Cultural Olympiad Programme Forms Exhibition at National Media Museum

Directing team Quayola and visual artist Memo Akten team have created an interactive animation and installation through digital production outfit Nexus Interactive Arts for the Cultural Olympiad Programme.

The series of motion-driven 3D animations – titled Forms – is the highlight of the exhibition In the Blink of an Eye: Media and Movement, commissioned by the National Media Museum.

Displaying at the Museum from March 9 – September 2, the digital artwork explores themes surrounding the capture and synthesis of movement.

Highlighting the pressures on each Commonwealth athlete’s joints, CG models were matchmoved in 3D Studio Max. Motion data was retrieved through custom generative software to create the related abstract geometric visualisations.

Forms does not focus on the path of the body and movement, but the relationship between the human body, its movements and the trajectories it defines through time and space.

Images and artefacts from the museum’s National Collections featuring within the exhibition includes the work of Dr Harold E. Edgerton, Roger Fenton, Tim Macmillan, Etienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge.

Forms will be projected in the space with a smaller split-screen standing in front to show original footage of the athletes upon which the animation was based. The smaller screen, mounted on a plinth, will allow the interactive viewer to digitally peel back the individual layers of the animation.

Quayola and Memo said: "Sport is one of the main forms of entertainment in today’s society. We are interested in de-contextualising the roles of the athletes and to exclusively focus on the mechanics of their movement."

Curator of In the Blink of an Eye, Colin Harding said: “Quayola and Memo have created a strikingly original interactive artwork, which offers a contemporary and rather beautiful response to both the theme of movement and the items from the National Collections we are displaying.”