Comprised entirely of GIFs, OOZLUM can be viewed in its entirety in 45 seconds. But linger longer if you choose, your viewing experience is up to you.
A collaboration between dancer/choreographer Sophie Sotsky | TYKE DANCE and advertising creative Andrew Mixter, this dance in GIF format was designed to exist only in virtual spaces including email, vine, instagram, snapchat, tumblr, and primarily in it’s own domain — www.oozlum.com
*Check out our q&a with the creators below project
What brought you and Andrew together? What inspired this particular project?
Andrew Mixter: Actually, Sophie asked me to be in a dance of hers Sophomore year at Wesleyan University, and I loved the experience. We’ve had an ongoing dialogue about dance and art since then. I kept thinking about the possibilities inherent in digital formats, and Sophie was always interested in talking about and exploring new ideas. I loved her work and her creativity. And we were already good friends, so, I guess it was inevitable, haha.
Sophie Sotsky: This project largely came from our mutual desire to make a dance work that is hyper accessible yet not superficial.
It’s no secret that most people consider dance to be inaccessible. Dance is abstract, sensory and kinesthetic, and requires a great deal of engagement from its audiences. A lot of our peers are much more likely to engage with something that is visual and instantaneous…
AM: We wanted to make an impactful dance you could experience the way you read BuzzFeed — a dance you could share with your friends.
Why an oozlum?
SS: We chose the word “oozlum” to allude to an important narrative component of this work, without leading one to believe that the nature of the work is primarily narrative.
That, and it sounds like “ooze”… it’s gross… it has a sensory quality, an animalistic quality.
The aesthetics are really unique. Can you give us some insight into the process and production?
AM: We thought a lot about how people experience so much these days on small screens. Instead of seeing it as a limitation, we saw it as an opportunity to rethink the experience of dance. We wanted to make something really different that would be engaging when viewed on a smartphone, for example.
Hopefully, it’s kind of a surprise for viewers.
SS: In the creation of these GIFs we were trying to conceive of time in a completely different way while also trying to retain the cohesiveness of a dance. At one point in the process, we went into the studio with some of the dancers I work with and tried to choreograph instantaneous yet cyclical moments.
AM: The production of this project required that the two of us learn how to tackle a lot of things neither of us had ever confronted before – lighting for film, GIF encoding programs, coding html, and encoding and sharing video in so many different formats. We also did almost all the editing over the internet through Team Viewer, a screen sharing program, from different cities (Brooklyn and Boston) – which frankly, I had no idea was even possible before this.
What would you say was the most challenging about the creation of this project?
AM: That’s hard to say… probably wracking our brains trying to figure out how to translate normally temporally linear dance into looping GIFs, which almost deny the passage of time. There’s something hypnotic about many successful GIFs that we tried to capture. But there was no real template to look at for what we wanted to do. We were driven by the confidence that it WAS possible, but making it work was harder than we ever imagined.
I’ll also mention that the day we shot, Sophie danced on and off for probably 8 hours.
Are there more gif series like this in the works?
SS: There’s definitely more in the works. 😉
Check out TYKE DANCE’s website for additional information and other works.
