Expanding the zone: multimedia animation, performance and curation in Peter Burr’s Special Effect (2013-14)

Throughout his career, New York-based experimental animator, video and performance artist Peter Burr has incorporated collaboration and collectivity into his multimedia performances. Founder of the avant-garde animation label and touring live performance show Cartune Xprez (2006-2013), Burr has commissioned works from across the new media landscape, compiling a compelling cross section of contemporary experimental animation into three DVD collections. One of his more recent expanded animation performances, Special Effect, took the remediated form of a live television show where Burr ‘hosted’ his own animated imagery which was periodically interrupted by obliquely related ‘commercials’ created by a selection of contemporary animators and video artists. Based on Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), Burr’s imagery (which makes up most of the single channel version) depicts three distorted computer-animated characters as they wander through ‘the zone’ in the form of abstract digital spaces and live-action overgrown and abandoned landscapes. In its live manifestations, Burr guided spectators through a labyrinthine experience that included the use of a fog machine, lasers, a webcam with green-screen effects, body mapping, binaural vocal performances, and video sequencing via custom software. This paper explores the multifaceted significance of Special Effect. Situating it within the broader practice of expanded cinema, it maps its curatorial relationship to the current spectrum of experimental animation and analyses the conceptual productivity of its digital distortion of Tarkovsky’s elusive film.