"Fiennes’s 'Nativity’ gives holiness the hi-tech treatment." – Telegraph
NATIVITY (2011)
SLOimage
Artist/Director: Martha Fiennes
Vocal performer: Sussan Deyhim, Gunnlaug Thorvalsdottir
Cello/Electric Cello: Martin Tillman
Exhibited at: The National Gallery
A collaboration with sister Martha Fiennes, Nativity was unveiled to the world at the Masonic Temple in Covent Garden in 2011 and went on exhibit at the National Gallery and The Victoria & Albert Museum to much acclaim as a ‘game-changer’ in the art world.
Nativity was the inaugural work to utilize Martha’s proprietary media creation ©SLOimage. Indirectly influenced by the tableaux portrayals of the Nativity scene by Italian masters and fresco painters, Nativity’s AI-based gaming engine drives events in real-time through often near-random heuristics, creating a non-linear, non looping, endlessly open-ended narrative, all occurring at a graceful and meditative hyper-slow frame rate, made possible by the Phantom camera’s 1000 f/s shutter speed.
Characters are shot green screen, enacting a large library of moves and gestures that the engine then selects through a complex algorithm. Backgrounds are CG animated or matte drawn and also dissolve and transform in real time, almost unperceptively. The end result is something between a painting, a photograph and a film.
The music needed to follow a similar ruling to the image and was therefore composed in a matrix of key-interrelated compositions, consisting of ‘stems’ with the potential to overlap in any multitude of combinations, so music is never heard the same way twice.
Reviews:
/ The Guardian /
/ Maestro Arts /
