ISCO: Character: Diamond Eyes

Link to Flash Movie here

Character:

Diamond Eyes and his kind eat gems, diamonds, and other shiny things. He spends his day searching for them. He eats his findings until full, then brings the rest home to his family.  He currently lives with a pink, circle eyed female. They do not yet have any children.  Periodically his current partner and/or their children will be caught and eaten by monsters and he will start over with a new female.

Diamond Eyes is essentially a flat, one dimensional character. But this is not because I, his creator, have been lazy and chosen not to further develop him ever though he is in this sizable project the main character.  It is because I see birds, and most nonhuman animals, as such. Their lives are controlled by the instinct of survival and propagation of themselves and their species, and they are surrounded by other animals of a similar plight, some of whom want nothing more than to rip them apart and eat them.  So for my purposes Diamond Eyes is a stand in for a large part of the natural world and the animal kingdom: all he wants is to eat (survive) and partner with females (propagate himself/his species).

Medium/Concept:

Projections onto a grid of 11 sound insulating squares on the rounded back corner of room 447 on the floor.  The projections are to be read like a comic, although they can be read both by row, as comics traditionally are, or by column, and the same narrative is to be had. I originally intended for it to be read vertically, by column, with the leftmost column just being decorative, and the other 3 being 1 piece of text on top and 2 illustrations of that text, but ultimately, as was pointed out in class, it can be read either way.

For the projections I created a Flash application which allows me to project onto each angled screen, record where its corners are in 2D coordinates, and distort the image on top of it by stretching its corners to those 2D coordinates.