Cinema’s Original Illusion: Savinder Bual’s Mechanical Animations
Savinder Bual’s work investigates the still and moving image using unusual and everyday objects as well as special hand-crafted mechanisms. These short, often looped videos are reminiscent of early animation and projection techniques. Bual brings to these works a minimalist, conceptual approach as she reflects on the cinematic image. Having studied painting at the Winchester School of Art, and photography at the Royal College of Art, London; she works as an artist, filmmaker and moving image inventor.
Bual’s practice reflects upon the early history of cinema and moving images, which was entwined with a Western enthusiasm for scientific invention, mechanisation and the expansion of colonial interests. Stepping back into the shoes of the inventor, Bual tries to recreate the initial wonder of seeing a moving image. For instance, in the work Javasu—consisting of a two-dimensional image of a flatfish mechanically fed through two rollers—the artist creates the illusion of three-dimensional movement using a technique inspired by the early film experiments of the nineteenth-century French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey. However, her short mechanically orchestrated images retain a conceptual clarity that emerges from her framing of these histories. The automated movement of images becomes a lens through which she implicates larger technological processes that have defined modernity—like the steam engine or clock time (as a standard, universal measure of time).
In the present world of hyperrealist digital animations and special effects, Bual creates elementary illusions with lens-based images; reflecting on the nature of illusory images and constructing new ways of telling stories through them. In this video-album, we will look at a series of such explorations.
(Featured Image: Still from Javasu. 2019. Video. Three Minutes.)
Punch. (2019. Video. Thirty-Five Seconds.)
This thirty second mechanical animation uses the motion of a pendulum with two hanging weights to generate movement. The artist derives a narrative from this movement as the colliding balls become cartoon fists which endlessly fight each other.
Javasu. (2019. Video. Three Minutes [looped].)
Javasu was a part of a larger exhibition created as a tribute to a resident of Bristol, United Kingdom—Mary Baker, who in 1817 convinced the public that she was “Princess Caraboo” from a fictitious island called Javasu. The work draws upon this history in which sea monsters, the pineapple and moving panoramas triggered the British public imagination to wonder what it was like to journey to faraway lands that were inaccessible to them.
Sphere. (2017. Video. Twenty-Two Seconds.)
This short mechanical animation uses the mechanism of a “thaumatrope,” consisting of a card with two images spun on a taught string. Here, Bual attached the flat image of a sphere to create a concave surface. When this concave, flat image spins—the illusory form of a sphere comes to life.
Walk Cycle. (2018. Video. Thirty-Four Seconds [looped].)
Walk Cycle uses the simple mechanism of a wheel and paper cut-outs of cartoon feet to create the illusion of walking feet. Through this minimal automation of movement, Bual’s video equates the wheel with human feet, evoking mechanical transformations of the nineteenth-century—like the assembly line, which transformed human relationships with movement and machines.
Train. (2009. Video. Made from a Single Photograph. Original Image Courtesy of Pete Hackney. Two-Point-Two Seconds [looped], [not in real time].)
This video references the famous legend surrounding the first screening of moving images by the Lumière Brothers in Paris in 1895. The short documentary film, Train Pulling into a Station, allegedly caused the audience to run from the sight of the screening in shock and fear as they equated the image of the train with the actual moving train. Bual plays on this legend, using a single still image of a train to create the illusion of movement.
All works by and courtesy of Savinder Bual.
