Chris Doyle: Building An Immersive Space
The literary genre of “apocalyptic science fiction” is but one way to map the technical and psychological development of the modern era. These premonitory fables explore in rich detail the growth, collapse, and aftermath of human industrial society, along with the desolation wrought by unfettered growth, extraction, and ecological catastrophe upon the natural world. Nature, ever cyclical, ever abiding, ultimately rises again in an act of Edenic reclamation over the derelict relics of civilization. Of course, the ‘romance of the ruins’ and its sublime beauty have long held our art and literature in its moral thrall: from the timeless influence of Ecclesiastes, to the Planet Of The Apes franchise, to Thomas Cole’s epic series of narrative landscape paintings, The Course Of Empire.
The latter served as one of the conceptual inspirations for the work of animation artist and painter Chris Doyle, whose own whimsical investigations into apocalyptic sci-fi are being presented this summer at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) with a vast projection installation titled The Coast of Industry (2024). This newly commissioned work is part of Doyle’s ongoing series of digitally animated videos, which are typically projected or shown across multiple screens as infinitely scrolling panoramic landscapes. The Coast of Industry explores nature’s endurance through cycles of build, collapse, and regeneration.
This interview was originally published in edited form in BOMB Magazine as Chris Doyle: Building An Immersive Digital Projection, August 2024.
To see more of Chris’ work, please visit the extensive documentation on his studio website.
Installation view of The Coast Of Industry, digital video projection & audio.
Images and video courtesy of the artist.
SEAN CAPONE: Let’s start by talking about the projection installation The Coast of Industry that’s going up at MASS MoCA. What’s the history of these works? This is the largest video piece you’ve ever produced, right?
CHRIS DOYLE: Around 2018, I had an idea to develop an animation that would be built the way an organism evolves. I started with a single cell and developed a motion and from there, a looping mechanism. From these loops, a more elaborate organism would emerge. Ultimately, that project became Parables of Correction. The title comes from Correction, a novel by Thomas Bernhard. At the core of the novel is the idea of constantly revising until what you end up with bears no resemblance to where you started, which definitely resonated with my own process. The novel spurred me to embark on a long term project where the animations from Parables of Correction would evolve over years through a process of constant revision. The Fabricators, a three channel piece that I showed in 2022 was the first revision, and now, the family of animations has further evolved into this new version, The Coast of Industry, which is a six channel work and is the largest piece I’ve made. In a way, the project makes an explicit connection between revision, editing, evolution and mutation as they work in the artistic process and in genetics.
SC: I can clearly see the lineage of the new piece from the earlier ones. In each, we see these elaborate but whimsical biomorphic contraptions and cartoon-surrealist assembly lines. You have abstract characters operating the devices that look like they were grown just to operate the machines. I see these as allegories about the holistic interconnection of life, nature and energy, but also as a satire on the repetitive absurdity and mindlessly scrolling, distracted attentions of modern life.
CD: With The Fabricators, I revisited the machines from Parables and thought of them as organs in a body so the task became to figure out how they worked together as a single system. I was rigorous about how everything had to have function and it all had to work together, however absurdly. Some of the figures are building parts of the system, while others seem to be lubricating it or recycling byproducts and waste. No question, the loops have a Sisyphean aspect to them. And as with Swell (2017), I was again drawing parallels to my own cyclical activity as an animator. Each frame I drew was a revision of the one before, only to arrive in the same place. With Coast, I decided to think more seriously about the nature of my own industriousness.
SC: So “yes” to both interpretations, but you’re talking about something personal as well.
CD: A couple years ago, my father died of Alzheimers. He had always been extremely hardworking, rarely still. It was difficult for him to stop working. Before he died, I watched him incessantly moving around the house, unable to sit down. When we did get him to sit, he was up within a minute, sure that he had something he should be doing but completely unable to remember what that might be. Not long after, I read The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow. A big part of that book centers on seeing that industriousness is not necessarily programmed into us, but a product of western capitalism. Coast is really a meditation on this question, how much is industriousness the result of a lifetime of training and how much of it is actually encoded. Will we be able to give up the idea of constant growth and progress and be content with a looping industriousness?
