Terrazzo spins an open-ended tale of sidewalks, shelter, and shooting for the sky. The Hollywood Walk of Fame, with its terrazzo patterns in black and white and pink (stars), is the grounding of the piece. The infamous sidewalk uneasily welcomes incongruous users-  those with dreams of celebrity, and those looking for a place to sleep. The animation imagines a 3D shelter built from the pink terrazzo star that takes on a cardboard lining or insulation. The immediate association is of humble street shelters scrapped together from cardboard. The 3D shelter spins in a sequence of naturally occurring light phenomena in the sky, gains a skylight, sheds its cardboard lining and finally, shoots itself off into the sky.

Terrazzo was made using a combination of Photoshop and Google Sketchup (3D) software in a Flash animation environment. The background field of 'stars' is a sequence of stop action images extracted from my photograph of the terrazzo sidewalk in Hollywood, CA, USA, animated to glimmer like stars in the sky. The pink terrazzo star, also from my original photography of Hollywood's sidewalk "Walk of Fame" (typically these stars honor celebrities, movie stars, etc.), is translated in to a 3D shape that transforms from a shelter to a space capsule.

Terrazzo was created in late 2008, and invited to participate in the LA Freewaves Festival for Experimental Media Arts in 2008 (Los Angeles, CA, USA), where it was projected on the side of the Scientology building there. For images of that event, please see:
http://www.arts.ucsb.edu/faculty/beckman/terrazzo.php

See website: http://www.laurelbeckman.com/

See video here.

Duration: 97 seconds
Working with and nurturing eccentric public spaces, Laurel Beckman highlights perception and public display. Attending to themes at the crossroads of consciousness + social conditions, meta-physics + science, Beckman’s practice investigates perceptual phenomena, language, the built environment, and social relations. Employing a wide range of media and distribution strategies, her public and gallery projects often enlist commercial and civic spaces with the goal of contributing meaningfully to the cultural landscape and to our understanding of empathy. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of California, Santa Barbara.