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Conversation


Still from the film
 
Thursday, March 29, 2012
6:30 p.m.
Harold M. Williams Auditorium
The Getty Center

A sneak preview of Thomas Demand's 100-second animated film Pacific Sun will screen prior to the conversation.

The Getty Research Institute presents a conversation between internationally renowned German artist Thomas Demand, Oscar-winning film director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, and Professor Michael Fried, author of Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008). In this conversation, the speakers discuss Demand's Pacific Sun and explore the intersections of photography and film, of art and memory, and of aesthetics and technology. The conversation is moderated by Thomas W. Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute.

About Pacific Sun:

Demand's most challenging and sophisticated project to date, Pacific Sun is a 100-second animated film based on a YouTube clip, capturing the tumultuous effects of a storm on the cruise ship Pacific Sun. Over the course of months, and with the help of a 12-person team of animators, Demand carefully constructed a model of the ship's dining room in his signature media: paper and cardboard. In a painstaking process, he then brought the set to life through stop-motion animation. Demand meticulously retraced the movements of each item in the room—from chairs and tables to lemon slices at the bar—and recorded each shift in a single frame. The combined total of 2,400 frames creates a continuous film. The process resembles a technologically advanced version of Eadweard Muybridge's early animations of animals in motion. Devoid of human actors, Pacific Sun results in a surreal, stylized, but oddly familiar film that evokes memories of disasters at sea.