- [Presenter] Welcome to "Kalamazoo Lively Arts," the show that takes you inside Kalamazoo's vibrant creative community and explores the people who breathe life into the arts.

(uplifting music) (uplifting music continues) (uplifting music continues) - [Announcer] Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of Greater Kalamazoo.

- [Shelley] On this episode of "Kalamazoo Lively Arts," Ginger Owens shows us her process of making cyanotype on mixed media and why history is so important to her artistic efforts.

But first, Kevin Abbott sheds some light on how virtual imaging technology can be used to create stunning visuals, to support theatrical performances, and be an art piece all on its own.

(soft upbeat music) (upbeat music) Kevin Abbott, I normally don't say this, but I'm kind of blinded by the light.

This is wonderful.

You are in this world of virtual, so I'm gonna have you basically tell us what you do, according to your title, Director of the Virtual Imaging Technology Lab and more.

- This is our new space here at Western Michigan University that we are just opening up now.

And so this space was part of the former Music and Dance Library, which, with all the changes that happened during COVID, the space became available and my dean had the idea to turn this into a technology space.

And so the idea was to bring together a number of different virtual technologies that can be used to work together.

So we have the LED wall, and then the blue cameras above are the motion capture system.

And then we often pair that with technology like game engines, so that they're able to actually create imagery in real time, meaning that we can have imagery on the screen that reacts in the moment to performers, to patrons, and what they're doing to have a more immersive experience.

- There are cameras in this room all around us.

What about this?

What does that mean and what are they doing?

- [Kevin] So those are our motion capture cameras.

So we have a 25 camera system, so that for our footprint here is actually really nice.

We get really excellent coverage and allows us to do both, I guess I would say traditional motion capture, where you're putting a performer in a suit with the reflective markers.

Again, dance has been our most common use of that.

But then we also do things like track a camera so that we can have a virtual imagery that connects here, or also that we can do interactive things.

So we started to build a demo, which is like an underwater scene, and as you walk close to the screen, some of the creatures that are in the water actually then respond to the fact that you've come closer to them.

So you can do traditional body tracking, but that you can also set up things that you can track independently in the space or build relationships between things.

So the fact that they're in the same footprint together, I mean, it's really nice to come in and just turn everything on and it's all ready to go.

Where in the past we were always having to move stuff around, roll stuff in and roll stuff out, but then also the fact that we can just set up so many unique relationships that we couldn't before because the wall and the tracking system live together in the same space.

- What's your background?

- Our background is actually as a theater designer, came to actually to Western, to study, initially to study acting, and then I got introduced to design.

I really hadn't seen it before, and just absolutely fell head over heels.

And I'm still in love with design.

I didn't know that you could get a job where you just got to make up how things look and either put them on a stage or put them on a screen.

I still absolutely love that process.

And then towards my late years in undergrad, you started to be able to get a desktop computer that would actually run graphics well.

And so started to be able to work more with 3D computer software.

I was making set designs, because I didn't draw as well as I wanted to back then, but it, that world just totally made sense to me.

And then I left theater for a little while.

I spent some time working in video games, and a lot of the work that I had done in the theater, both as a set designer, but particularly as a lighting designer, really carried over into the 3D design world.

- So what is happening on the wall here?

- Well, this is a frozen frame from a dance project that I did in 2019, 2020.

And it's a blending, here you're seeing all virtual characters.

So the whole piece was a blend of video of the dancers, but then also motion captured the dancer and it was expressing the ideas of, as we entered COVID, a lot of us had to, we had this duality where we were communicating in person, but we were then often communicating digitally, virtually, which was different.

And so it was the idea of that sort of virtual persona sort of breaking out.

But then coming this alternate sort of part of yourself.

It was called "Nine Boxes", was the working title because the dancers at the time had to be separated.

The floor was taped out into nine individual squares where they worked.

And so we ended up using that idea to help drive the visual ideas for the piece.

- [Shelley] How is something like this used?

- Um, really used to make art.

So the tool, the tool that's largely behind this is called Unity.

It's primarily used to make video games, but because it's able to generate its imagery on the fly, like in a video game, when you right press the forward button, the WASD, your character immediately reacts.

And so the computer is rendering that scene for you one frame at a time right in front of you.

And so we really like to use it for our production work because it allows us to not have to wait for the computer to render.

We get to see our changes immediately.

When we're doing live work, often a dance piece is just one piece that's part of a larger concert.

And so having this tool allows us to really take advantage of the shorter rehearsal chunks that we have by making changes almost immediately and have them show up and not wait.

So it's a very responsive environment to work in as an artist.

