Production: National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Directed by Alex Boya. Writing Credits: Alex Boya. Produced by Jelena Popović, Producer. Michael Fukushima, executive producer. Music by Judith Gruber-Stitzer. Film Editing by Theodore Ushev, editing consultant. Sound Department: Olivier Calvert, sound designer. Technical Specs: Runtime: 8 min Color: Black and White. Details Official Sites: National Film Board of Canada (CA). Country: Canada. Release Date (Canada). Storyline Plot Summary: A pilot crash-lands into his home. His face has been replaced by a turbine and he's fallen in love with a ceiling fan. To save their marriage, his wife must take drastic action. One-word title Genres: Animation Short Production: National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Directed by Alex Boya. Writing Credits: Alex Boya. Produced by Jelena Popović, Producer. Michael Fukushima, executive producer. Music by Judith Gruber-Stitzer. Film Editing by Theodore Ushev, editing consultant. Sound Department: Olivier Calvert, sound designer. Technical Specs: Runtime: 8 min Color: Black and White. Details Official Sites: National Film Board of Canada (CA). Country: Canada. Release Date (Canada). Storyline Plot Summary: A pilot crash-lands into his home. His face has been replaced by a turbine and he's fallen in love with a ceiling fan. To save their marriage, his wife must take drastic action. One-word title Genres: Animation Short
MERLEAU-PONTY exposes the shortsightedness of our mental maps of reality via Descartian models of assumptions; Our life is in fact strictly the constant self-awareness of a flesh-bound prison impressed from outside rather than from within observed subjects; a body equipped with defective apertures whose inadequacies are in fact what sculpts the universe from each of our isolated standpoints. Animation funnels a guided uncertainty in a similar way. The framings and manipulation of what is seen at a given moment allegorically resolves the shortsightedness addressed by Merleau-Ponty.EXPERIENCED SPACETIME, our flesh-bound portal maps meaning because it roams in the fourth dimension while simultaneously preserving a memory of a given subject matter, consequently mapping it in context to prior experiences that only our relation via experiencing it defines as proper to being from the same thing, such as identifying various spaces of an apartment as a home in its wholeness. Animating practically puts to tests this tool of association to orient a story around a point of sentience within a muted diegesis. So the attribution space in TURBINE is in fact a conversing dome, a wrapping which laminates the experience of a point of sentience, the audience, via the placeholding crest of a cartoon character. Look at how this blueprint (next page) is scanned by spacial mastication of the character and inevitable via me while drawing this scene. In a sort of perspective, or DESCARTIAN see-through naturally progressing to the absurdist GOD VIEW of a FREE FALL, I schematized an order from above:
After the blueprint is established, the funneling of subjective experience is emulated for the space to exist via our movement.
Meaning through space is in fact a life-saving misunderstanding from discerning stimuli in motion and building networks in the patterns of experience from the standpoint of our bodies. This interdependence of reality to experience through the body evolves to an elegant dichotomy of opposites, as MERLEAU-PONTY exemplifies with several incongruences of opposing points of perception of the body, such as Aristotle's illusion where crossed fingers feel one acorn as if it were two objects due to an overlapping of the mental perimeters of respective sensorial outlets. My character here also touches partial access to the corridors of the apartment, to view the space in motions, maps of routine.
The short-circuit between the visible and white absence sculpts the space: I sculpt the space by animation, but also by choosing what to retain invisibly. These incongruences that form in their contrasts a sort of ghost reality, a third inexistence, a point of focus no-longer carnal but rather synthetic to resolve incongruences. This false reality in TURBINE lies in the schema that soon makes further outlets to phenomena more opaque and inaccessible, replacing a theoretical external reality with modular hallucinations that combine themselves into schematic presumptions of space and hierarchy relations. It becomes a SIXTH SENSE. By teasing the unseen, we sculpt the space mentally, start seeing it. I mix the audience with myself as the two are part of a circuit.
