The Project: In Vitro, project 1.

The Purpose:

to explore the boundary between human and machine.

The Process:

For the opening sequence of images:
I found images representing the question of boundary between human and machine; x-rays as mechanically inhuman representations of the human body and pitures of battlefields as Harraway's "cyborg orgy" and flashed them as a kind of warning of things to come in the video.

For the fetus with legs part:
I assembled many pictures, which represented either the mechanical or organic aspects I wanted to portray, even hiding some of these elements by, for example, using spider legs and equipping them with lights to represent metallic legs.   I then assembled them and edited them in Photoshop, using layers to animate the legs and the numbers, saving each change as an individual frame.   For the blinking lights, I merged the layers and used the dodge tool in the color red in a large circle to simulate the glow of a light.  I then assembled the frames in final cut. This section meant to symbolize a stylized version of the fetus in vitro - an important form of cyborgs in the modern world.

For the series of live action shots in the middle:
I took a cow heart and pierced it with various pieces of metal.  I also took a computer power cable and used food dye to make it seem as if it were bleeding.  I shot these on a dv camera.  When editing them, I used color adjustment tools to alter their look and to fade in and out of b & w.  The purpose of such shots was to show the extremes of the boundary - to give life to a wire. The piercing of the cow heart was to represent jewlry on a living body and to what extent piercings and other jewlry represent a cyborg form.

For the animation part:
I began with drawing the tubes on paper; then, I scanned my final drawing into the computer….

I then used Photoshop to color the setting and size the image.  I chose a very large size so I could crop the frames later and simulate camera movement. 

After the setting was complete, I began work on the mermaid in much the same way.  I drew her in many different positions to paste into the setting and simulate her movement.  I then pasted these various positions into the background and added static shots into the tv screen, saving these segments of motion as new files for each.  Next, I made my camera movements by cropping frames on the images and alternating between the series of motion images to achieve movement.  I then assembled all of these frames together in final cut.

For the music:
I assembled beats and samples together on my hardware sampler and then made an ambient piece on the computer to tie them together.  The fluidity of the ambience was supposed to represent the organic while the sampler was meant to represent the mechanical.