Then the next piece we did after this, which was called Stranger, that one was part of a live show and it was simply projected on the back wall of the theater - [Shelley] 3D modeling and animation.

You're an expert in this.

How does this work?

- [Kevin] That's been around actually for quite a while.

So that was where I started, was creating 3D models, again mostly for video games.

And so one of the reasons that we wanted to put the studio together was to try to give students more experience in those areas.

There's so many industries now that are using 3D modeling, right?

Not only game development, architecture, automotive engineering, it goes on and on and on.

Same with the game engine technology.

A lot of other things other than games are being made with it.

And so we really think it's important for our students to have some experience with that because they can take that experience and go in so many different directions with it.

- You use what's called real time rendering technology.

Talk to me like a fifth grader.

What's that mean?

- So if you watch a movie like let's say Toy Story, right?

All the material in Toy Story, the characters, the animation, the lighting, the textures, all that is prepared.

And then that gets sent to a big floor or building of computers called a render farm.

And because of the high quality, it takes a long time to generate one frame, right?

And a film is 24 frames per second times however long the film is.

So it's thousands and thousands and thousands of frames.

And it just takes a long time to render high quality.

A video game does the same thing.

It takes the lighting of the textures and the models and it renders a frame, but they are hyper optimized to happen immediately so that when you move, it responds in the moment.

You give up quality, so you can't quite have the visual fidelity, the perfect lighting, the realistic lighting that you have in a film.

But boy, every year the game engines get better and better and better at that realism.

And for me, like here, this is not, I'm not trying to make it look realistic, but the play of light on the figures has a realistic feel to it.

It gives them a sense of dimension.

And so that ability to assemble your work and then immediately get to see it in motion is amazing.

It means for me with art, I like surprise.

I like to see things that I haven't seen before.

I like things that challenge me.

And so I think that that's one of the reasons why I tend to want to look to the future.

And these tools to me are very interesting because they've so far proven to be very good at helping me create things that I hope are surprising to people, that pull people through a work, that show them something on stage that they maybe never have seen on stage before.

So I'm really, really interested in new experiences and surprising experiences.

- I'm picturing my computer, I'm picturing this, what's the scale difference, similarity?

How does this even happen?

- I mean the computers are, they're kinda like dogs, right?

Like, you have chihuahuas.

You have great names, right?

And computing can be very much the same, where there's just a wide range of things that those computers serve.

So for us, generally our work is pretty demanding, in terms of computers.

A lot of what we use would fall under the term of even gaming computers, right?

Gaming computers, particularly ones that run Windows are really good at playing video games.

They're really good at rendering.

- [Shelley] There's a niche there, right?

- [Kevin] Yep.

And so they come with faster processors, they come with more expensive video cards.

And these days, the video cards are the parts that really does most of the... - [Shelley] It's a literal card?

- Well, no, these days they're really quite, they're really quite large and can be quite powerful.

So our LED wall isn't super big.

And so we actually run ours off of one pretty powerful computer, but this is a computer that's $15,000, for the single computer to run it with a very, very high end graphics card.

And so it is one of the things that's a challenge for a university, it always has been, and also the arts as well, is that when you start to wade into stuff that's normally reserved for Hollywood, that's normally reserved for the video game industry, those are industries that generate a lot of revenue.

And so the companies that serve them charge quite a bit for their technology.

So for us, that's always a balance that we have to try to meet to what can we afford, how much are we wading into that?

Because, you know, the pieces and parts can all be expensive.

I can remember stories, our first motion capture system was one that had been used on Polar Express, the Tom Hanks movie.

And we bought it used, you know, because that was what we could afford at the time.

And in talking to some of the people who were working with it, they were explaining that when they did their capture sessions with Tom Hanks, they would put all the little, right, little markers, the reflective markers, like a hundred of them on his face.

- On his physical face?

- [Kevin] Right.

And those, at the time, they were like, they were like $5 each, these little reflective markers.

And at the end of the day, they'd washed them all down the sink.

So that was $500 every time they did it, because you really can't put used markers back on Tom Hanks' face because he is supposed to be doing another movie two weeks from now.

And if he breaks out from those, then there's gonna be a lawsuit available.

So that's just sort of a, you know, an example of the range of cost, right?

So for us, we're always trying to make smart choices, hopefully stuff that's enough, like what's in the industry, that it's a good experience for our students, giving us really good quality as we work, but then trying to balance it so that we're not over investing too much and have the ability to take in a number of different technologies.

- Keep on doing your thing and keep on paying it forward.

Appreciate this conversation.

- Yeah, thank you.

(upbeat music) (piano music) - When did you pick up your first camera?

- Probably high school.

Yeah.

I took a photography class.

