Moving Illustrations of Machines (2000)
By Jeremy Solterbeck
Consider Moving Illustrations of Machines a revisionist animation. It ignores all tenets of traditional animation: color, hypernatural movement, and the depiction of vibrancy and life. The only characters as such are machines. Work began on this film as a commentary on the 1997 cloning of Dolly the sheep. The goal was to visualize a hybrid world where the distinction between organic machines (such as cells) and their man-made counterparts (such as microchips) becomes unclear. A duality has crept into our technological consciousness: first, the idea that a living mechanism such as an ovum can be described as a machine, and second, the idea that man-made mechanisms with extreme complexity must at some point be considered alive. For instance, the CPU of your average desktop computer can now outperform insects in terms of information processing power. Does this suggest that microchips are in some way smarter or more alive than insects? This new paradigm of the machine concept is here applied to a narrative that encompasses many of our emotional perceptions regarding cloning. Setting a provocative tone, the film opens with the mission statement of scientist and entrepreneur Richard S…
Watch Moving Illustrations of Machines on Fast Ubu