desktop microinvasion

Desktop Microinvasion

Digital, Stop Motion Animation. 9:42 minutes. 4:3. 2008

Produced from over a dozen separate stop motion and frame-by-frame animated sequences created from thousands of photographs, Desktop Microinvasion is an animation about illness, death, loss of control and grief. The materials used in its making include digital still photographs, medical scans, spontaneous drawings, metal rods, sticks, paper cut-outs, envelopes and junk mail. As it unfolds, abstract forms grow ceaselessly, expanding and spilling out of their boundaries. An anonymous figure is seen in a series of desperate and futile attempts to contain, reorder, reanimate, and reconnect as an unrelenting and merciless disease runs its course.

Throughout the short film an anonymous figure, obscured, cut off, erased or in shadow, appears to struggle and battle against an unknown foe which manifests in a variety of forms - reports, medical bills, and strange, abstract drawings and sculptures that quickly grow and expand aggressively into the surrounding space. There is a moment at the end when its shadow, photographed in Atacama Desert in Chile, appears to construct an effigy in the sand made from sun bleached branches suggesting bones. The person is never visible, only the shadow which itself never touches the branches directly. Instead, it holds a stick, like a wand, and appears to push the bones into place with it one at a time. The shadow never touches the branches directly.

The animation is to a series of disparate and discordant sounds and recordings, including abstracted noises, instrument samples and household utensils, which establish a tense sonic atmosphere. Amid the noise the highly processed and abstracted voice of the poet Dylan Thomas can be heard reading from his poem And Death Shall Have No Dominion.