Illuminate the Plaza Presented by PNC Arts Alive: Picture Consequences

Featuring: Harvey Benschoter, Cybee Bloss, Maisie O'Brien, David Dempewolf, Jack Gray, Jason Hsu,  Amy Lee Ketchum, Joshua Ketchum, Lindsay Kovnat, Joshua Mosley, Jacob Rivkin, Oona Taper, Ashley Wick, and Kelli Williams

PAFA is proud to present Picture Consequences, a summer-long outdoor screening of animations by the Philadelphia Animation Ensemble.

During the winter of 2020 in the wake of the pandemic, a group of animation artists began meeting virtually with the mission of cultivating an independent animation community in Philadelphia. They are drawn together by a common passion for animation as a medium for experimentation. The Philadelphia Animation Ensemble consists of artists residing in the Philadelphia area.  Members are involved with other art groups including Marginal Utility, Krissy Talking Pictures, Spiral Q, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid as well as various institutions such as the University of Pennsylvania, PAFA, U Arts, and Moore. Among the collective are puppeteers, motion graphics artists, UX designers, professors, and doulas. 

In Picture Consequences #3 the Philadelphia Animation Ensemble began with the idea of responding to the PAFA collection.  Using web scraping methods, the group assembled a list of the works available online and related data to create a 22-minute scrolling video of the entire collection.

Individual members of the Ensemble created short animations in response to words and phrases in the titles that evoked thoughts, inspired drawn or collaged images, or provoked visual interventions upon the long list of credits. The Ensemble overlayed their animations on the scrolling list resulting in a site-specific projection that will premier on the facade of the Museum on July 22nd.

In Picture Consequnece's first installation (June 25th to July 15th video footage below), they looked to the past. Historically, picture consequences is a language or drawing-based parlour game developed in the early 1800s and was used by the Surrealists in the 1920s. This game, also known as an exquisite corpse, is "a method by which a collection of words or images is collectively assembled." For this project, each artist animates a minimum of 36 frames (3 seconds) and is given a frame from a different artist in the group to end on. When all of the animations are compiled it results in a single animation made with a wide range of styles and techniques. 

This June featured the Philadelphia Animation Ensemble’s first two collaborative animations, projected together in one changing loop.

New site-specific animations which respond to the PAFA museum collection will appear on the plaza, lighting up the Historic Landmark building with the Ensemble's moving images on July 16th and  August 2nd.