Collaborative animation project spans continents, includes UK art students

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 18, 2025) — Students in the University of Kentucky’s School of Art and Visual Studies will participate in a collaborative, real time animation creative project Feb. 27, with students from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium; the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow, Poland; and the University of Kwazulu Natal in Durban, South Africa.

UK students learned about the software that will be used in this event, which will be noon-4 p.m. in the Singletary Center for the Arts President’s Room, during a visit by Royal Academy of Art faculty and students in January. 

The software works in real time. Artists stationed at computers on which the software has been installed can contribute simultaneously to a work in progress, like creating animated shapes, changing backgrounds and adding other visually artistic elements to the living piece. The goal, said Janna Beck, professor of intermedia at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, is a work that is continually evolving based on the interpretations of multiple artists.

“It’s a bit like a jam session, but with visual artists and graphic designers,” Beck said in January during a visit to UK. “It allows exploration of strengths. I’m not very good at figured drawing, so I might contribute something more abstract. You can make shapes, but you can also make small animations, and that helps the work come together.”

Currently there is no way to record the collaborative work using the software, so whatever people see on Feb. 27 will be the single “performance” of that work, Beck said. All artistic choices will happen in the moment and become part of the piece. She said, however, that it is possible to rehearse what can happen in order to have cohesion.

“There’s rehearsal in a way that we sometimes define a set of colors to be used because we want certain unity,” she said, “or we talk ahead of time about what kind of shapes or figures should be drawn depending on the event.

“But the most fun is when artists do what comes to them intuitively.”

Junior digital media design major Adelaide Long participated in the software demonstration in January. Though her interest is illustration, she said she sees a benefit in the kind of collaboration the software fosters among students.

“This was a transformative experience for me because I don’t think we do as much collaborative work in the art world as we should, and we should strive toward that more,” Long said. “This is a very interesting project because you’re seeing everybody’s individual way of thinking, their process, whether they’re an animator or not.”

The Feb. 27 collaborative project is free and open to the public.