Using his cat’s laser toy, a swivel chair and complicated math, artist Rollin Leonard just released a new project and it looks like it hurts.
This is 360 / 18 Lilia. Using highly composite numbers, Leonard breaks up the very recognizable image of a human face into nine horizontal slices rotating individually on a 24 second loop and then, again, into 18 slices on a 36 second loop. He tells the Creator’s Project:
I’m playing with simple systems falling in and out of synchronicity… In the case of 360 / 18 Lilia I wanted to play this innate ability against the scrambling pattern of the video. As it rotates you’ll notice when only a few are in sync that you’ll tend to mentally complete the head.
To get it perfect with zero blur, Leonard opted out of video and used a specially built protactor, tediously spinnig the swivel chair 1 degree at a time. For this, Lilia had to stay VERY, VERY STILL. “Lilia is very professional,” Leonard tells ANIMAL, “She pays the rent sometimes by modeling so she is just better than us mere mortals. Also there was some trial and error involved of course.”
You can see his set-up on NetArtNet.Net’s inaugural studio visit video 001.mp4 – Rollin Leonard 360°. The Portland, ME-based has been working with body parts as pixels and pixels as body parts for some time. As ANIMAL’s second Artist Notebook subject, Leonard gushed about “bodies being elastic” in his “gory and morbid” human-tetris like project Pig Pile: “You can scramble them and still recognize them. It’s super pleasant and pretty the way their bodies turn into pattern, but it looks like a body is decomposing, falling apart.”
