Lewis Heriz

Someone who we never see – a 'nobody' – tries to tend to their plants, but persistent inner voices draw them into an alienating place with the promise of communication through pure thought. Where are we in this vision? Are we an observer of this experience, or experiencing it ourselves? Where is the division between us?

A warning / a reminder / an experiment in investigating a subject through subjectivity.

Written and directed by Lewis Heriz

Animation & cinematography by Lewis Heriz

Additional animation by Sanjana Chandrasekhar and Loïc Kreyden

Research & Assistance: Qi Zhuang

Music: V. R. Alevizos and DrumTalk

Sound design: Lewis Heriz

Sound Mix and additional Sound Design: Oliver Mapp

So Long (We Dreamt of This) is a process-led experimental animation investigating what it means to be human in the digital networked economy. It was also a way of developing an animation practice in an era where everyone with a mobile phone engages with the form.

For me, animation takes advantage of a neurological phenomenon that allows the manipulation of light and matter to give the appearance of objects defying physics. 

The resulting magic is a thrill; one that has captured the imagination since the earliest experiments in optical illusion. We dream of defying physics, to be untethered from our mortal reality. The concern at the centre of my project, however, is that networked animation technologies – such as the mobile phone – deliver the illusion under the guise of actual reality, as opposed to the realm of fiction. Primarily this is due to the screen’s permeability, the sense that we can control it, influence it; a dream that cinema audiences of the 20th Century might have been thrilled to see realised. 

This logic – that animation technologies are ‘progressing’ towards a seamless fusion of physical and digital – appears to be the underlying force behind the visions of tech positivists leveraging network effects to integrate their surveillance devices permanently into our lives; beyond the screen, even, into a boundless, seamless ‘experience’. To enjoy screen-based art or entertainment is a choice. To have our every move and interaction collected and sold through optical technologies that we use for human communication is not.

To be fully aware of the opaque medium that sits between us when we communicate like this is to enter into a state of digital paranoia. It raises difficult questions: how to connect – as we want to – and feel as if we are doing it naturally, when this connection must necessarily first be transcoded by an incomprehensible web of algorithms, code and ulterior motives?

So Long (We Dreamt of This) is an act as much as a research project, a statement of intent as much as a story. Reintegrating with the material and investigating a subject through metaphor, non-rational associative improvisation, and self-initiated ‘found footage’, to process an experience and move beyond it.

Documentation of the process-led approach.

Collaborations

Rather than use assistants as part of a production line, I engaged with a small group of RCA artists – all isolating in their home countries across the world – to generate footage on their own terms as part of the associative and part-improvised dimension of the project. Details are in the clips and stills above.

Processes

Much of the processes appear to be in direct contradiction to the subject under investigation. If this depicts a future, why analogue? (There is nothing to say analogue technologies will not be used in the future, but Hollywood and Silicon Valley are an unholy alliance that looms large in the collective consciousness.) If this depicts the present, why no depiction of the technology we use? (To depict a culture you are critical of is to reproduce it...)

Using so-called 'obsolete' technologies is an act of defiance in the age of techno-capitalism, for a number of reasons. Nothing you do automatically generates 'data' that can then be sold on to third parties. Machines that may have felt black-boxed in the pre-digital era (such as the 16mm projector) are now eminently comprehensible in contrast to 'the algorithm'; even physical computing is comprehensible when compared to Alexa. Working with physical components that you can manipulate and customise is an act of agency. Calling the aesthetic outcome of any technology as 'nostalgic' is to ignore the fact that digital media relies upon nostalgia to retain its users: the most state of the art communication technology leverages nostalgia (Here's a memory from five years ago! Why not share it?), while the aesthetics of previous artistic tools are written off by the logic of technological 'progress'. This is a trap. A tool is a means for its user to achieve something; in many cases in the digital landscape, this power dynamic has reversed under the auspices of 'a free and open' internet where advertising is 'essential but benign': as the cliché now goes, you think you are the user, but you are the product. In this relationship, the platform is using you, even as you feel like you are using it. In this environment a question arises: what is all this activity for? Has it really improved things, as the platforms themselves insist? Does it really serve us well, and is there something we ought to be doing that's better?

To engage in material processes (or simply go for a walk without a device) for a time is to not spend that time generating data through 'interaction' that shifts vast amounts of money to individuals that use their wealth to build private rockets to fly themselves into space, rather than help fix problems on earth and in society. Whether we live in a real-life dystopian science fiction is ultimately down to us.