Think Tank
Big, chunky pixels: New lo-fi animation
Michael Bell-Smith
That mystery—the silent meditative questions of how and why—are at the core of Michael Bell-Smith’s work. The Philadelphia-based artist exhibits at the same gallery as Paper Rad (Foxy Production) and makes moving images the way that painters might construct paintings. These are fully conceptualized scenes rendered in the language of his generation: pixels. That is, Bell-Smith uses the medium of animation to create imagery that reflects interior states, but in the visual language we’ve been inundated with since the advent of video games and the Web. In his 2006 work “Self-Portrait, NYC,” a man stands still in a street as animated traffic blurs past him. What we see is like a video-game—an image composed of pixilated building blocks. No attempt is made to disguise its digital origins, which makes the image of a digital man, alone, both more poignant and more satirical—poignant in its isolation and satirical in its deliberately lo-fi execution. Despite all this technology, all these people, it seems to say we’re still human, still unique, and still alone.
Figure 4: Michael Bell-Smith, “Self Portrait, NYC,” 2006.
In “Self Portrait, NYC,” as in any many other pieces, Bell-Smith is using animation against its original purpose, which of course was to propel a narrative. Instead of serving a plot, Bell-Smith makes it serve an idea. “In my work I like to take pieces of things and re-contextualize them. It’s an attempt to create new spaces where these pieces can be reconsidered.”
In both Bell-Smith’s work, we’re presented with images we’ve seen before: a hero looking into a sunset and a loner isolated from a fast-moving crowd (an often-used film trick). When these pieces are re-created outside of a narrative and twisted a bit, they take on a new meaning. At the same time, however, they’re moving and changing, so we have a sense they’re a part of something larger—a story, a life, a world. It’s almost as if the viewer is rewinding and watching the same moment of a film over and over. “I certainly think that narrative has its place and I haven’t ruled it out for myself,” says Bell-Smith. “I just tend to be more interested in images and gestures.”
Figure 5: Michael Bell-Smith, “Continue, 2000,” 2005.
Bell-Smith is generally working with software in a far more primitive way than it’s intended to be used. Because of that, he has had to develop techniques that work around some of the functions that the software performs automatically. “It seems ridiculous sometimes, working hard to dumb the software down, but it’s necessary part of my work.” In constructing “Self Portrait, NYC,” for example, Bell-Smith imposed his own limitations. He maintained a lo-fi aesthetic, even drawing the cityscape by hand one pixel at a time rather than using a quick-action 3-D rendering program. The effect is to root a sophisticated digital work in the artist’s hand. Bell-Smith is controlling the tools to his own liking. He notes that “the idea that digital imagery has to progress towards realism runs counter to the trajectory of art history. If we thought about art that way, all paintings would be neo-classical or something. And most software implicitly encourages that. It’s not easy to dumb it down.” In creating his motion effects, for example, he has to work against After Effects tendency to automatically add a “ghost” image into the works, smoothing it out where Bell-Smith wants to keep it rough. It’s a continual dialogue between artist and tool, and one that leads to challenging and hypnotic results.
Figure 6: Michael Bell-Smith, “Some Houses Have Pools,” 2006.