SC: So, does it make sense to ask: in these works, are we looking at the past, the future, or a constantly unfolding present?
CD: I guess I wasn’t thinking so much about it in terms of our human time frame as much as imagining an alternate world where the species that exist develop an industriousness that is not dependent on a constant extraction/destruction model, but have a more harmonious relationship to the land. For me at this point, it seems too easy to produce work that is ominous and adds to people’s anxieties. With this project, I was aiming to delight.
SC: Speaking of your earlier piece Swell, I am fascinated how you use textures and patterns to build a narrative space that’s constantly unfolding and transitioning through elements of surprise and comic effects, like watching an illusionist’s stage trick. What’s the relation between the visual content and the temporal elements: the motion, transitions, and narrative? How does one arise from or flow into the other?
CD: Swell is the culmination of a series of animations inspired by Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire series, a cycle of five paintings depicting the rise and fall of a civilization. With those pieces, I worked in a way that was a little more like a storyboard. I would develop disconnected scenes over a long time and then the motion emerged from finding fluid connections between them. I’d start with some unrelated visual threads like the assembly line, the zoetrope, and the ominous potential of water, not knowing where I am going until the transitions begin to tell me. Swell focused on industrial culture in the age of climate change, and to some extent, it came out of my own experience working in a factory. In some of the transitions, I am reminding you of the repetitive labor of the animation and the presence of the animator.
I’m excited to be showing Swell in the gallery adjacent to Coast at MassMoCa, the former Sprague Electric Company. There is an interesting conversation in both form and content between the two, especially because one is all about the transitions while the other has none.
SC: For as long as I’ve seen your work, it’s always presented as large-scale projections or architecturally-embedded screens and digital billboards. It just wouldn’t work playing on a small TV mounted on a wall, right? What is the relationship between the image and the spatial experience?
CD: Scale is something I think about all the time, whatever the media. Most of my animation work that is in private collections is shown on conventional monitors and of course, I draw it at that scale. At the same time, you’re right that they are often conceived to be shown at an architectural scale. I grew up equally enamored by both the intimacy of Saturday morning cartoons and the magnificence of the drive-in movie. I am always thinking about the plane of the screen in relationship to the body. I love conceiving a space in layers, always in relation to the person who will stand in front of it. I don’t think that necessarily makes it immersive, certainly not in relation to an experience like VR. You are still experiencing the space as if through a window looking out onto the landscape.
SC: At this scale you can’t say it’s cinematic, like sitting in a theater, I guess you could say “expanded” or “post” cinematic, especially since the backgrounds take panoramic landscape imagery as a jumping off point. It’s immersive in the sense that the viewer’s perception, their body has to get physically involved to look at the whole picture.
CD: This latest piece provided some new challenges since the projection is 25’ high and 260’ long and the experience of standing in front of it was very difficult to imagine in the abstract. In reality, the image is so large that you have to move around a lot to figure out how you want to experience it. Your relationship to the space in the piece is further complicated by the fact that while it is a panoramic landscape, there are times when the space flattens out like the space in a medieval painting. In testing it, I found myself constantly moving between multiple viewpoints, at times trying to take in more of it to understand larger relationships, and sometimes getting up very close and sensing the materiality of the light on and the individual pixels as they move across the painted brick wall. The scale of the space has a similar impact on the sound. The score by Jeremy Turner and the sound design by Owen O’Neill has to be designed to move throughout the space.
SC: How did you communicate the project’s scope and goals to your soundtrack collaborators?
CD: I have worked with Jeremy and Owen for ten years now, so there is a lot of trust. At least at the beginning, I don’t want to control the process too much, but give Jeremy free rein to do what he imagines. I might give a general prompt like “think about percussion.” For this project, Owen is critical to making the installation work because he is taking the score and spatializing it, then weaving the score and sound design together into a complex three-dimensional presence.
SC: To speak of "expanded cinema" is also to speak about the idea of expanded animation. As a medium and a profession, animation is practically impossible to encapsulate succinctly nowadays: 3D, generative, game engines, stop motion, interactive/reactive etc. But you’re one of the few visual artists I can think of working specifically in a ‘flat’ graphic style drawn more from cartoons and traditional cel animation. Is there something distinctive about this method that connects to your artistic concerns?