My mother was a high school art teacher and it was a medium that she was not aware of as a teacher.

And I thought I would do something different than my mother, so.

- And obviously, you have.

- Yeah.

- Yes.

Well, congratulations on your success thus far here as a professor with Western Michigan University, I guess there's a lot to fill in between high school and there, but let's cut to the chase here.

How are you spending your day with the university and with photography?

- Well, I, of course teach photography classes.

My specialty is in alternative processes and I teach darkroom black and white photography as well as, you know, some art appreciation classes and business practices.

- [Shelley] Let's talk a little history project.

What do we have in front of us?

- Oh yeah.

So this, all of the work that you see here on the table, it represents a type of photography that's called cyanotype.

And this was a process that was created in 1842, at the dawn of the invention of photography, by a man named Sir John Herschel, an English man, and very good friends with a very well-known inventor of photography, Fox, Talbot.

Fox Talbot needed to solve a problem about fixing an image permanently on a substrate.

And went to Herschel, who was a neighbor of his.

And Herschel came up with this process.

It was then later incorporated by architects.

So you've seen architectural blueprints and this is the adaption of that process.

And now you're starting to see more and more contemporary photographers turn away from digital photography, because they feel a need to work with their hands again.

And they're going back to the dawn of photography and its earliest inventions and using processes like cyanotype.

- Wow.

Alright.

Take me into this.

As we look close, we see faces.

- Yes, yes.

So as an artist, it's very important for me to connect to history.

I've used my personal family history as a major subject matter in my work.

And as I'm getting older, I'm also thinking.

- [Shelley] You're getting better.

- Well, okay, maybe a little better.

But, you know, I'm thinking about how I'm connected to a broader history.

And so I really am passionate about the early inventions of photography and that history that, as a photographer, I belong to.

So the little faces that you see here, they're pictures from my family photo albums.

- Let's piece together, beginning to end, and you start with what's on the wall?

- Going back to personal family photo albums has... - Who's that?

- This is actually is my great-grandfather, my father's father.

And so I'm going back in and appropriating these old pictures into my artwork.

And then this is my grandmother, his daughter I'm printing on fabric in the cyanotype process.

And she was a great storyteller.

And so I just use some of the stories that I remember that she would tell me repetitively as a child and have embroidered those over the face of her image.

- And then where will this ultimately end up?

- I installed this on the wall as an installation.

And this is just a smaller couple of pieces.

There are panels and I believe there's about 12 of these panels.

They kind of have a rippled effect.

They're installed vertically and they're meant to mimic a waterscape.

- [Shelley] That's the ultimate look.

- [Ginger] Yes.

- [Shelley] Will you be precise in trimming and placing symmetrically or is it meant to be pretty much as is?

- Yeah.

Wabi-Sabi - Wabi-Sabi.

What's that mean?

- You know, a little, a little that, yeah.

Yeah.

- How did you get the image to even stay here?

- The art of the imperfection?

- It's idea of the Wabi-Sabi, but the images, they're just Xerox transfers, so it's a very low tech process.

Right.

- What do we have over here?

- The image here and here, they're actually rubbings from gravestone.

And this is a rubbing off of a very famous door from the home of William Henry Fox Talbot.

He was the inventor of photography.

And I took a group of students to his home and later went back and did a month long residency, where I got to really study the place that, you know, he lived.

Yeah.

So I started taking these rubbings on tracing paper and that's an example of that.

And then I would print those with the cyanotype process.

- So there's printing that's involved with photography as well, right?

- Absolutely.

- How about this bigger piece that's still part of your, what we see from this door?

- This image was created by Fox Talbot in about approximately 1840.

It is really the most famous photograph door in the history of photography.

So when I went to his home and studied, I was able to take a rubbing of that door.

And for me as a photographer, this is like going to the moon and bringing back a moon rock.

I love being connected to that part of history.

- [Shelley] There is also something underneath this, if you want to share a bit of a quilt, do we call it?

- Yes.

So maybe this is the newest of all the works that I've created.

These are photograms.

My parents came during COVID to visit and we were, you know, hanging out at home in my backyard.

And I asked them did they wanna make some photographs with me?

And we made simple photogram images of garden botanicals of the backyard.

- [Shelley] This is the end process.

Obviously you had to take photos, you had to present this on this and someone quilted this.

- Yes.

My mother and I worked on those ending parts together.

So a lot of family history here.

- You're more than just a photographer.

- Yes.

Do you wanna see the backside?

- I wanna see the backside.

Let's see the backside.

And then how will you use this, as a quilt or a wall hanger?

- I display it in a gallery space.

- I wouldn't want my dogs to sit on it then right?

- No ma'am.

