C-TRL Labs: Tiny Visual Experiments
When she was a blacksmith, Nika Offenbac pounded out iron gates and handrails. She enrolled in art school intending to deepen her knowledge of metal fabrication, but once there she discovered — and was captivated by — the world of film and video. Offenbac traded her hammer and anvil for a Mac and earned a degree in what she calls interactive programming: a blend of film, video, and programming for robotics, installations, and sculpture. Soon she was forging a new kind of art using Shake, Final Cut Pro, and other tools on her Power Mac G5.
Today, Offenbac and business partner Devan Simunovich run a Manhattan firm called C-TRL Labs. Simunovich contributes his skills in 2D and 3D design, animation, and motion graphics as the pair invent boundary-blurring film and video, installations, sound sculptures, VJ performances, and animated projections.
In addition to serving clients that include ad agencies and Hollywood studios, Offenbac and Simunovich are committed to keeping their personal creative juices flowing. “We decided early on that it’s important for us to continue to do our own work,” explains Offenbac. “We’re keeping one foot in the commercial world and one in the fine art world — we want to go down both roads.”
30-Second Experiments
The fine art road has led C-TRL to a series of short films they call 30-second experiments. Screened at film festivals and distributed online, the “Microvert” series (the title refers to mini-movies and mini-commercials) will eventually form a body of work its creators envision as a single piece. They aim to add to it every six months until the visual fragments tell a fuller tale.
Offenbac explains the concept: “The idea comes from the William Gibson book ‘Pattern Recognition,’ in which a series of single frames, which viewers assume are part of a larger film, are released on the Internet. We’re releasing these tiny films on the Internet so that, over time, people can piece them together and interpret the narrative.”
But, she cautions, there’s no traditional story line. “We’re creating these pieces in no particular order. They’re glimpses of action in moments of time. We don’t have a scripted narrative structure laid out in the usual way, with a plot path that goes from conflict to resolution. Instead, the narrative is associative — the way our minds work. Our films present you with these disparate images and your mind draws together a story based on your own experiences.”
Macs for Machine Control
One of the installments, “Microvert Fragment #5306A,” is a telling example of the inventive visual imagination and deft animation skills that have put Offenbac and Simunovich at the top of their game. Beyond the theoretcial questions the video raises about the distinctions between the natural and the manufactured, they say, “we just wanted to make something that was visually stunning.”
The partners use Shake, Final Cut Pro, QuickTime Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Maya to craft their edgy vision on two Power Mac G5s. Offenbac is a longtime Final Cut Pro editor who’s loyal to the Mac in part because it’s the only computer that runs some of her favorite software — including Max/MSP/Jitter, which lets her control machines, audio, and video on a single platform to create interactive environments.
“My work has always combined the physical and the digital worlds,” says Offenbac, “so I needed a computer that was able to do both. I have to interact with the machine. And on the Mac, it has always been easy to hook up electronics boards and do rapid prototyping.”
As a self-confessed UNIX dork, Simunovich is enamored of Mac OS X. “All creative houses use Apple,” he says. “It’s the de facto design platform. But since the release of Mac OS X, I’ve been even more sold on Apple because of the UNIX underpinning. I like to be able to get under the hood and do stuff fast.” For example, he adds, “I do a lot of intensive 2D and 3D rendering, and being able to do that from the command line, to interact with the OS in that way — well, it automates and speeds up what we do.”
