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Move-Click-Move is a diverse program of 18 animated and experimental films by Deanna Morse. From Sesame Street to the Odessa Steps to the Everglades and the computer lab, Morse has created at least one film poem each year since college. This work explores materials and techniques, shifting time and space by considering what is between the frames as we celebrate seasons, people, change, and nature. Collaborating with children, musicians, and puppeteers using pioneering computer animation techniques, time-lapse, kinestasis, or simple cutouts, her visual poems are like postcards. A postcard message that says, “Wish you were here,” often sharing common surroundings. Move, click, move.

How Animation Works: Move-Click-Move

Deanna Morse

Grand Rapids, MI | 2001 | 2 | digital

The introductory signature video for the award-winning retrospective DVD Move-Click-Move, published in 2001. An interactive journey through the artist’s cluttered desktop.

Help! I’m Stranded…

Deanna Morse

Spartanburg, SC | 1981 | 5 | digital

Help! I’m stranded… in a Spartanburg motel room with: 1. a broken TV, 2. some note cards, and 3. a red crayon. It’s a true story. A rubbing film, a sound-image guessing game.

Container Loss

Deanna Morse & Jane Flint

San Francisco, CA | 2022 | 3 | digital

Climate crisis, gyres, garbage patches, natural phenomena, human response, hope, loss, optimism, equanimity, integrity, awareness, and responsibility. Reminders. Cutout animation and time lapse. Animated with Jane Flint. Music by Chris Gagnon.

Sandpaintings

Deanna Morse & Jane DeKoven

Palo Alto, CA / Chicago, IL / Grand Rapids, MI | 1992 | 8 | digital

Two Navajo-inspired figures explore symbols and their meaning. Piano music by VR inventor and philosopher Jaron Lanier. A pioneering film using VPL DataGlove motion tracking to animate the sign language hand. Art is not to be feared.

The Gift 

Deanna Morse 

Grants Pass, OR |  2019 | 2 | digital

Celebrating Walt Whitman’s 200th birthday, and his poem “To a Certain Cantatrice.” This multigenerational female family reading honors Whitman’s point that basic needs belong to everyone. Food, nature, creative expression, art. Yes, they belong to everyone. Original music by Edie Herrold. 

A Mother’s Advice

Deanna Morse 

Lake Forest, IL / Grand Rapids, MI |  2000 | 8 | digital

Body images and a rite of passage. Based on a story by Beth Isacke, inspired by her hair. Created during an artist residency at Ragdale Artists Colony, Illinois. Sound design by Edie Herrold.

Skin 

Deanna Morse 

Everglades National Park, FL | 2012 | 5 | digital

Thick skinned, thin skinned. The first line of defense. A surface archive. Created as an artist-in-residence at the Everglades National Park, Florida. Trees. Many trees. Mosquitos, too. Sound design by Edie Herrold.

Breathing Room 

Deanna Morse

El Mojacar, Spain | 2009 | 4 | digital

Examining nature through the lens of time. Light sweeps languidly across the tiles in a room. Outside, the flowers erupt in a riot of color. Created at Fundacion Valparaiso, an artist colony in Mojacar, Spain. Music by Edie Herrold.

Whispers of the Prairie

Deanna Morse 

Grand Rapids, MI | 2013 | 4 | digital

The first American Iawn: prairie. Back to our roots, to the medley of native flowers that thrive in our forests and our sustainably landscaped lawns. In contrast, manicured green unsustainable turf grass. Music by Edie Herrold.

August Afternoons

Deanna Morse

Charleston, SC | 1985 | 5 | digital

Sunlight and shadows whisk through time. Optically printed from Super 8 footage. Charleston, SC, with Randy Buggs and Ray Harvey.

Lost Ground 

Deanna Morse 

Chicago, IL / Grand Rapids, MI | 1992 | 3 | digital

A modern love story. Michigan to Chicago by train in 1992, early 3D animation. 

Plants 

Deanna Morse 

Oakville, ON, Canada | 1989 | 4 | digital

A lifelong obsession revealed. Created with NeoVisuals Software at Sheridan College, using clunky code (keypad entry—before menus, trackpads, and the mouse). Plants can’t walk. Plants don’t talk. Plants can’t see. Plants don’t have legs. Music by Jim Barfuss with Chloe Willey.

Monkey’s T-shirt

Deanna Morse & Rose Rosely 

Grand Rapids, MI | 1991 | 2 | digital

Animated short for Sesame Street. An embedded figures puzzle, animated by Deanna Morse and Rose Rosely. Sound by Billy Vits. Look! The animals are hiding! Can you find them?

Night Sounds: Imagination 

Deanna Morse & Rose Rosely 

Chicago, IL / Grand Rapids, MI | 1992 | 1 | digital

Animation for Sesame Street. A little girl is so scared by the night sounds, and she is not the only one! Animation by Deanna Morse and Rose Rosely, with sound by Billy Vits.

Dejeunez, Mon Amour

Deanna Morse & Mark Henriksen 

Ames, IA | 1970 | 3 | digital

Close-up vision of American consumption. Before tattoos were all the rage, filmmakers Mark Henriksen and Deanna Morse had a vision. And some food. And some stock music. One of my earliest films, student-produced at Iowa State University.

Forced Perspective: Odessa 

Deanna Morse 

Russia / Ukraine / Grand Rapids, MI | 2007 | 5 | digital

My visit to the real steps at Odessa was affected by the Odessa Steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. Media images have power. They shape our real-life experiences. 

Postcards from My Backyard 

Deanna Morse 

Grand Rapids, MI | 2007 | 5 | digital

An exploration of a single space over two years’ time—the seasons of Michigan. Incorporating time-lapse footage, motion graphics, and my own musical soundscape, this video poem considers growth, decay, and transformation. 

Charleston Home Movie 

Deanna Morse 

Charleston, SC | 1980 | 5 | digital

Memories and images of Charleston, South Carolina. Rotoscope animation of significant friends and moments. Film is represented in several collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Music by Keith Jarrett, used with permission. 

This program comprises one film by Su Friedrich and four others by women who have informed her filmmaking, though not necessarily directly. These films deal with aesthetic and technical concerns which are somewhat or sometimes different than her own. But each shares a fierce spirit that inspired Friedrich when she first saw them, and the inspiration continues to today. Whether using analog video to create otherworldly worlds, putting a little girl through some strange paces, “rewriting” a video game, or sharing playful moments with some young women, these films are admired by Friedrich because they are made from the hearts, minds, eyes, and bodies of some very observant, thoughtful, clever, and playful women.

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Hand Tinting

Joyce Wieland

New York, NY | 1967 | 6 | digital

A study of poor Black and white girls at a Job Corps center, brought from rural areas to be “educated” in typing. Here you see displaced creatures… swimming, sitting, and mostly dancing, who express what’s happening to themselves through their bodies, their hands, and their faces.

The Drift of Juicy

Ursula Pürrer

Vienna, Austria | 1989 | 10 | digital

The Drift of Juicy looks like it was made with high-tech digital effects—but Pürrer made it in 1989 with analog video. It was unique then and is literally inimitable today. Whether it takes place in outer or inner space, is dystopian or utopian, is for you to decide.

Jennifer, Where Are You?

Leslie Thornton

New York, NY | 1981 | 11 | digital

In Jennifer, Where Are You? a girl sloppily applies lipstick while an unseen man repeatedly calls out her name. Her image is intercut with black leader, bursts of light, and meditative shots of domestic spaces. With “Jennifer” hiding in plain sight, Thornton presents a carefully structured comment on the formation of female identity.

She Puppet

Peggy Ahwesh 

New York, NY | 2001 | 15 | digital

Re-editing footage collected from months of playing Tomb Raider, Ahwesh transforms the video game into a reflection on identity and mortality. Moving beyond her implicit feminist critique of the problematic female identity, she enlarges the dilemma of Lara Croft’s entrapment to that of the individual in an increasingly artificial world. Courtesy of Peggy Ahwesh and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Seeing Red 

Su Friedrich 

New York, NY | 2005 | 28 | digital

In Seeing Red, three elements run parallel, overlap, diverge, lock horns, and in various other ways give voice to the notion that a color, a melody, or a person has multiple characteristics that cannot be grasped by, or understood within, a simple framework.

On Time is a selection of Wenhua Shi’s moving image work from the recent decade. “Over the past ten years, we have been faced with the unexpected. The demands from all sides became monumentally heavy. Looking through the viewfinder is my way of being in the moment. Editing becomes a new way of rediscovering/investigating the experiences and measurement of time.” –Wenhua Shi

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Because the Sky is Blue

Wenhua Shi

Wuhan, China | 2020–2022 | 4 | 35mm

Muybridge captured the galloping horse one hundred forty years ago in a brief 12 frames. The durations of today’s social media video clips are similar to Muybridge's brevity. Wenhua tries to reimagine what subject Muybridge would capture today. All source footage is from Wenhua’s social media feed. He used the cyanotype method to reprint the individual frames, creating the final short videos.

Descending a Staircase

Wenhua Shi

Beijing, China | 2012–2014 | 6 | 35mm

This work pays homage to Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Created one hundred years after the original piece, it is a meditation on the mechanical nature of cinema and moving images, both through its dynamic movement and fragmentation. The footage was captured at an apartment building in Beijing, China. Steadicam by Patrick Selvage. Girl by Jiang Shu.

Concrete: Boston City Hall

Wenhua Shi

Boston, MA | 2021 | 22 | 35mm

Image: concrete. Turn the image upside down: nothing more, nothing else, nothing. During the pandemic, drones flying over the empty city became oversaturated. Media coverage fixed our imagination into one way of reading a city/space. I return to the idea of ma”—empty or open spaces (interval or pause in time). This piece was created with this additional perspective, creating a contrast to City Hall, legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman’s four-hour long film.. Here I try to present the meditational quality of the empty city hall. The project was presented by local art organization Non-Event with support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. 

Senses of Time

Wenhua Shi

New York, NY / Boston, MA | 2018 | 6 | 16mm

Senses of Time depicts the lyrical and poetic passage of time. The work focuses on defining subjective and perceptual time with close attention to stillness, decay, disappearance, and ruins.

Gutai

Wenhua Shi

Shanghai & Wuhan, China / Boston, MA | 2019–2020 | 6 | 16mm

Wenhua took on a radical use of single frame image capture and examines his strange and familiar hometown in China, which he has been away from for nearly two decades. The film title comes from postwar Japanese avant-garde artist group Gu-Tai. The kanji used to write gu means “tool,” “measure,” or “a way of doing something,” while tai means “body.” The film is the result of intense looking, seeing what might not be there.

Walking Cycle

Wenhua Shi

New York & Hamilton, NY | 2016 | 8 | digital file

Walking Cycle is an abstract audiovisual piece that celebrates the line, its quality, and its movements. Sound by Wang Changcun. Created at the Signal Culture artist residency, Owego, NY.

Die Nacht

Wenhua Shi

Boston, MA | 2017 | 4 | digital file

A prelude to Senses of Time, dedicated to Phil Solomon.

The Rose

Wenhua Shi

Wuhan, China | 2019 | 4 | digital file

Shi's most recent experimental piece, The Rose alters the space of a newly planted rose, overgrown through an iron fence. The film explores the perception of the relationship between foreground and background. The process of editing pays tribute to the thaumatrope, the bird-in-a-cage optical toy from the pre-cinema period.

Monosabishii

Wenhua Shi

Boston, MA | 2023 | 5 | double 16mm

A visual poem was composed when no one is at home.