So the backside, you can see some images of our family incorporated and intermingled.

- [Shelley] What's it like to go from an idea to this?

Does it take a while, or once you're on a roll, you're that expertise to make it happen?

Does it change?

What's the process?

- It depends on the situation.

In the case of this, it was hanging out with my parents and talking about our past, and then my mother being inspired by a new hobby that she had as a quilter.

And me looking at her and saying, Hey, well you wanna make a project together?

- And is this something your students ultimately learn to do and you hope that they take away as they go into the world?

- I do teach an alternative process class, and yes, I want them to learn about the early histories of photography and to keep them alive and vital.

Modernize them, you know, create new works out of them.

- So Professor Owen, I would like to be your student for the next couple of minutes.

What would you like to teach me?

- I would love to teach you how to make a cyanotype photogram.

- Let's go do it.

Alright.

I am the student.

You are the professor.

Take it away.

- Yeah, sure.

So with the cyanotype process, we have two chemicals and we mix those together 50/50/ We have a sponge brush.

And then we're gonna dip the brush into the chemical.

- Okay.

All right.

- [Ginger] And kind of pull off as much chemicals - [Shelley] We don't wanna waste.

Right.

So these have gone into here?

- [Ginger] Yes.

- [Shelley] Alright.

- [Ginger] And then I'll have you do this one, but I wanna show you what it looks like.

And we're just gonna take the chemical, - [Shelley] Oh, like olive oil.

- [Ginger] Very lightly on it.

And then we're gonna go in the opposite direction.

- [Shelley] Why is that?

- [Ginger] The other way.

We're just trying to get it on nice and smooth.

- [Shelley] Oh yes.

Okay.

Well here we go.

Be be easy on my critique.

Alright, ooh, so we start going down, correct?

- [Ginger] Yes.

- [Shelley] Okay.

Probably in the future I should coat it a little bit more here.

- And light is better.

- Light is better, yes.

- Perfect.

- Okay.

Perfect's good.

Alright.

- [Ginger] And then we're gonna take these and we're gonna stick 'em in a dark room and dry them.

Right now they're wet and they're not sensitive to light, but as soon as they dry, they'll become sensitive to light.

- Alright.

So while those are drying, what's next?

- So what we're going to do is we're gonna make a type of photograph that is called a photogram.

There's no camera that's involved.

We're just going to make an image without camera or camera-less image.

- So we take the pieces of the woods?

- Yes.

So we can use things that I found out in nature.

And the other thing that is interesting about this process is you can print on any kind of natural substrates, paper or fabric.

And so I'm gonna grab this and it's for contact printing, which means that I'm going to make tight contact between this, the plants and the photographic paper.

So this is dry, it's sensitive to light.

So we need to work fast.

And what I'll let you do is make an arrangement.

- Make an arrangement.

- Any kind of arrangement that you like.

- Oh, this is so outta my comfort zone.

But that's okay.

I wanna think, you know, thinking thirds, right?

Or so, okay.

I kinda like that.

I like that.

Yes.

Thank you.

Yeah, it looks like an Irwin forest.

Yep.

- [Ginger] And then I'm gonna take the paper that we've coated.

- [Shelley] Are you gonna press that?

- [Ginger] And I'm gonna press it.

We're gonna expose it to ultraviolet light and kind of like, it's kind of like a tanning bed.

- Oh.

- But you could take this out into the sunlight and expose it under the sun and it would work the same way.

So if we flip this over, we can kind of see your arrangement.

- [Shelley] That's beautiful.

- [Ginger] Yep.

- [Shelley] I'd be fine with just that.

How much you wanna buy it for?

- [Ginger] Yeah.

Now we need to make the exposure.

- Now we're ready for the water.

- [Ginger] Yeah, and so once we make our exposure, all that we need to do to fix the image permanently onto our paper is to agitate it in a water bath and it releases the chemical that has not been exposed to light.

- [Shelley] So take me through what happens after exposure.

- [Ginger] So after the exposure, we take it out of the contact printing and we just place it in the water bath.

And then we just agitate it and it releases the chemical.

It's that simple.

- [Shelley] The art of teaching.

How fun is it for you to be able to share your talents with one who wants to explore this in a professional way?

- [Ginger] Yeah.

I'm very passionate about sharing the things that I love.

So it's, you know, I couldn't imagine a better job than what I have.

- Can I take my print home?

- Absolutely.

- Thanks for talking.

- Yes.

Thank you for having me.

(uplifting music) - [Announcer] Support for Kalamazoo Lively Arts is provided by the Irving S Gilmore Foundation, helping to build and enrich the cultural life of greater Kalamazoo.

(upbeat music)