This artwork plays on the idea of life being short for Friedrich Nietzsche’s aphorism “Is life not a thousand times too short for us to bore ourselves?”. To create the artwork, I documented myself writing, erasing, scribbling, rubbing, and layering charcoal atop charcoal. I photographed the majority of this process on my Cannon DSL camera, but swapped to my phone just before the conclusion of the process when my SIM ran out of storage. This ultimately resulted in an interesting glitching in the fin The final artwork is 232 frames long.
I chose to highly contrast, desaturate, invert, and posterise my images to give the frames a raw, grungy look. I considered how the artwork would look projected onto a building and thought this style of artwork would be very intriguing to see disfigured over the building’s surface.
The concept of life being short is represented through the appearance and disappearance of the words and letterforms during the artwork. The lifespan of each word is short and quickly replaced by the next. The word grows and lives and dies; either being erased or written over by the next word.
Animation by Mikayla Cairney, @cairneydesigns, 2021
https://www.instagram.com/cairneydesigns
AUDIO SOURCE:
“nyoko - Flowing Into The Darkness” is under a Creative Commons license (CC BY 3.0).
Music promoted by BreakingCopyright: https://bit.ly/b-into-darkness
