Still from Heliocentrum (1995)
Richard Wright is a British animator and media artist who has worked at both London Metropolitan University and at the National Film and Television School. His works are mainly animations created by splicing together and animating different still images as well as footage from different sources.
One such film, called simply "10,000 Copyrighted Images," is made up of a series of 10,000 images pulled from a search engine. The images flash by far too quickly to get more that the barest idea of what any of them contain, yet, as Wright points out, they are all considered instances of theft.
10,000 Copyrighted Images from Richard Wright on Vimeo.
It is a clear comment on the strange plight of digital art in an art world that still plays by rules made for paintings on canvas.
Another of Wright's short films, Heliocentrum, described as "Political documentary meets baroque rave video," is a series of animated images familiar to the era of Louis XIV accompanied by frenzied baroque-style music and voiceover narration in the form of a series of quotes from the king himself. The movement style Wright chose for the piece is at first disconcerting, herky-jerky and false-looking, until it dawns that much of the movement is actually giving the impression of a puppeteer just off screen, pulling on strings and sliding things around: the sort of limited animation technology that existed in the time of Louis XIV. This is very apparent in one of the first shots of falling, rotating baroque images- they quiver and jerk in a manner very similar to a hanging mobile. Wright also mixes the traditional images with more modern animation, such as portraits being grainy and distorted like television screens with bad reception. By the end, the music intensifies and becomes foreboding, and a reading of an angry letter from the archbishop to the king plays over footage from the Poll Tax Riots in 1990.
Heliocentrum from Richard Wright on Vimeo.
In the film there is a clear parallel drawn between past and present failures, and the meshing of the two via animation is very interestingly handled.
Richard Wright effectively uses his animations as a way to convey his ideas to the viewer, however at times they may exist only for meaning- I couldn't really stand to watch more than a few seconds of "10,000 Copyrighted Images," though the message was quite clear at the start. Even in his more polished works the meaning is not particularly original. In Heliocentrum it was not surprising to me that he would compare the failings of King Louis with the failings of the British government in 1990, though I know little about the history of either. It's just the kind of thing that has been done many times before. His meshings of images and motions and music are pretty to look at, but they are not really groundbreaking. If he created something with a less contrived meaning I might derive much more from it that I do any of his works with the meanings handed to me.
Visit his Vimeo profile to view more of his films.
References
http://eyebeam.org/people/richard-wright
http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_artist/w/r_wright
http://vimeo.com/futurenatural
