Brains and creative brawn! A lively and artful abstraction about that which is anything but abstract: our senses. This piece is animated by Cal Art’s Master of Mindbending, Caitlin Craggs, and is one very clever and tactile segment of a fascinating eight part multi-media (dimensional?) series. Read on to muse on Caitlin’s mysterious machinations and to hear from producer and Grand Perceiver Nadja Oertelt about the concept for these sublimely boundary pushing exploratory shorts for HarvardX, each with their own animator.

blog by vera long

Nadja Oertelt on the Poetry of Perception series:

How do we perceive the world? This is a question that neuroscience has long sought to tackle, but which poets and artists have pursued even longer. I conceived of and produced The Poetry of Perception, an eight part series for HarvardX’s Fundamentals of Neuroscience alongside eight animators and a composer. Find out more on The Atlantic, Vimeo Staff Picks, Hyperallergic, Open Culture, Booooooom and The Creators Project.

ANIMATOR
– Caitlin Craggs
A child of the Pacific Northwest, Caitlin is currently an LA based designer, director and animator. An interest in storytelling and media propels her work—she is curious about the place between documentary and narrative, between journalism and surrealism, between self and other. As an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, she received a Princess Grace Award to create Lintscape, her stop-motion film about killer lint. She has since directed animation for documentary film and music videos. She is currently an MFA candidate at the California Institute of the Arts.