My own work has been largely concerned with an exploration of the animation process – “so what comes next?”
Found footage of home movies - selecting - editing - re-working segments from these short films, which have been acquired from youtube.com and ebay.com - to study conventions and structures of narrative. I understand the value of these little films, made between the 1960’s and 1970s, home movies are the private documents from a generation – petit bourgeois portrayal of one’s own living room, various birthday parties, eating, drinking and being together. Various films address the camera directly – who is this invisible audience they keep communicating with? Is it themselves as future viewers of their own films? Are they addressing friends and relatives? Or are they talking to history itself – to an unspecified “later on,” as they keep reappearing after death.
I want to explore the act of erasure, or reduction of a meaningful object to the point of zero meaning, using techniques such as collage, which involves erasing, removing and tearing off elements of images to reveal and create new combinations. The evaporation of a material thing into a thought or concept – asking the questions: “what is there to see, what to remember?” Hegel suggests that “thinking is always the negation of what we have immediately before us the endless deletion,” (Hegel, 2002, P.245) just as it does with cartoons, the formal mechanism of obliteration of the previous cel.
The influence of Tscherkassky’s experimental films upon my development has facilitated many of my ideas: The discovery of found footage and the re-working of existing film material - His double life as a theoretician as well as practitioner – filmmaker – critic – curator – historian.
“Whilst thinking about the process… one can helplessly describe the result as “beautiful” or even “ridiculous”. The film itself is practically “nothing”, its images do not reveal their secret. The necessary clues are contained in the film’s intellectual and technical structure, in its immaterial aspect… Beauty lies not in the object itself but rather in the train of thought the object gives rise to.” (Horwath, 2005, p.24)
Why should animation be the domain of the few rather than the many? The boundaries and distinctions between artist working in animation and experimental film are fast dissolving. What is interesting and useful about film is what we see, it turns out, is an animated photograph, a film is a hybrid and it is an integral part of my actual art activity.
“…this means you have the opportunity to take control of the medium in the same way as you do, for instance, with the canvas or paint where there is a learning process.” (Schum, 2005, p.23)
