Terminal

A hand-drawn animation showing at Platform Artist Run Space

The latest work by Simon O’Carrigan again displays his love of rough, hand-drawn animation, contrasting starkly to the computer-produced animation we are so used to.  Terminal carefully considers the typical looped display of video art, and makes the loop an integral part of the work.

Showing at Platform gallery is an unassuming little animation depicting a looped day in the life of an everyman office worker.  Transforming the idea of Groundhog Day into Kafkaesque heights of absurdity, the protagonist seems trapped by some form of sleep disorder, unable to escape the grind of the commute and his time in the office.  The gallery space, in Campbell Arcade beneath Flinders Street station, is an ideal location for this work, as it is sure to strike a chord with many commuters as they pass by in peak hour.

At first glance, the work seems to be a very short (two minutes) loop, however if one lingers longer they will notice that as the days flow by for the protagonist, he seems to fade from existence.  It leaves you wondering, how will this Sisyphus manage to complete that ever-replenishing towering pile of paperwork?  As you watch the character fade away, you wonder if he has suffered as many paper cuts as the animator must have, to draw by hand the hundreds of individual frames that comprise the animation.

Exhibition Details

Platform Artists Group Inc. (‘Frame Space’)
Campbell Arcade, Degraves Street Subway, Melbourne.
Exhibition Opening Night: Friday 4th September 2009, from 6pm.
Exhibition Dates: Monday 31st August—Friday 25th September 2009.

The Petrol Can Rider, 2009. Click thumbnails above to view stills. Video will appear online later in the year.

Downloads: Film Promo Card (A7 PDF) | Official Bus Gallery Invite (DL PDF)

The Petrol Can Rider will be launched at Bus Gallery, looped on exhibition, in June/July 2009. Download the flyer/invite for details.

THE PETROL CAN RIDER

As I write this, I'm hanging improbably in the air. The map that appears when I press a button on the armrest says I'm almost exactly halfway between Australia and my destination on the other side of the world. Looking closer – the map is unreassuringly staticky – I see that the familiar outline of home has disappeared altogether from the margins of the map.

Australia has always been defined in part by its unlikely geography. It's not nicknamed "Down Under" for nothing. The isolation of living at the ends of the earth has also given us a strange, ongoing relationship with the end of the world.

George Miller's Mad Max, for example, knew it would barely have to disguise the countryside to imply some kind of apocalypse. Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin's cult heroine from the late-80s, Tank Girl, married a British punk sensibility with an Australian setting, mutated kangaroos and all. The Matrix starred a human population fooled into thinking the world hadn't ended, but like Keanu Reeves' Neo, we knew better – and locals knew the simulations was disguised Sydney streets, too. Worst of all, DC Comics basically blew Australia off the map in its series Invasion!, presumably thinking the rest of the world wouldn't notice.

Which brings me, finally, to Simon O'Carrigan's The Petrol Can Rider. This animation continues the tradition of imagining our staggering steps towards the end. His trenchcoated hero needs fuel for his car; that's the only thing we know about him, or that we need to know. Without fuel, the story will be over. His desperation creates its own physics. Eventually, the empty petrol can he clutches itself begins to float, becoming a hopeful vehicle to carry him away.

O'Carrigan's piece borrows its story from Franz Kafka's short story The Coal Scuttle Rider. For many, Kafka has become shorthand for grinding, surreal bureaucracy. Does it seem strange, then, for this animation to use the kind of cartoonish logic in which the shockwaves from a dog's bark can knock a man to the ground? People forget that Kafka is funny. It's not so much black comedy as it is a slapstick of the soul. He'd be tickled, I think, with the O'Carrigan's Looney Toons touches.

The script for The Petrol Can Rider includes the following line: "To remain still in this world is to be condemned to death". This is true of any animation, of course. Some technologies of animation boast about the massive processing power and rendering times required to make their subjects move. Those giant transforming robots you last saw on the big screen? Press releases excitedly revealed that each frame required over thirty hours to process.

O'Carrigan's apocalypse, however, is painstakingly hand-painted and cranked into motion at only 12 frames a second. Any faster than this and we'd risk missing the point. When fuel is so scarce and energy so precious, movement must be precisely calculated. Why would the back half of a dog move just because the front half does in a world collapsing into entropy? Equally, why would we see more of this world than we need to? Whatever's outside this vignette doesn't matter; it certainly doesn't matter to the driver, the merchant, and the dog that populate it.

Now, I'm watching the screen in the back of the seat in front of me and its cartoon plane stutter across the simulated map of the Pacific. I imagine that if we ran out of fuel, right now, up at 33,000 feet, we wouldn't fall. We'd hang here, landlocked in the sky like in Looney Toons, until physics finally noticed and animated our descent.

Martyn Pedler
22nd June, 2009
Halfway to New York
www.martynpedler.com

Knife, 2009. Click thumbnails above to view stills. Click here to view video.

Knife has been screened on Rage (2009), and featured in the Melbourne Internation Animation Festival (2009), as well as various online venues.

Be Famous & Die. First shown as part of Melbourne and Other Myths at the City Museum @ Old Treasury, Melbourne, 2008. Based on an original monologue by Martyn Pedler, with sound design by Michael Prior. In 2008 this animation has featured in the Brisbane International Animation Festival 2008, the Canberra Short Film Festival 2008, Electrofringe @ This Is Not Art (Newcastle) 2008, The Substation, Singpaore, 2009, and Melbourne International Animation Festival 2009.

Animations from The Drowned World, exhibited as a projection based installation at Shifted Galllery, Richmond, 2008.

Various short experimental animations, 2004—2007.

The above works were created in study for, and some exhibited in, “The Drowned World” at Shifted Gallery, Richmond, Victoria, 2008. The below will view in a separate slide set. It is a propositional work for a possible series.

These works were exhibited as a series in Somnambulist at Victoria Park Gallery in September 2008.

The Found Sculpture Series, 2007.

The first two videos are tests for composition and the possible relationships between painting and video. The final, Data Dérive, applies the Situationist exploration of space to the fictional space of the internet.

Installation views of The Drowned World at Shifted Gallery, Richmond, 2008. Animation samples can be found under the animation category.

Installation views of Elisions, an exhibition at Runt Gallery, Monash University, Caulfield, 2007. Many of the works featured video and animation projected onto canvas or paper. The animations can be viewed in the animation section of the site.

Elision (noun):

• The omission of a sound or syllable when speaking (as in I'm, let's, e'en).
• An omission of a passage in a book, speech, or film.
• The process of joining together or merging things, esp. abstract ideas.
• From the Latin elidere, to 'crush out'.