The conversation is an experimental live animation piece I created during my MFA thesis at RISD. The work focused on human gesture as a form of visual communication.

As part of my method for creating this work, I set up my video camera in a fixed location and taped several conversations over a few hours of time. Only two figures are present at one time making the conversation appear as if the dialogue took place between those two characters, however, the people on the sofa are constantly being replaced by other characters that never appeared in the frame together. The audio is a combination of the all the conversations collected from the selected edits.

During the taping of this work, I was actually in each scene having a conversation with the other person. For each person I switched sides of the sofa so that later I would be able to splice the two images together to form new relationships and new conversations. I wanted to see what would happen if different people having different conversations could create some type of formal dialogue through body gesture alone, even if they had not been present together.

I edited the footage so that a cut was made every time there was a body movement, then compiled the video using a 'time-lapse' like method. The result created a comical and perculiar visual symphony of body movement that makes us perceive a conversation a bit differently.