glass dancer

viewing and framing

If you’re here because you’ve scanned the QR code on the packaging of ‘Glass Dancer’, thankyou very much for your purchase and I hope you’re enjoying your brand new print! If you’re here for any other reason, thankyou also for your curiosity- all are welcome here in the coven of rotating animation!

First things first, please refer to the video below for guidance on how to unpack and view this print:

For further viewing information and general zoetrope/phenakistoscope faq’s, please visit this link: https://www.izziearrowsmith.com/zoetropes

Alternatively, if you’d just like to frame your print, simply remove the packaging and pop into any 30x30cm (12x12inch) frame. I recommend these if you’re on a budget: https://www.amazon.co.uk/DECORO-Picture-Portrait-Landscape-Display/dp/B0D29JDHB5/ref=asc_df_B0D29JDHB5?mcid=93ed01d5a07b3f8e87396f60f4c88296&tag=googshopuk-21&linkCode=df0&hvadid=702545765894&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=4611302667390942622&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9045477&hvtargid=pla-2321061732162&psc=1&gad_source=1

about ‘glass dancer’

With that out the way, I’d like to use this blog post as an opportunity to divulge some context for this particular print, since it’s actually something of a loose tendril from the academic research side of my practice- which I’m excited to discuss professionally for the first time amidst all the commercial chaos this year!

‘Glass Dancer’ is a practical extension of a research paper I wrote early 2022, entitled ‘Print as Posthuman: How the Human-Technological Relationship Can Be Explored Through Processes in Printmaking’ (a mouthful, I’m aware!). Within this paper, I argued a point for Printmaking as a fundamentally Posthuman practice, where the externalisation of human consciousness through non-human objects situates printmaking as a vital catalyst for mass dissemination of information via reproduction prior to the digital age.

Let’s roll it back for a moment before we continue: WTF is Posthumanism? I like to summarise the answer to this question with quotes from two writers at the forefront of current Posthuman research:

‘”Posthuman” has become a key concept in contemporary academic debate, to cope with the urgency for an integral redefinition of the notion of the human, following the onto-epistemological, as well as scientific and bio-technological developments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.” -Dr. Francesco Ferrando, Philosophical Posthumanism (2019)

Or, more simply:

Posthumanism ‘seeks to undermine the traditional boundaries between the human, the animal, and the technological’ -Jay David Bolter (2016)

In short, my particular interests (both academically, and somewhat spiritually) reside in that liminal state, that grey area between the human and non-human (animals, technology, our natural environment) and asking the question… exactly how ‘human’ are we?

The human-technological relationship specifically is where we swing back to with this piece- and how I was looking into ways of pushing the boundaries of printmaking now that digital devices and the internet have essentially replaced its primary function as a mode of information exchange. Of course, printmaking is very much alive and well as a discipline of choice for many fine art and design practitioners, but I was interested in how I could combine such a traditional, physical way of working and give it a place in the sphere of our now-digital lives.

This began with animated print work, my first experiment of which (SCROLL, 2022, below) involving some 8-12 frames of linocut assembled into a moving image using Adobe Premiere Pro. Sadly the original file got lost when my EHD fatefully perished last year, but I managed to pull this off IG from the BCU Night School viewing:

Naturally, as someone who gives half a damn about the environment, I was as horrified by the wastefulness involved in creating this 1.5 second animation as I was thrilled that it actually worked. My plan for the MA final major project was to have some 3 minutes of this sort of thing, but the idea of using hundreds, if not thousands, of per-frame lino blocks to complete it was an automatic nope on account of how much it would cost, how long it would take, and how much material would be disposed of by the end.

I will interject once again with some context, as many people tend to have the same question at this point: what’s with the hands and phones? At this point in my research I was absurdly preoccupied by how our cultural shift towards smartphone technology is changing our physiology- evolutionarily speaking, we have no real need for our hands to constantly be in this position: holding a small, rectangular device, with our thumbs scrolling away over the glass, tapping, pinching to zoom in and out, etc. Yet here we are, doing these small gestures for potentially hours per day, every day of our lives. I remember reading somewhere that the average person makes millions of scrolling motions every year and how it’s become almost a completely unconscious reflex, like breathing in and out. I just considered that to be a truly stark testament of how human beings and technology are becoming more and more intertwined as we advance through the modern digital age.

Anyway, back to ‘Glass Dancer’. By the time I’d considered phenakistoscopes/zoetropes as a suitable alternative to frame-by-frame animated print work, I was a week away from submitting the paper, and had to put a pin in this amazing idea to recreate SCROLL as a single printed image, brought to life using the technology of turntables, light, and smartphone cameras. So I sat on it… until literally last month (Nov 24), when the opportunity arrived in the form of the Stryx Studio Holder’s Winter Exhibition. And here we are: a fully realised choreography of dancing thumbs and fingers in the form of a linocut phenakistoscope! I just diverged from my original idea in one small way, which is the absence of phones in this animation. After some deliberation, I decided this was the best way to illustrate how unnatural to the function of our traditionally-defined human bodies these gestures really are:

And with that, I conclude my little stream of consciousness about this piece- thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far! As a parting gift, here are a few BTS snaps of the process of creating this piece (: