Faculty of Art

Drawing and Painting: Digital Painting and Expanded Animation

Louis Corneil

Symbiont

Symbiont is a mixed-media animated documentary that examines the ideas found in contemporary science about symbiosis that decolonize the way we look at nature, childhood and what it means to be human, in the natural environment.

“Narrated from the perspective of a young girl who is fed up with being isolated, the film explores the way evolution is studied in modern science, of looking at bodies as collectives, relating this to decolonizing individualism, in art making and education. The play of symbiotic animation techniques for “Symbiont” lets art make itself, rekindle a symbiotic relation between artmaking and artist. I use traditional media such as sketching, stop motion,16mm film and 2d traditional animation, as well as experimental sound making with plants and a synthesizer. The materialist choices here are inspired by William Kentridge’s collaborative methods, and Theodor Adorno’s aesthetic theory that a holistic view on life and art, is in rejecting conventions of theatre, music or film, and in embracing the materiality of the world, as the only way to deal with the world as we are experiencing it today. I feel that this approach is necessary for decolonizing our perspective on the natural world, while it undergoes extreme degradation. As the hand-drawn character who comes from the hand moves through the random yet natural environments of 16mm photography, 16mm animated scratches and stop motion/conte animal animations, we see a fight in mediums, between individual and collective pieces. This battle between mediums, combined but separate, the styles all become one, as the end of the film collapses the image of the individual “character” becomes a part of the collective as a new symbiont.”