Image courtesy NOTsoNOISY / Guillaume Reymond.
Recalling the imaginative antics of football-field drill teams, the work of Swiss filmmaker NOTsoNOISY (Guillaume Reymond) makes human beings into pixels. People themselves become the medium as much as the stop-motion film, with charming results. So, speaking of what that means for a building facade, it’s worth visiting some of the other best work from this artist.
Human beings can even become an LED matrix:
The video games are especially lovely to watch, requiring a whole visual narrative – and drawing, in turn, upon the minimalist storytelling capabilities of the original games and the extraordinary technical restrictions they had to face.
Behold, for one, Pac-Man:
There’s a whole series of these, including Pole Position and Tetris:
But this approach to humans and stop-motion actions can be subtler, too – treating them as narrative medium without necessarily making them only individual pixels. “Mon ami l’été” may lack the viral sticking power of some of the trickier videos here, but the attention to the play of figures still allows the human form to step outside its more normalized role. The bodies here produce form and arrangement, create shapes, spell out letters – all reminders that people need not be only conventional dancers or depicted in purely naturalistic ways.
“Mon ami l’été” de jO Mettraux
“Mon ami l’été” de jO Mettraux. Images NOTsoNOISY / Guillaume Reymond.
The bottom line: the body doesn’t have to stay out of art. And it can even be, quite literally, digital.