As these maps of meaning derive from thought, they must not be confused for external independent assets objectively the same from each carnal point of sentience. Reality isn't from within, but rather solely dependent on the piercing from outwards of a sentence into matter As we are bound by flesh, the world can only be discerned as a patchwork of perceptions from the body, from outside looking out at the world, instead of the Descartian model of synthesis from within objects. This is why TURBINE floats in the white of uncertainty when strategically convenient to invite mental bridging of unavailable information; that space of absence becomes essential for VISION. In this shot, the example of strategic absence is apparent; the white of the page occupies a sort of opaque volume of underlying structure which is solely in the hands of the viewer to patch up into existence through time.
With this vulnerable interdependence, perception of reality is in fact likely solely a perception of our own body with its multiple sources of intake clashing and sculpting a schema of something that was never really there identically as we perceived it. I operate by this principle while animating subliminally, and, just as I carve out shapes from drawing, the audience sculpts meaning from gathering the static frames, gluing them into a coherent space through time.
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This strategic absence in the exploration of SPACE through TIME naturally leads to examining drawing on the body. The body is skinned and inverted on itself as it wraps the dioptre of the vision, sentient point of the animator, and viewer. MERLEAU-PONTY’s phenomenological view, of which consists a great part of my antecedent research in this class, all fall into place as I connect TURBINE to the idea of a WRAPPING of space around a point of sentience to the notion of sequencing the relationship that point of sentience has to it’s WRAPPING in chains of entering and exiting situations. This tool essentially becomes a narrative one when applied to my animation. Below is an example of this, as the relativeness of coordinates in a depicted relationship between two characters is in fact that same rumination of a cohesive wholeness, a BODY, which essentially is the VISION itself, the SPACE in its totality which we can only fabricate from disjunct sequencings through the event.
So, if being wrapped by your environment is the experience of seeing, perhaps navigating actively within that environment becomes understanding what is seen, as TIME becomes intertwined in the experience. In TURBINE, the actual relationships of cartoon characters which estimate a sort of schema of feeling, containers for viewer empathy, dance along a mutual skin of experience. Our virtual tour of several exhibits, including ATLAN and the tour FUGLEM gave us, allows for this interdependence of space to its line exactly by emulating an inability to understand the resolution of the exhibition; it is exactly in the absence of understanding that I realize what SEING means, in line with an overarching body whose skin cells are the very meshing of schema which is facilitated by strategic absence, by IMAGINATION. TURBINE often lays the ground for inaccessible surfaces that are patched up by active exploration while I animate and when space is experienced by the view. Perhaps the viewer is time itself? MORRIS also re-addresses an account of awareness of volumes in relation to its enveloping of our sentient shape, similar to that reoccurring concept of the drawing on a body. The direction that pulls inherited theory from his antecedents such as Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty beyond its base is Morris’s notion that our sensorial mapping of space ultimately mirrors our ethics and hierarchy relations we have to others daily only contributes further in allowing for the characters to engage in a play of domination and submission essential in the utterance of any sentence, any relation and any story within the skin of that overarching map. Phenomenology explores underlying mental maps of sentient human experience, but the hierarchization of coordinates on that space allows for the story to take place, such as in the TURBINE frame above, where the simple spacial submission of the wife character communicates a marital condition which TURBINE questions among other symbolic topics. Here below is another blueprint of how this process is orchestrated again and again during the animation process: the performative line is an embodiment of spacial manipulation here again.
In relation to TURREL's ATLAN, MORRIS sees real things to originate in a relationship of space to the body, similarly to the schemes of appeal in TURBINE. We discern its facets in a fractured limitation, bridging sens of a real thing from a sequence of fractions that animate into an estimation of reality in the diverse spaces of the story. Opposed to this, the unreal pink elephant is not situated in this sequential experience of relationships to video, it flows freely for being all together in the realm of schema, as a refined abstraction of prior sequencing which no longer answers to the wrapping of the real, the relationship which crafted the original sequence. In animation, that realm of the unaccountable becomes the point of nature, the independent anchor that measures space.
TURREL’s ATLAN seeks to extrude in MORRIS’s framework this imaginary point of caring between the sequenceable anchor-points of real and the animated schemes which originate from observation in a feeling body. The confusion of that window creates an expansive wrapping about perception and the materiality of the blue light. The ambiguity of what is seen exposes that the object is the meeting point with the feeling body on an exclusive level. The tensions of presence in TURBINE are harvested similarly. To sculpt story, that chronology of perception is intertwined to sequential expression, to animation. What especially excites MORRIS about TURREL’s ATLAN is how, almost in chemical sublimation, the anatomy of the confusion the feeling body has, and the chronology of problem-solving which is dependent on the motion of the body; By moving around the artwork, are the virtual spaces in TURBINE, the observer feels ordered levels of understanding and internal perceptual reform until a figure's anatomy is grasped. MORRIS sees this chain of schema building followed by rejection of outdated schema into new space as a kinetic sculpture in itself, but also a performance piece; In the process of understanding the real, the observer moves in space to intake the sequential stimuli necessary to harvest a partial map of meaning from the ‘object’. It becomes apparent how animation is the simple branching out of this same act of seeing, but the accident is that the stages of that chronology are frozen in artifacts of reason, the sheets of paper, the frames of a schematic movement/space cataloged in a virtual timeline. The reveal of this character below (next page) in rotation employes this gradual revelation and exploits the betrayal of outdated schema while the revelation is observed to manufacture interest from the viewer:
This natural complicity which ATLAN and TURBINE expose between the piece and the viewer, natural because viewing in itself is a moving sentient body which, for MORRIS, is gathering from the real, caring with a sort of cognitive mastication that has maybe more in common with tactile-ness, with the mapping of the volume of an object by touching its contours from different angles in your hand. In line with PERFORMING an animation, that observation is reversed-engineered when I animate. The touching of space is reversed into becoming as explained. Of course, this analogy with a blind man holding an object in their hands is far fetched, but clarifies cored concepts in MORRIS; The idea that reality is a sequence of snapshots gathered by the feeling body which then synthesizes a meaning from it, an abstracted volume separate from the observer, as are the frames of an animation, both for the observer, and reversed-engineered for the creator. TURBINE provokes this process in a hermetic space, almost in a scientific space, by presenting such a clean sampling of the phenomena of confusion in an almost medical, bio-mechanical aesthetic of what is being seen that, amidst a space that provides no distractions, the nature of the moving body, equivalent to the seeing body, is exposed to become the actual subject of the piece, meshed in the overarching skin, the SPACE that wraps the sentience. This also explains the variability of the subject, the innate MOVEMENT, as it is a dynamic relationship to the viewer instead of a static object. The film pretends to be filming a sphynx in a rigid Descartian world but it is rather a performing line that swims in relativity as the examples show.
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When drawing defines as a mapping of the rift between what we recognize as seen and is an outside vision, we challenge the Renaissance perspective and DESCARTES’s idea of subject/object because we have stripped ourselves from the previous safety of a form from within. In TURBINE, the imagined skeletons of the invisible have been debunked as hallucinations because they are extruded as a platine, a figure of style; the viewer is left rejecting perspective altogether as the expired power fantasy of "seeing through". This is why the general existential condition of the proposed virtual space is a milky fog on which attempts of the order are figuratively pinned. Usefully in line with FREE FALL imagery which ironically enacts, especially in STEYERL’s writing, an appendage to an organ of almost corporate unaccountability as empirical anchors are a liability to the manipulation of SPACETIME, a tyranny anatomically essential to communication as we currently know it in cinema heritage. Through a quantified Merleau-Pontian account of embodied perceptual norms, this EYE OF THE FLESH, it is implied the world is exactly how I feel it to be at this very moment. In a sea of truth auctions where we boost a relative truth on a forum platform, the higher bidder wins the PHENOMENOLOGY competition to impose one story instead of another story. SPACE is an invention of the Renaissance perspective, prior to the technological appendage of linear awareness SPACE was a different thing in the ever-malleable minds of humans. A likely unsuccessful attempt in TURBINE, like for KLEE, is to retrieve a wilderness of space which was confiscation in that truth auction six centuries ago. I'm not fooling myself; the attempt to deconstruct in TURBINE is reactionary metabolism motivated by the same power of spatial manipulation which produced linear perspective. BARAD also defines these representational kinetic hieroglyphics of volumetric situations as an immaterial proxy for a graspable parallel reality, which becomes that virtual animated ‘SPACE’ with its characteristic socio-political framing of power. In light of this, MORRIS re-addresses an account of awareness of volumes in relation to its enveloping of our sentient shape. The direction that pulls inherited theory from his antecedents such as MERLEAU-PONTY beyond its base is MORRIS’s notion that our censorial mapping of space ultimately mirrors our ethics and hierarchy relations, which is insoluble to telling the TURBINE story. Deconstructing DESCARTIAN space in TURBINE is as much an attempt at empowerment as the Eurocentric schema of SPACE was, and may, in fact, be the carrying old enzymes conquest, transcending from Colony to Corporation via the more adequate propaganda tool of Cartoon from Poster- more adequate for, while the poster manipulates its graphics, it is still chosen to be looked at; animation is a sequence of posters regimented in their chronology, and is often targeted at the most ideologically vulnerable, children.
This subversion of linear perspective, may perhaps have more in common with the hydrochloric acid from the stomach lining when food is ingested, which deconstructs what is ingested to efficiently relocate cells from the food to a ruling body. A perfect example is this scene, where the linear structure must be shuffled to penetrate the viewer with a new condition of space; the piping of an unexceptional kitchen is rewired to become the arteries of the body of the protagonist. Here again, DESCARTES is subverted, but for the same purpose of prioritizing one schematic realm at the expense of alternative space.
LLINAS depicts SPACETIME on a cognitive level as simply a movement from point A to point B embodied in the line. INGOLD also adds art's synthesis is a tool for science to ground relation between materials. In a way, this way retracting to the white absence is the insurance policy of TURBINE. This suspension of all stories and no story within the charge of potential motion when there is no line allows for the waves of spacial manipulations to take effect, just like the artwork is framed in neutral colors in an exhibition space. Below again, the white charges the line, because it’s absence, reminds of the potential of movement, the potential of SPACETIME. The image is bathing in its neutral frame and hence exists, performs a motion. At the core, this dedication to an unsolvable reality relative to the highest bidder can easily mutate to the tyrannical nature of cinema, and by extension the performative line of TURBINE amongst other cartoons. Space is in a state of perpetual conflict as the mode of governance, the mode of communication. SPACETIME as an insurmountable estimation of quantum physics has more to do with patterns of links in our phenomenological hallucinations and hence in the viewer; the viewer's quest for negotiating space while experiencing a cartoon, its underlying renovations and negations arguably neocolonial on several instances, surmounts the siege of a grasped space. To read this space in time, to see it, a conquest via dislocation, motion, becomes synonymous to seeing. From this patchwork of our readings, It seems to deconstruct colonial SPACE is in some instances fact a Neo-Colonial appendage, necessary to sustain colonial SPACE. TURBINE critiques this, but cannot opt-out as it's the cognitive matrix that is fully immersed in colonial heritage. Here again, even the allowance of critique is integral to the hierarchy spectrum, abusive to each in relation to allocated cast. When revolt is included, perhaps unironical application is the only possible revolt
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As amplified with TURBINE on several instances in the very cognitive construct of animation, MERLEAU-PONTY challenges and ultimately rejects Descartian models of assumptions from within because these reflexes filter phenomena when incongruent to preliminary maps. MERLEAU-PONTY breaks down how our life is, in fact, omnipresent self-awareness of a flesh-bound prison impressed from outside rather than from within observed subjects; a body equipped with defective apertures whose inadequacies are in fact what sculpts the universe from each of our isolated standpoints until synthesis is reached via MOVEMENT, animation, to refine memory of past input into the synthesis of reality. Viewing an animation like TURBINE demonstrated this as that shortsightedness of our mental maps of reality is in fact a mechanism of recognizing patterns that allows a vision of the film; reduction of the REAL harvests a virtual space which is the only space ever experienced. It gets interesting when we consider that animating the film is a reverse of that reductionist apparatus of sight. These fictions are projected in the mind prior to drawing. Simultaneously, SPACIOTEMPORAL utterances, kinetic hieroglyphics, provide checkpoints of the internal processes of spacial projection while I conceptualize a seen. The drawing of the seen is an accidental sequencing, documentary, of the same chronological exercise of decoding complex reality, funneled in reduction, into sight. Looking back at the pages, we have a seismic record of our own neurons in a language adequate to dreams. This image of a checkpoint of performing space in animation can be read as a dance, where the body is a moving drawing. From MERLEAU-PONTY’s framework, KEERSMAEKER’s VIOLIN PHASE samples this relation in phenomenological terms feeling bodies have to EXPERIENCED TIME, our flesh-bound portal to experiencing reality seems to map meaning because it roams in the fourth dimension while simultaneously preserving a schematic memory, consequently mapping in shapes such as the circle and the crossings within it. The key is that this process of schematic integrity through variability is recorded in the sand, just like my drawn frames record my performance of SPACIOTEMPORAL worldbuilding in TURBINE. He saw the body places these impressions in context to prior experiences that only our relation via experiencing it defines as proper to be from the same thing similar to how the viewer of TURBINE decodes virtual space by anchoring schema.
KEERSMAEKER performs the process of observation with the line of her situation in space, encompassing one situation amongst variable chronologies which the act of seeing can manifest itself by the actions of feeling bodies, the actions of points of sentience in the process of experiencing the real. In animation, that same dance can be discerned internally, with outputs being drawn frames. These scanned instances of though become records of a constellation of schematic relationships wrapped on themselves until unzipped onto sequential experiencing to the viewer. These snapshots become time worms, elongated characters in a fourth dimension undivorced from their attributed events, as shown here:
MOTION hence becomes a given, as seeing is sequential and an act of gathering snapshots and synthesizing virtual representations, estimations, of the wrapping that submerges it. Just as in the examples brought forth by MERLEAU-PONTY, KEERSMAEKER masticates space, occupies different portions of the potentials of space to see the space from her limited standpoint, in a sequence of experiences that can only be bridged by schematic estimation. The game-changer is that the drawing process is represented by the sand on which she steps as an impressionable surface where the past trajectory is mapped into the meaning of space. Similarly, my drawn frames provide a TIMELINE portrait of a similar act of VISION.
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In the relationship of drawing to movement and the audience's innate complicity with diegetic agents in movement in media content such as a cartoon character, KLINE explores the nature of surfaces and interlaces tonality in deeper impressions of aquarelle. Time plays an important role as his delicate canvasses gradually reveal their nature incongruence to a periodic process of inspection from the viewer. There is a stripe tease at play. We are triggered to unravel a missing piece of information. In TURBINE, this strategy of fascination via anticipation and partial access is omnipresent. When the protagonist endures a final metamorphosis, the way I orchestrate the space and time mimics a similar strategy to KLINE. In materials, we are worlds apart, but since we are actually looking at the work as a kinetic sculpture that resides in the cognition of the viewer, that material contrasts become immaterial. The stripe-tease becomes almost identical with the respective differences of the medium. The schema of the character is muddled to ignite excitement. As the character is depicted slowly removing a gown, the map of vision gradually allows for a new schema to emerge for the white anonymity of variable potential.
Even LAU's storytelling via building spaces with interactivity that measure the line between fact and myth in a mixture of socio-political commentary, Chinese literary symbolism, and spatial representation are directly similar as TURBINE also is about world-building SPACE TIME in a confusing schematic/synthetic space between visual coordinates and hierarchy of symbols. Again, the materials at play are changing, but the focus is on the viewer's harvesting of the art piece via experiencing it. The performance of animating it understands the projection of the intended experience of the symbolic and volumetric mixture with a little confirmation bias as possible while performing the line of animating TURBINE.
