THOMSON, Mungo
Time Life

This quite thick volume adapts 8 pretty amazing short stop-motion animation films by Mungo Thomson to the book form. In these works the artists used a high-speed robotic book scanner to digitize a selection of pages from encyclopedias, art books, how-to guides and other manuals. My favorite focuses on Rodin’s sculptures, or rather, the way how the sculptures have been documented and photographed; how the movement that animates their shape is frozen by the objective, and then how they may be put in motion again through the sequence of pictures… From the stop-motion film to the printed pages, the editing shows something else: the material circulation of images, the history of reproduction techniques and the history of colour adjustment tastes, the culture of the representation of bodies, of nature, of ideas. “Thomson exploits the dualities of the digital and the analog, the video and the book, the automated and the handmade, binding them each together.”

With essays by Hal Foster and Lisa Gitelman.

Published by Karma, 2023
Artists' Books