A ring of black text on a transparent background, reading 'Monday Short'.

Erodium Thunk

Whatever you want to call them, there's no denying the hypnotic quality of his work. In his hands, magazine cutouts, cable commercials and other mass-media detritus are stitched together, pulled apart, and recombined in ways that are funny, clever, and strangely unsettling.

A collage "face" made of a cereal bowl, two Ocu Clear boxes, and a mouth from a magazine ad.

For folks who dwell on fine distinctions, Winston Hacking's collage film Erodium Thunk probably falls closer to media art than animation. All of his films blur that line at least a little—in his words, his music videos for Andy Shauf, Flying Lotus (nsfw-ish), Washed Out and Soupcans and Washed Out all "masquerade as animation in an attempt to deceive the viewers eyes."

Whatever you want to call them, there's no denying the hypnotic quality of his work. In his hands, magazine cutouts, cable commercials and other mass-media detritus are stitched together, pulled apart, and recombined in ways that are funny, clever, and strangely unsettling.

Where Hacking's music videos can at least lean on the mood and structure of a song, his most recent film, Erodium Thunk, is completely unhinged, free to find the connections "between things that originally didn't have any." That freedom also highlights Hacking's playful sense of satire, tearing apart the promises of consumer capitalism in a barrage of rapid transitions and literal cuts.

Erodium Thunk

dir. Winston Hacking

syn:  The piece is an endless barrage of hyperlinked cable television commercials. With equal doses of satire and nostalgia, the promised pleasures of late consumer capitalism are deconstructed through a contemporary form of détournement. - Clint Enns

2018