Mungo Thomson: Sideways Thought

The video “Volume 5. Sideways Thought” is part of “Time Life”, a series of stop-motion animations that use reference encyclopedias, photo books and instructional manuals as their raw material. The project imagines these books being scanned by a high-speed robotic book scanner, the kind used by universities and tech companies to archive libraries. “Time Life” proposes such a device as a new kind of filmmaking apparatus: a machine making flip-book-like animations, spitting out short anthropological essays while digitizing books for the Internet.
“Volume 5. Sideways Thought” is a motion study of the complete works of Auguste Rodin, made by aggregating every possible photographic view of Rodin’s sculptures found in books on his work. Thomson assembles 360-degree revolutions around each sculpture, approximating a 3D digital scan of Rodin’s corpus using only 2D analog materials. The original musical score is by Ernst Karel, a musician and sound artist and co-director of the 2020 film Expedition Content. Several new TIME mirrors, the artist’s signature person-sized mirrors bearing the iconic border and logo of the international newsmagazine, reflect upon the last 100 years: the Person of the Century, the turning of the millennium, and a black-and-white mirror based on the very first issue of TIME, dated March 3, 1923, very nearly 100 years ago. Incidentally this stretch of time brings us back nearly to the time of Auguste Rodin, who died in 1917 in Paris.