Below is Steven Hilyard's animated sequence, One Life.
One Life from Stephen Hilyard on Vimeo.
As we watch we encounter a family of bees which becomes more organized in their flight patterns as time progresses. In the background the viewer can hear the muffled sound of a television tuned to a daytime soap opera. The music in the soap opera plays as events become more dramatic. References from the audio indicate family drama and conflict.
We are faced with a swarm, a very large family. Overlayed, is the sound of family conflict. However, the family we are watching does not appear to have conflict. On the contrary, each bee falls in line so that the swarm can draw itself into complex geometric images in the air. Such synchronization requires discipline, selflessness, and a devotion to a greater cause. Bees in this case represent a modern hierarchical sacred model - in which god is 'there and then' and thus not within the individual. However, the soundtrack suggests something else. Are we to compare ourselves as humans to the perfection of the bees? Or, are we to doubt the perfect model of obedience displayed by the swarm? Or is this a glimpse of the afterlife, filled from end to end with sweet fragrant flowers, an unending bounty of nourishment, and a lack of division and conflict? If heaven is such, is it desirable?
Hilyard's work reaches for the sublime with a belief that the world is beautiful. Being sublime, the questions we have are unanswerable. The intentions of the artist may have been ambiguous even to himself. Art often takes us to a place where ideas are not concrete, illusive, and ever shifting. And, when we reach such a place we usually feel contently vulnerable ... as we should, since our very existence is questionable, fragile, mortal, and quite possibly - void of reason.
One Life from Stephen Hilyard on Vimeo.
Steven Hilyard
British artist Steven Hilyard is a professor of digital arts at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. He began his career as an architect. He also worked as a fabricator at Peter Carlson and Company where he met Claus Oldenburg and Jeff Koons. At this time he was working as a sculptor, creating small mythological objects. As an architect and design engineer he worked with three dimensional modeling programs as they were first developing in the 1980's and 1990's. His current works include photography and digital animations.One Life - 2007
One Life is a video sequence animated in Adobe Maya. Hilyard photographed apple blossoms and manipulated the photos in Photoshop to create an impossible profuse landscape of blossoms. The sound of the bees was recorded from hives by Stephen. The bees depicted in the sequence are three dimensional virtual models.As we watch we encounter a family of bees which becomes more organized in their flight patterns as time progresses. In the background the viewer can hear the muffled sound of a television tuned to a daytime soap opera. The music in the soap opera plays as events become more dramatic. References from the audio indicate family drama and conflict.
We are faced with a swarm, a very large family. Overlayed, is the sound of family conflict. However, the family we are watching does not appear to have conflict. On the contrary, each bee falls in line so that the swarm can draw itself into complex geometric images in the air. Such synchronization requires discipline, selflessness, and a devotion to a greater cause. Bees in this case represent a modern hierarchical sacred model - in which god is 'there and then' and thus not within the individual. However, the soundtrack suggests something else. Are we to compare ourselves as humans to the perfection of the bees? Or, are we to doubt the perfect model of obedience displayed by the swarm? Or is this a glimpse of the afterlife, filled from end to end with sweet fragrant flowers, an unending bounty of nourishment, and a lack of division and conflict? If heaven is such, is it desirable?
Hilyard's work reaches for the sublime with a belief that the world is beautiful. Being sublime, the questions we have are unanswerable. The intentions of the artist may have been ambiguous even to himself. Art often takes us to a place where ideas are not concrete, illusive, and ever shifting. And, when we reach such a place we usually feel contently vulnerable ... as we should, since our very existence is questionable, fragile, mortal, and quite possibly - void of reason.
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