Ultimate Lifestyle Apparition
Animated collage film and event branding commissioned for Kin-Makers, played with live improvised soundtrack from electroacoustic duo Richard&Linda
Ultimate Lifestyle Apparition is an exploration of non-narrative storytelling, overlaying animated digital collage onto specifically collected background footage from a range of suburban landscapes within Brisbane. Most notably this footage focuses on the housing estates of Mango Hill, an area undergoing significant environmental disturbance as development is rapidly clearing and draining bushland to establish a new spatial configuration of first home-owners and affordable kit homes. This suburban footage captures the strange regularities, repetitions, and conspicuous silences within these manufactured sites, and works to make visible the peculiar manifestations of individual choice within a pre-established system of parts as well as the stark sterility of a site treated as tabula rasa. There are hints of a richer, more vibrant and complex history of suburban life in the still shots of the now defunct Chinese takeaway, and in-between sites of older estates, inner city suburbs, and the Pinnaroo Cemetery illustrate the long term negotiation between human management and the reassertion of the underlying topography and soils.
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Working with this backdrop of manufactured suburbia, the overlaid collage animations introduce apparitions of microscopic nonhumans that continue to exist on the site, as well as ghostly beings displaced through and entangled with the estate’s development. This approach draws upon the concept of hauntology as overlapping visions of a future impinging on the present, motivating us to ‘sell out companion species in exchange for dreamworlds of progress’ (Gan et al. 2017, G2). In this case, the nonhuman apparitions are determined to reinsert themselves into back into these future-present dreamworlds, playing with scale and absurdity to make themselves visible and critically reframe the suburban footage as conspicuously and problematically human-focused and individualistic.
Reference
Gan, E., Tsing, A., Swanson, A., Bubandt, N. (2017) 'Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene', in Tsing, A., Bubandt, N., Gan, E., Swanson, A. (ed.) Arts of living on a damaged planet. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.