Guido Devadder
From Post-cinema to Pre-cinema and back: A Media Archaeology of Loop Animation

Still from Hungry Ghost
PhD student Intermedia research unit
This film is part of Devadder's ongoing
PhD in the Arts, From Post-cinema to Pre-cinema and back: A Media Archaeology of Loop Animation.

Abstract

Proto-animation devices from the 19th century were essentially silent media, but their idiosyncratic design raises the question of how sound could be integrated with such animations. Hungry Ghost grew out of an exploration of this question and aims to create a holistic connection between image and sound, starting from the loop as common ground. Although visual music boasts a long tradition in experimental animation and received widespread academic attention, Hungry Ghost takes an unconventional position by foregrounding rhythm through rotation. The image is based on a combination of the principles of the phenakistiscope and the zoetrope, out of which a three-dimensional hybrid emerges. Sound artist Kaitlin McSweeney initiated her research from self recorded samples of rotating devices — mostly household appliances — so that the resulting rhythm could be synchronised with the image loops. Manipulating the rotation speed of the 3D printed sculptures subsequently allows to create temporal dynamics, enabling shifts in convergence and divergence between sound and image. Thus, a formal link to the thematic aspect of universal craving and desire arises, much like Schopenhauer’s concept of the Will and Brahman (Hinduism) or Sunyata (Buddhism) in Eastern philosophies. This blind and insatiable force makes existence an eternal struggle, but also unites all life in its essence, referring to the anima, the Latin root of the term ‘animation’. Due to its cyclical nature, Hungry Ghost does not require a linear viewing experience, but is intended as an encounter, an invitation to linger and contemplate.