Three experienced skiers were killed Sunday afternoon after being caught in an avalanche by Tunnel Creek Canyon, in an out-of-bounds area near Stevens Pass. A total of twelve skiers in three groups were swept away by the new snow. The skiers had safety devices–shovels, avalanche probes, and avalanche beacons–but the precautions still weren’t enough to save them all. CPR was started on the three men, Jim Jack, Chris Rudolph, and Johnny Brenan, but proved unsuccessful. One person survived by wrapping himself around a tree and holding on for dear life, while professional skier Elyse Saugstad was saved when she deployed an avalanche airbag, a backpack designed to keep her afloat in the snow. Next Media Animation has the computer-animated version of the disaster. As astutely pointed out by a YouTube commenter (usually a contradiction in terms), “The Next Media logo looks like an avalanche safety device.”
All in all, it was a bad weekend for outdoor activities, as a snowboarder was killed in a separate avalanche at Alpental and a scuba diver’s body was recovered near West Seattle Sunday night.
Spontaneous Fantasia shows at West of Lenin on Friday, September 2, at 8 p.m., and Saturday, September 3, at 5 and 8 p.m. Tickets: $15-$18.
J-Walt (aka John Adamczyk) is off to the right, standing in front of a touchpad and slider box and joystick, looking like a mad raver-scientist: long curly blond hair, goatee, black jacket with gold lamé. On the movie screen is a virtual reality world he’s creating, live, to the music, some of which is his own schwoopy ambient and bleepy dance, some Pachelbel.
In another life, J-Walt created a real-time computer graphics system for filmmakers. It worked with live action cranes and motion control rigs so that, if you were using a green screen, you could watch the live and animated as you shot. J-Viz won an Academy Award.
But that was in 2006. In 2011, J-Walt’s challenge to himself is to walk audiences through a “Spontaneous Fantasia”–evoking the animated film, while making a point of how far computer animation has come. J-Walt gives a little précis before each piece; one, he said, featured “twisted vortices,” it was the way genes dance when we’re not looking. Every so often I’d tear my eyes from the screen to watch him at work, hardly believing it was possible that all this arose from a curlicue on a touchpad.
There are other “shorts” on the program, but Omnicentric Universe is in its way a cosmic performance of animation: It begins with the birth of the universe, proceeds to nebulae and stars, then to planets, mountains, oceans. The parameters are largely set beforehand–he’s not sketching out a nebula, per se–but the “bringing into being” is live, and that’s the impression you’re most struck by: the vibrant ferment.
In Omnicentric Universe, J-Walt says, he wanted to explore how what matters to us tend to be close by us–attachment is attenuated by distance. His joystick lets him (and the audience) fly through the work he’s creating, zoom around, over, beneath. It’s both like and not like flying through Pandora–I found J-Walt’s universe more extravagantly alien, even considering the rave-culture paint patterns he’s fond of.
At night, in an architectural, arboreal-limbed shelter, a lone candy corn with a hat pongs about the floor, generating sparks and blossoms of light. The camera zooms back into the dark, but the dots of light and color persist.
