Verge 360: beyond the frame

This presentation considers the ‘frame’ and the ‘framing’ within Parker's collaborative practice research with Stuart Moore into the immersive digital arena (IDA360). Examination of two case studies demonstrates the ways in which the interplay between frame, screen, and audience shifts, depending upon the incarnated specificity of animation, with particular focus on the IDA360.

Firstly we chart the evolving forms of our project Verge: from the process of its making to the first presentation as a looped dual-screen gallery installation; through a series of iterations for single screen; to its recent metamorphosis for the IDA360. To make Verge, found objects collected on a circular walk are printed directly onto 16mm filmstrips: the fallen bodies of bees and flies picked from the dirt, and the vegetation growing up in the stony rubbish along a roadside verge. The original artwork is frameless: the filmstrips are ‘framed’ photographically in order to create series of sequential digital images playable as cycles on a timeline.

Our second case study reviews the practice-as-research outcomes of Verge, and examines the ways in which these inform the creation of a new animation we are making specifically for the IDA360.

To conclude, we suggest that the IDA360 provides an environment – created by image projection within a 360 degree dome to an ‘unfixed’ audience – that extends animation’s potential to become an experience ‘beyond itself’, through the embodied visuality of an expanded cinema that continually reconfigures its borders beyond the frames of space and time.