Curatorial Statement:

As one of the major figures of the postmodernist movement in Japanese animated filmmaking, animator and director Satoshi Kon developed a name for himself in his decade of work. Throughout his four animated movies such as “Millennium Actress” to his serial animation “Paranoia Agent”, Kon demonstrated a style of cutting and editing of film unique in style and meaning. From themes of experience of time and space to the different lives individuals lead, his work utilizes such editing styles excellently in order to edit the space and time required to emphasize his points.

This piece intends to experiment with his style of editing with the medium of 3D animation and animated GIFs. By sending a character walking into the foreground, the background scene can “cut” in time when the foreground character passes over characters and space in the background. The intent is that each of the cuts is ambiguous in their relations to each other in time. The main difference between this piece and Kon’s style, besides visual quality, is that this piece uses the looping nature of the animated GIF as a final cut, as the repeat can be viewed as either a single loop or an endless cycle across time.

In a similar fashion to Satoshi Kon, the piece intends to use those cuts as enhancement to the message; people’s relationships can change across changes in time of any size. However, it also suggests that not everything changes; the bench and vending machine continue to exist in the same locations, and the person walking back and forth in front of the camera follows repeating paths in space.