Rhizome or Möbius
Stop-frame animation
loop - each 69 frames
This animation is made of 69 frames put into a loop. It consists of two ‘characters’, one goes forward in time, and the other is its reverse: each of them endlessly mutate, eat and throw up themselves. The pulsating mutations act as the root of a conversation (rhizome). As we see both mutate individually, we want them to mutate together, although this never occurs. Could we say that the meaning of this unsatisfying feeling transforms into to the very content of such conversation? The Möbius strip is a good example to understand why I used two organisms – the inside and outside exist together. By presenting the two counterparts, I wanted to challenge our understanding of communication. This work has a double title to provoke a feeling of ambiguity towards the representation of it as identity or as process.
“The rhizome itself assumes very diverse forms, from ramified surface extension in all directions to concretion into bulbs and tubes [...]. Semiotic chains of every nature are connected to very diverse modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc)”
Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus.
Mobius strip is a surface with only one side and only one boundary component and has the mathematical property of being non-orientable.
This animation expresses a semiotic understanding that is inescapable to the human condition. While I was creating it and considering the mechanism of the loops and cycles, I came across important questions that intrigued me immensely. The language of suggested signs which construct and surround the character manifest abilities such as the dissection through the flesh of signs. By stretching one static moment in the timeline, more signs appear – they weave into this inner space to reconstruct the character and hold it back together – by doing so it seems to have become a mutation. But is it merely a rhetorical mutation or does this action hold something of more importance? In this supplementary dimension of meaning, unity continues its spiritual labour.