CD: I’ve always drawn a lot. I started out as a painter in college. I then took a detour and went to grad school in architecture where I spent a whole lot of time constructing perspectives by hand. When I finished, I started making short videos but I found production wasn’t my thing, though I loved post production. In an effort to simplify production, I started working in stop motion, but I found even a still camera proved too much gear for me. I finally just let myself just draw and I started making these frame by frame digital pieces. Because I really knew nothing about proper animation, I sort of fumbled my way through the software, always feeling like I was in over my head.
Certain aspect of cartoon animation have always fascinated me, like the way the backgrounds in early Disney are these gorgeous landscapes painted on glass with the animated characters occupying them, or the way the backgrounds in Roadrunner cartoons always felt like they were drawn on a constantly rotating cylinder. In the end, it’s the slow and plodding labor of the frame by frame process that I am really drawn toward. I have come to understand accumulation of small things as both a way of working and a way of understanding the world.
“It’s the slow and plodding labor of the frame by frame process that I am really drawn toward. I have come to understand accumulation of small things as both a way of working and a way of understanding the world.”
SC: What were some of your other influences and references?
CD: A lot of my references tend to come from the world of painting: Bosch and Bruegel, Renaissance altarpieces, Illuminated manuscripts and Persian miniatures, Klee, Burchfield, Bridget Riley are some. The fusion of nature, pattern and architecture in mosques in Iran and India, William Morris wallpaper, and the plazas of Roberto Burle Marx, is definitely a preoccupation. At the same time, there is a healthy dose of Chuck Jones, Disney, Jan Svankmeyer, and Miyazaki as well. Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the work of Siquieros, Orozco and Riviera, the great Mexican muralists who weave painting, architecture and narrative so brilliantly.
SC: I notice you didn’t cite any other contemporary artists working with video or digital animation as influences. Where do you see yourself in that conversation or context, within the firmament of moving-image art?
CD: Giants who have written the history of video and video installation art, artists like Bruce Naumann, Bill Viola, Pipilotti Rist, Tony Oursler, and Eve Sussman may not seem like obvious influences but their work is like an architecture I get to inhabit. For me, the great William Kentridge is probably the most important artist in shaping my understanding of animation as a process of revision, and for his seamless navigation across all media. More digitally centric artists who focus on the natural world, Marina Zurkow and documentary filmmaker Richard Mosse in particular, are artists whose work consistently amazes and inspires.
SC: Last but not least, can you talk about the interplay and distinctions between your animation work and your paintings & drawings — which really are their own whole thing, apart from the videos?
CD: Whether I’m drawing on paper or on a screen, I tend toward spatial complexity. The origin point for work on paper is usually close observation like in the Newly Fallen series, while the drawing in the animations gets at complexity by beginning with a motion and working outward from there. They are very different ways of working but I feel that they converge when it comes to the kinds of spaces I construct. Intermittently over the years, I have worked on pulling the various ways that I draw together into a single process. The Emanation series was a way to try and do that. I thought of the enamel paintings in that series as zoomed in details from the organisms in Parables of Correction, which used Augmented Reality overlays, allowing each one to give off little bursts of energy. This effort to weave together disparate kinds of drawing is the current focus in my studio.
SC: As a video artist, though, how have you navigated the art world and art market, which is overwhelmingly preoccupied with painting and more traditional mediums, especially now?
CD: I have a great community of artist friends whose work I admire a lot. The art world is made of so many overlapping worlds and most artists I know occupy more than one of them. I feel like the market, which while an important engine for the making of new art, is not the only one. It’s definitely true that if you walk through any recent art fair, you see almost no moving image work at all, which is disappointing. I know some galleries and collectors find it challenging to sell that work or own it, and I’m sympathetic to that. I’m lucky to have some adventurous collectors, curators and a gallery who are supportive in all kinds of ways. Most importantly, they are always interested in what I’m working on next.
SC: I’d say that’s a good mark of an artist’s true audience. They like to look at what’s in front of them but they care even more about what you’re working on next.