motion

I've never been very facile with motion. By facility, I mean : the skill at which I represent, analyze and even implement movement of all manners and sorts. For instance, I did poorly in Physics 53 (Mechanics). My professor, a very kind, well meaning, articulate, mother-like, (yes she was female (!) woman named Pat Burchat, made every effort to make the transfer of knowledge about the kinematics of rigid bodies as easy as possible. She would stand in the lecture hall of TC Seq, with her giant magnetic Vector arrow and stick it to the board, point it out of the board in all manners and in quite animated ways, but it still didn't work. The vectors looped through my brain in a tangled knot of confusion.

In a painting session that my instructor dubbed to be the "testing moments of our painting careers as we have known it" I did a rather poor representation of a ballerina in Giacomo Balla's painting style. For this event they had hired a professional ballerina and she danced for these lanky painters for two hours with only a five minute break in the middle. She was quite graceful. She had even brought two meter long gauze ribbons in many colors to even further highlight the grace with which she moved. I tried to represent it with a rapid succession of lines representing jaggedly repeated dynamic movement. The Futurists would have rolled in their anarchic graves. My teacher, Charles Parness, a very skilled portrait painter told me, "this is not very good , kid. I suggest you practice more". I agreed with him whole heartedly, promising to myself to never paint moving objects again. "Apples dont move", Cezanne even said. He's a smart painter.

Funny that I work for a virtual reality lab doing just this. My job is to animate dummy people and make them do all sorts of things. My professor likes to study human beings feeling of "presence" during interaction with virtual human beings. My job therefore is to make compelling movements to make these virtual people feel lifelike and human. I tug the "strings" of the virtual puppets adding every keyframe hoping they convey some sort of "human feel" whatever that means."

My friend Jolly says that I walk rather slowly. I told her, "Jolly, poets don't walk , they stroll." I like to look at things. I especially like to look at things that are still. Wouldn't it be great if the entire world were submerged in some type of substrate that would make everyone move 20 times slower. Then everything would be a lot easier to look at.