I contributed an essay on the work of Internet animation pioneer, Han Hoogerbrugge for the monograph of his work, released by BIS Publishers in cooperation with Submarine Channel. Modern Living: The graphic universe of Han Hoogerbrugge documents the graphic whimsy and animated mayhem of Hoogerbrugge in exhaustive print and DVD form.
Flipping out and Floating Away
An Actionscript Auteur. The Fellini of Flash. Han Hoogerbrugge’s satirical animations elevate the mundane into the mysterious, using a familiar cast of recurring characters to battle against the boredoms, frustrations, and trivialities of contemporary life.
The figures that populate his creations are all somehow masked. Like the clowns featured in works such as the Young Punx music videos--or indeed his animated alter-ego in the Neurotics clips for MTV/Motorola--you can keep peeling away the layers but more of the same emerges. Underneath it all, somewhere, is the real Hoogerbrugge himself.
In a similar way to the artist Cindy Sherman, who’s work often features herself as the subject but skillfully deflects the traps of the celebrity cult through her inhabiting the characters of her own creation, Hoogerbrugge hides under an artificial animated skin. This is crucial to the pertinence of his work. He plays around with the idea of the ‘character’ within cinema, and the controllable ‘avatar’ familiar to us from video gaming. His creations--the way they look, and the method by which we interact with them--inhabit a hybrid zone between these two areas, between the active and passive ways in which we explore storytelling and experience narrative.
For me, these two strands define his oeuvre, delivering interactive work with cinematic, narrative qualities. And dusting this narrative with the features and tropes of gameplay. There’s a tension created between the cinematic experience--of being swept up in a grand narrative--and controlling the story. It’s a tension between the roles of viewer, and of player/user. HH utilises these factors to add a dimension of unease to his interactive animations. In itself this is a counterplay to the whimsy and amusement contained within the pieces themselves. But also an argument against this very superficiality.
In a way this is a microcosm of a very modern battle in cinema between narrative and sensation (or the sensational). Installation pieces like Comet and Zoo illustrate how the artist/director deals with these aspects. Comet is the more conceptual piece of the two, where a spectator stands between two screens as a giant ball is projected and appears to ‘float’ between these displays. The ball consists of our modern technological detritus, gadgets. The way this ball is presented, rotating, spinning into focus immediately reminds me of a video game interface for a player’s inventory. The need to pick an item obviated by a hummingbird flying between the ball and viewer, nature’s messenger questioning our need to consume? It’s a message reduced to the smallest visual signifiers as possible - the essence of a larger narrative going on around us.
The installation Zoo meanwhile see’s a number of looping projections beamed onto a single ‘display case’, where Hoogerbrugge’s animated simulacrum, representing modern man, is entrapped. The animations capture the ennui and anger of the species. The man shifts on the spot like an animal driven crazy in a cage, pulls his shirt, and then his tie, frantically and repetitively. Spins in the air. Most pertinently, headbutting his duplicate in ludicrous action and reaction, like a human Newton’s Cradle. Finally, within the walled geometries he hovers posed in sukhasana, achieving for a moment a sense of bliss. Each scene devoid of any overt message, creates an overall sensation which we can’t help but plough larger meaning into. They are expert capsule narratives.
These capsules feature literally in Hoogerbrugge’s masterwork, Hotel. It’s a surreal narrative concoction that works as a satire on our psychoanalytic tendencies (just as most of his work does on socio-political level) that acknowledges Hoogerbrugge’s ‘stories’ work best on a liminal level. Delving into the experiments of Dr Doglin, the director literally explodes the conventional mise-en-scene, as scenic transitions have characters and props fly out of the screen. Everything floats in Hoogerbrugge’s world. It defies logical explicit meaning, with no absolute narrative. The protagonist Flip is a Buster Keaton-type, and the absurd physicality and exaggeration in all the character animations remind me of the Golden Age of Silent Cinema. What dialogue there is becomes distorted beyond recognition, familiar as somewhere between David Lynch, and Chris Morris’ Blue Jam.
While Hotel leads us through a linear narrative we explore it non-linearly. Scenes and character actions unfold based on our interactions with the screen. Mouse clicks trigger character ticks. The topdown isometric projection of each scene echoes the early 3D rooms of computer gaming. It becomes a game to extract as much narrative as feasible from each new scenario. In one restaurant scene, our clicks engulf a laptop in flames, trigger karaoke singing from a cowboy atop a pedestal, and reveal a naked, flashing, clown. These interstitials to the main narrative add deliberately abstruse layers to the whole. Unlike in normal gameplay, where ‘unlocking’ these features would help us solve a puzzle, all they do is obfuscate meaning. Yes, that’s the point of this ambient narrative, of the jumbled laws of physics in this world.
“I have no idea what I’m saying but I do know that I say things that you don’t understand and if you do understand what I’m saying you are wrong.”
A knowing statement from one of Hoogerbrugge’s Neurotics gives a lie to the fact he’s just clowning around. He’s a point and click Jacques Tati whose tomfoolery exposes the contradictions of his medium, and also of our everyday existence.