AKENATON/ DOC(K)S STATEMENT

“THE ORIGINAL MYTH” animation is an example from A GREAT BLANKNESS THAT INSPIRES AWE, an ongoing project that includes a website (www.greatblankness.com) and assorted digital projections. This collection of Flash animations is composed primarily of found images selected from clip art, old text books, puzzles and games, plus music samples, sound effects and short texts, both identified and anonymous. The images are chosen for their stereotypical affect: while drawn in a variety of styles, they are meant to represent their subjects iconically--a bowler in mid-motion, an ice fisherman at work, a girl on a swing, a prisoner behind bars, a family in the park--but precisely because of their flat-footedness, they can easily be diverted into other associations and contexts without losing the bluntness of their graphic roots. It is this ability to toggle between pictorial description and metaphor that gives the images their protean power. In collaboration with the images, texts and sound effects function in a similarly dynamic way, alternatively captioning and describing while suggesting new narrative possibilities.

The music samples used in GREAT BLANKNESS, because they represent musical styles and cultural contexts--hip-hop, rock, punk, jazz, country and techno--are the elements most tied to a specific time and place, but as with texts, sound effects and images they move easily between past and present affiliations.

Taken together, these animations are conceived as compacted constellations of meaning which turn intellectual concerns and cultural reference into kinetic form. Running as 20 to 30 second loops, the animations encourage multiple viewings, repetition serving to extend a joke, reveal the text, build anticipation, or generate unease in order to establish a psychic loop with the content.

“THE ORIGINAL MYTH” is a recreation of selection from SWALLOWS, a mid-nineteen eighties computer narrative made for the Apple IIe. The animation mimics the limited phosphorescent green on black palette and block graphics of that time. As with the other graphics used in the GREAT BLANKNESS project, the images are meant to be both nostalgic and iconic.

As for the collective title of the project--A GREAT BLANKNESS THAT INSPIRES AWE--a sense of inspiration and surprise before the declarative speech of the stereotype may only be mine. But their blankness is "great" and expansive to the extent that it seduces the viewer into the oscillating web of meaning that the mix provides.

Paul Zelevansky

September 2004

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