aspect that we shared and had a high impact for us is Howie’s studio. We both agreed that we really like the studio space and the general atmosphere in it. Our creative response resulted in 2 parts, one is a mini diorama of his studio space, and the other being a looping video of the diorama studio with a stop motion of Lauren’s video work for Howie in it. Within this response, it does bring in several of our initial ideas. The liminality and hybridity, of traditional vs digital, virtual vs physical, material vs immaterial. The idea of the artist’s studio. It is in his backyard, but also a separate space, surrounded by nature. It was a small cozy space. The layering of videos, inspired by the retainers of anarchy. We had several ideas for the digital part of the response as well but decided to go with a layered video in the diorama space. 

The immersive 360 experience was actually unplanned. I happened to have a fish-eye lens handy when we took images of the diorama, and then Lauren animated the video. The default app had the option to play the video in 360, which worked with the fish-eye image. We initially had the idea of simply displaying the video on a laptop screen, but we had a surface tablet which allowed for the handheld panning of the video.

I definitely tried taking more of an organic approach in this project, and I enjoyed the process. If I could continue working on it, I think I would want to add watercolor paint in the diorama, to make it less of a architecture model or doll house and more reflective of the studio experience to us. And perhaps photograph or stitch the initial photograph into an actual 360 diorama as well.