Artist Five - Simon Starling

Simon Starling won the prize in 2005 with Shedboatshed. Starling dismantled a shed and turned it into a boat; loaded with the remains of the shed, the boat was paddled down the Rhine to a museum in Basel, dismantled and re-made into a shed. Both pilgrimages provide a kind of buttress against the pressures of modernity, mass production and global capitalism. 

My original idea was to simply have a flash animation that went name -> shed  -> boat -> shed -> name in a simpler way to how Shedboatshed was created, but was modified to the signature below on talking to Andy about how to create the Flash file. He made me aware of the 'shape tween' option in flash, which with well-chosen vectors would warp the shapes into each other using computer calculation.

Process

The first job was to create the vectors in illustrator. I spent a while finding images which would work with each other – similar size, same about of volume, negative spaces etc. Instead of using images of the actual piece by Starling, I wanted to simply display his idea and not recreate his the artwork.

I created the vectors by carefully tracing the images with the pen tool in illustrator and filling black. I then imported into Adobe Flash and arrange a day in which Andy could quickly show me the shape tween. Once I knew how to do it, it was simply a case of experimenting with the timing, shapes and font to create a seamless animation.

I also spent a lot of time learning how to embed the file on to this blog.