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Points In Space Explores The City In Flux With A Stop-Motion Of 1,050 Public Paintings

Benjamin Ducroz combines stop-motion and time-lapse animation for a, um, “moving” portrait of Melbourne.

POINTS IN SPACE from ducroz on Vimeo.

Cities are busy places. But you don’t need me to tell you that—you probably live in one and have to deal with the chaos of it, getting elbowed in the face as you’re trying to read your Kindle in the corner of the subway train on your way to work and having to wait in line for just about everything. But underlying this chaos exists a hidden harmony, a harmony that stops us all from trying to turn the same corner at once and ending up as a big pile of intertwined bodies in the middle of the street.

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And its these organized systems beneath the bustle that Australian artist Benjamin Ducroz is highlighting in his piece Points in Space, shot in Melbourne. He’d previously interacted with the city using his stop-motion sculpture MÖBIUS, which snaked through the streets with a helping hand from passersby.

This latest piece is a combined time-lapse/stop-motion animation, where 1,050 black and white abstract images are placed on frames at busy intersections in Melbourne’s central business district. These frames are changed and added to, photographed, and then edited together with the footage of people milling around, to give a portrait of the city in flux. The sped up footage of the city and its inhabitants, both human and non, surrounds and contrasts the morphing black and white visuals, creating layers of movement.

It was these layers that Ducroz wanted to explore. “I’m really interested in the layers of traffic within an intersection,” he says, “where there’s pedestrians, trams, buses, horses, and then another layer of pedestrians and just investigating the movements within these layers—plus the animation frames themselves are layers, so it’s a multiayered visual extravaganza.” That it is. Check out the making of below.

@stewart23rd