In a similar pursuit, JODOIN, as a practitioner of the moving image, views KLINE and LAU’s “Weave” Exhibit in terms of a sequential experience, with different phases of exploration, where things are revealed to the visitor, but not in a traditional sense where artifacts are frozen in a hermetic gallery space for viewers to examine and synthesize. This traditional approach of the exhibition of KLINE and LAU’s “Weave” Exhibit, according to JODOIN, allows for a sort of depletion of the exhibited content; the viewer is first provoked to examine a stimulus. Once scanned closely, the initial problem is resolved, and the viewer moves on to another room, hence navigating in a synthetic space unconscious of its own narrative. In contrast to this antecedent understanding of the exhibition space and experience, “Weave” provides for JODOIN a told story in time, with manipulation of trajectory via the weaving textures and architecture and also via the captured everlasting moment of an unquenched thirst; the images resist revealing all their details to the viewers no matter how closely examined. It’s an exercise in spatial manipulation
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Examining the process of TURBINE leads makes the dichotomy between real and virtual pressing. Drawing becomes an antidote to photography, as it extrudes the phenomena of synthesis from within onto the frame while remaining free from the linear focal point. For SILVERMAN, Photography, with respect to an emulsion of sensory input, is the world telling us that IT exists independently. This implies that these tools validate objectively a vision outside the loophole of self-reference as a third party, the machine, has produced an impression understood as it's own vision, secondary to human vision. Since drawing TURBINE floats in the realm of mutual agreements between my animation and readable schemas, I map a network of objectively validatable anchors onto the wrapping. This insurance policy that things exist outside of me, measurable by TURBINE's communicability is drastically similar to photography, though the emulsion captures an internal process instead of the stimuli of the natural environment. That captured internal wilderness then is unzipped on the viewer, by their processing of schema, of space. The viewer's vision is highlighted from the contrast of this second vision of photography, as imagination becomes the alternative of two in the face of reality, a constructive vision from the schema. Then the concept of analogy relates to the branching out of imagination into a sort of schema between schemas, bridging images by their meaning instead of their initial visual nature. It's harder to show this in the actual shots of the film, so I filmed some of the processes of drawing to demonstrate how the images are in fact writings of objective hieroglyphics that build the shape, the story. I'm kept in check, just like the photographer, to an exterior reality, although my case involves the audience's perception while the photographer deals with the real as raw material. Coming even closer to animation, SILVERMAN also looks at TIME as the identification of empirical stimuli as it's information from my senses about outside reality. TIME projects its origins and potential future, similar to a line of thought onto virtual space in animation. The viewer, as a pattern-recognizing creature, situates story agents implement from imagination to make meaning and generate any knowledge; TURBINE's characters and inhabited spaces are hence subjugated to my commodification of its functions in the documented process above. I connect my vision to SUMMER's ideas as I am leveling the presence of virtual creatures and places on flat virtualization to a common subjective hieroglyph to communicate it to you so that you think of the TURBINE story on your own terms, keeping me in check like the photographer answers to light.
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Examining the 3 experimental drawings we made in class is essential in angling the performative line of TURBINE. The second exercise explicitly concerned animation, but it's the internal process, the performance of SPACETIME VISION which calcified into drawing 1 and 3 that are most useful.
A gratifying experiment was for my center of held sight to become the center of the screen of my WACOM tablet as I drew with a digital pen. Holding frontally still, I started synthesizing my peripheral vision by intuition, or as ARENDT would say, IMAGINATION; as I held my look forward, the chain of speculations I made of my surroundings soon started bleeding the boundaries between things, meshing my flesh bound container to the imagined wrapping of the environment which makes up my world. The fringes’ level of conciseness devolved as an almost medical realm evolved; The ligaments, even a sort of intestinal modular shape express the back of my head, between and beneath my eardrums, interlaced with architecture and objects of my studio. This was an expression of the bridging of stimuli into schema expressed in previous modules. In TURBINE, this strategic confusion of container and wrapping allows for frames to mutate in a narrative constant redefinition of anatomy in an almost identical approach, showing the performance of synthesis at work. The characters and objects can only be seen once meshed in an almost sexual, genetic synthesis of anatomies.
A combination of sensorial input (1) from the outskirts of my eyesight, nerves from the hair, stomach, but also (2) a sort of new blockchain of hieroglyphics (in the sense of zipped-format representation of situated feeling) from past experience/ memory, and imagination resulting from projection derived from memory. This memory became the anchors that situated a figure somewhat impermeable from the variableness of the outskirts of definition.
In contrast to the first drawing, the third was fully speculative as it was an exercise on depicting TIME. It falls even more explicitly in line with the performative nature of sequential drawing in TURBINE; With an idea of gravity pulling time in a sort of "melting" of otherwise stagnant shapes, the time worms defined in module 5 are echoed. In the realm of the schema, so to speak, I expressed shapes in their overarching potentials, in slices/ animation frames on potential functions and positions in time, such as the hand with various fingers as I drew the space. In Animation, this idea of potential is often referred to as a LIFELINE. TURBINE hence PERFORMS, in its process of being drawn, a curation of that spectrum of slicing SPACETIME.
