Animation is an all-encompassing artform, embracing any medium and process an artist can come up with. Each frame of an animated film is an artwork in its own right, but when that artwork extends beyond the screen into the gallery, expect the unexpected. Sweaty Eyeballs: Animation Adjacent, opening Friday, September 13 at Area 405, highlights work by artists from the Baltimore, D.C. and Philadelphia regions, manifesting as an extension of their animation that finds its best home off the screen and outside the theater. The animator is concerned with the sequencing of the individual image and the illusion of movement created by playing those images in rapid succession, but not all of those images end up on a screen.

A walk through the Area 405 gallery will lead you to touchpoints in animation’s very beginning, including praxinoscopes and zoetropes, pre-cinema optical devices that have been expanded and adapted by artist and historian Robby Gilbert. Viewers have the option of creating their own hand-drawn praxinoscope sequences and seeing them burst into movement in the machine. Juxtaposed with these historical entertainment devices are two interactive, generative installations by Timothy Nohe and McCoy Chance. Both artists use sound translated into electronic signals as the catalyst for animation. Similarly, the viewer is invited to be the “animator” by activating the works with their voice and movement with markedly different outputs in each work.