So wonderful. William Smith writes about visiting Robert Breer's home studio as part of Triple Canopy's publication in residency last Winter at MOCA Tucson. Which sounds like the awesomest boondoggle ever, btw:
Breer famously composed most of his films one frame at a time by photographing individual drawings he made on index cards. Thousands of these drawings were filed away in his Tucson studio in what looked like old card-catalogue cabinets. As we asked about his films he would reach into the files, pull out a sequential handful of cards, and make an impromptu flip book, animating a short clip with his hands. The setup recalled the earliest days of cinema, when filmmakers would submit still prints of every frame of a movie to the Library of Congress for copyright purposes and, eventually, preservation. One can only hope that Breer's trove of drawings will find such a home.Meanwhile, from another dormant browser tab, here's a screengrab of a video from 2003, an exhibition of E.A.T. at NTT's ICC, the Inter-Communication Center, a multimedia arts space in Tokyo.
I love the kind of unabashed way the giant-but-not-lifesize photomural of E.A.T.'s Pepsi Pavilion relates to Breer's full-size Floats. I'd assumed these floats were refabricated for Tokyo, but maybe Pepsi has kept them all this time. I think they're at the Baltic Center retrospective now. Maybe someone could find out and let me know.
Float on: Robert Breer, RIP [canopycanopycanopy]
◎ E.A.T.─芸術と技術の実験 [ntticc.or.jp]