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Drawing asks questions on SPACETIME and VISION. When contemplating myself in the act of creating TURBINE, I should be able to focus on what it is that I'm actually seeing and doing in these terms. It also becomes apparent that there is no border between passive reception and creation, as the vision itself is a creative act in the patchwork of meaning from outside stimuli. What is strange is that with animation, this process is two-folded. An inverted metabolism of SCHEMA is produced from the mind onto the page and then reversed from the frame into the patchwork of the audience. VISION in animation hence becomes an exercise of empathy and caring, as we build models from collectively acceptable prototypes. TURBINE an experimental drawing, digital, analog, hand-made, and performed product of vision, becomes the documentation of that two-way circuit. Vision is not insular, it is also communication when logged into the crystallization apparatus of the animation process. Because TURBINE explored how a line can be used to investigate space but depends on my understanding of the agreed schema and also keeps itself in check with measured results qualified by the efficiency of communication, it becomes similar to the camera's role. The striking difference is that it still keeps us in check to empirical reality, but doesn't photograph the outside world; rather it empirically weights internal processes, an inside world. I used TURBINE to find out something about how I perform representations of space; Its illustrative or communicative function as a tool are secondary applications; the act of building a drawn virtual representation of space is an exposure of my internal processes. However, I concluded that it is a two-way schematic language, social at its core for the described dichotomies and relationships above.
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I made TURBINE as a snapshot of the underlying performance of space-time awareness.
This leads to my proposed SYNTHESIS that my animated film TURBINE is a performative act, not an illustrative one. The happy accident that confused the process as anything but performative is that with this type of performative drawing, internal processes of vision and spatial projection are crystallized in the drawn frames as internal snapshots, documents of the animator’s cognition. The illustrated virtual space in the cartoon is an accident, or the sand on the floor in a dance piece rather than the main event, and can be abstracted as the actual drawing in the mental reasoning of the animator, crystallized in the animation. My film TURBINE extends this idea that drawing is an investigation into the idea of space, into ideas of space via the performance of the line. Production: National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Directed by Alex Boya. Writing Credits: Alex Boya. Produced by Jelena Popović, Producer. Michael Fukushima, executive producer. Music by Judith Gruber-Stitzer. Film Editing by Theodore Ushev, editing consultant. Sound Department: Olivier Calvert, sound designer. Technical Specs: Runtime: 8 min Color: Black and White. Details Official Sites: National Film Board of Canada (CA). Country: Canada. Release Date (Canada). Storyline Plot Summary: A pilot crash-lands into his home. His face has been replaced by a turbine and he's fallen in love with a ceiling fan. To save their marriage, his wife must take drastic action. One-word title Genres: Animation Short
Production: National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Directed by Alex Boya. Writing Credits: Alex Boya. Produced by Jelena Popović, Producer. Michael Fukushima, executive producer. Music by Judith Gruber-Stitzer. Film Editing by Theodore Ushev, editing consultant. Sound Department: Olivier Calvert, sound designer. Technical Specs: Runtime: 8 min Color: Black and White. Details Official Sites: National Film Board of Canada (CA). Country: Canada. Release Date (Canada). Storyline Plot Summary: A pilot crash-lands into his home. His face has been replaced by a turbine and he's fallen in love with a ceiling fan. To save their marriage, his wife must take drastic action. One-word title Genres: Animation Short
Production Co: National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Directed by Alex Boya. Writing Credits: Alex Boya. Produced by Jelena Popovic, Producer. Michael Fukushima, executive producer. Music by Judith Gruber-Stitzer. Film Editing by Theodore Ushev, editing consultant. Sound Department: Olivier Calvert, sound designer. Technical Specs: Runtime: 8 min Color: Black and White. Details Official Sites: National Film Board of Canada (CA). Country: Canada. Release Date: 27 September 2018 (Canada). Storyline Plot Summary: A pilot crash-lands into his home. His face has been replaced by a turbine and he's fallen in love with a ceiling fan. To save their marriage, his wife must take drastic action. One-word title Genres: Animation Short
Notes on Turbine's Canadian identity, by historian Damian Molinari OppedisanoBeing someone functionally versed in history, I tend to approach many situations necessitating critical analysis using history, and it’s methodology to make value judgement. I’ve always been dedicated to this approach, and naturally approached Turbine in the same manner. What follows is a description of a few relationships between Canadian history and Turbine that I was able to distinctly see with the broadest possible idea of “Canada” in the background orienting my interpretive perspective.
