By Karen Rivedal, Office of Research & Scholarship

When UW–Madison Digital Arts Professor Stephen Hilyard’s short animation titled “Morning Glory” screened at the Taos Film Festival this year, the official selection gave the artist something galleries rarely can: the chance to experience his viewers’ reactions in real time.

“Having everyone together in a large space, viewing it at the same time — which is what a movie is — is a very different experience,” Hilyard said. “It’s very gratifying.”

Hilyard saw “Morning Glory” accepted into the Experimental Shorts category of the festival in late April. A quietly mesmerizing mix of color and motion, the 3-minute, 6-second video clip screened for festival-goers twice, with Hilyard seated among them.

Created in 2008, Hilyard’s animation is built from still photos he made of a blue-hued morning glory flower and an image he found online of a blue-and-white ceramic plate crafted by Wedgwood, the famed 18th-century English mass producer of fine porcelain.

The animation takes viewers into the heart of the morning glory, starting with a view of the entire flower and then moving progressively deeper into the flower’s center. Internal structures of the flower spin outward from the center, before the camera moves deeper again to reveal a rural Western landscape of shepherds tending flocks rendered in shades of blue on the plate. A final plunge leads to an Eastern landscape hidden within the Western one and featuring a Chinese pagoda, in a nod to the original Asian porcelain makers that Wedgwood emulated.

“The underlying theme of the piece is around the layers of cultural back-and-forth that shape our experience of the world,” Hilyard explained. “Moving down through the flower is a cinematic device to give this idea of moving into another dimension and eventually moving effectively through the planet, all the way from Europe to China.”

The soundtrack to the video includes birdsong and a piece for solo lute written by the 17th-century composer Heinz Biber.

You can read more about this year’s Taos Film Festival and watch the Hilyard animation, paired with a fuller explanation of the piece and a selection of individual images making up the video. The page also provides links to other examples of Hilyard’s work including Katyusha, a 35-minute, 10-second movie he completed over 10 years as a fictional representation of the historic showcase community built for Ukrainian coal miners and their families in the Arctic by the former Soviet Union in 1928; it was evacuated in two days in 1998, leaving a ghost town.