At the very beginning of the film, there is a clear depiction of a railway as well as a locomotive. Both truly are hallmark icons of Canadian history. With regards to Canada’s transformation from a British colony into a quasi-independent Dominion (which, over time led to full autonomy), the construction of a transcontinental railway represents the first tangible action meant to kick-start this nation-building project in British North America. Even more importantly, the railway almost singlehandedly held together the prospects, and eventual unification of the colonies over time. The oft forgotten fact is, Canada became a country for purely economic, political, and military reasons. We often associate nations being formed out of a common dream of cultural unity, and sustaining that through economic, political, and military actions. In Canada’s case, we can almost see the exact opposite happening: cultural unity developing in tandem with the nation, being born alongside it. The railway was a huge symbol of this unity, being a transcontinental product of a transcontinental project. Over time, it would play an enormous role in settling the plains, expanding industry, defining the ethnic makeup by fueling mass immigration, etc. I have to stop here, it’s an essay in itself.
On another note relating to the Locomotive. The first thing that jumped to mind when I saw its sluggish way of moving forward was: “that’s a perfect image for the development of Canadian identity. It doesn’t seem straight, but you know you’re moving forward.” To me, it was poignant imagery, regardless of whether or not it was the intended way of being perceived. That’s the beauty of its style.
Another interesting hallmark in Canadian history is characterized by the pilot/soldier (obvious testament to “Shell-Shock”) caught in the midst of a paradigm shift. The idea of paradigm shift is actually important in Canadian history because of the innate volatility a nation feeling its way in the dark, its unity being tested the whole way. It’s as if there were always a portion of people feeling “national shell-shock” in light of change. In light of progress, nobody evolves and adapts quite at the same rate, nor in the same way.
This all boils down to understanding how Canada has never been free of this phenomenon of identity crises testing the resolve of the unity created alongside the nation. Despite this constant (sometimes subtle) turmoil, the idea of Canada has stood the test. With each paradigm shift comes a new status quo. A good portion of the film embodies that idea, of confronting a paradigm shift with a new status quo being the denouement. The husband/pilot and wife, in my eyes, truly symbolize one of those instances where opposing forces test the resolve of Canadian identity and unity.
Production: National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Directed by Alex Boya. Writing Credits: Alex Boya. Produced by Jelena Popović, Producer. Michael Fukushima, executive producer. Music by Judith Gruber-Stitzer. Film Editing by Theodore Ushev, editing consultant. Sound Department: Olivier Calvert, sound designer. Technical Specs: Runtime: 8 min Color: Black and White. Details Official Sites: National Film Board of Canada (CA). Country: Canada. Release Date (Canada). Storyline Plot Summary: A pilot crash-lands into his home. His face has been replaced by a turbine and he's fallen in love with a ceiling fan. To save their marriage, his wife must take drastic action. One-word title Genres: Animation Short
Production Co: National Film Board of Canada (NFB). Directed by Alex Boya. Writing Credits: Alex Boya. Produced by Jelena Popovic, Producer. Michael Fukushima, executive producer. Music by Judith Gruber-Stitzer. Film Editing by Theodore Ushev, editing consultant. Sound Department: Olivier Calvert, sound designer. Technical Specs: Runtime: 8 min Color: Black and White. Details Official Sites: National Film Board of Canada (CA). Country: Canada. Release Date: 27 September 2018 (Canada). Storyline Plot Summary: A pilot crash-lands into his home. His face has been replaced by a turbine and he's fallen in love with a ceiling fan. To save their marriage, his wife must take drastic action. One-word title Genres: Animation Short | Getting more posts... |