TOON PUNX

Our first screening, TOON PUNX was curated by Sean Capone and streamed on Sunday Oct 25th, at 7pm through the Outpost Vimeo channel. The archived program and Q&A were available to view for three weeks.

The archived program was edited from the original live one to accommodate for festival circuit screenings. It did not feature the previously broadcast works by Cassie Shao and Jack Wedge, and includes ‘Moonlight sounds’ by Jeremy Couillard.

TOON PUNX is an ‘animation scene report’ and showcase of short films by a diverse array of artists and directors who explore the aesthetics & poetics of 3D game engines, experimental character animation, digital psychedelia, and hybrid forms of cartoon-driven narrative. The works in this show are united less by a common visual style and more by their anything-goes DIY approach — by their creators’ devotion to animation as an expanded field of practice for creating new and unusual visual worlds and alternative forms of storytelling. 
As digital creation tools and online distribution platforms have increased in power and accessibility in recent decades, the medium of animation has radically escaped its boundaries, giving birth to entire new professions and methods of creative production. The works in this show — whether hand-drawn, 3D animated, or generatively rendered using (sur)realtime graphics engines — represent just a cross-section of that expanded spectrum… and the potential it holds for individual expression within (and against) the mainstream media/entertainment complex.

This screening has been curated by Sean Capone: a Brooklyn-based video artist, animation director, and curator; he has recently been recognized as a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Fellow in Digital/Electronic Arts. It will feature works by Jeremy Couillard, Jack Wedge, Cassie Shao, Amir Jahanbin, Peter Burr, David OReilly and Leah Shore. 

PROGRAM

Jeremy Couillard: Intro (1:30 min)
Hates Hugs, Believes In Reincarnation (4:30 min)
Commercial Breaks (various throughout)
Educated as a painter, Couillard is a self-taught new media artist who has made numerous well-received and internationally exhibited video, virtual reality, and video game works, accompanied by installations, paintings, and ephemera. His works often deploy humorous narratives about future dystopias to explore what motivates us as humans to work, live, and create. 

Believes In Reincarnation, Hates Hugs was from a show at Youngworld in Detroit in the summer of 2015. It was mentioned in the novel Paula Regossy by Lynn Crawford, which is sitting on the bookshelf in my apartment shown in the Intro video, created exclusively for this show. The Commercial Breaks are excerpts from a made-up news channel that played on a loop at a clinic for having out-of-body experiences.

Jack Wedge: Goodbye Mommy (13 mins)
Jack Wedge is an animation director and designer from NY. His short film series Domo features regularly on Adult Swim, and his surreal animation Tennessee was a 2017 award winner at the Supernova Digital Animation Festival.

A vivid new talent in animation just out of NYU, Jack Wedge is the director of Goodbye Mommy, a surrealist, sci-fi, neo-noir fable about a hardboiled but heartbroken detective whose new case takes him on the trail of a missing king and his alien baby. The delirious short film takes place in a far future, equal parts Blade Runner, Moebius, and Bruegel the Elder, full of tough-talking gangsters, jaw-dropping neon vistas, and enough bizarre creatures and robots to fill a Star Wars cantina. Wedge developed the short’s aesthetic after taking a cinematography class at NYU and closely studying German Expressionism and American film noir.
“I like how the geography of the world can play a role in the story — like in a video game where you can switch perspectives to see the ‘map of the world’. The environment of a story is crucial for creating the mood of the characters, the feeling of the place. I tied together the movement of the cameras with the psychological vibes of the characters.” – Le Cinéma Club
Goodbye Mommy features an original score by ARCA and Will Freudenheim.

Cassie Shao: There Were Four Of Us (6:45 mins)
Flash Flash Comfort – Safety (3:40 min)
Cassie is an animation & visual artist currently based in Los Angeles. She works across the field of independent films, music videos, projection mapping and advertising.

There Were Four Of Us is an experimental film about a non-linear dream experience that travels in and out of different spaces, times and realities. The film believes that even insoluble questions are worthy of being mentioned, and especially with itself, it finds it is important to try to question rather than to answer.

Flash Flash Comfort – Safety is a collaboration with Chicago-based band Flash Flash Comfort. The video tries to recreate the vision of what goes on in the world of a person dealing with anxiety and social awkwardness; it evolves around bugs and shapes and colors generated in Cinema 4D.

Amir Jahanbin: Daylight (3:20 min)
Amir’s work ranges from fuzzy nostalgic animations to robotic pen-plotted drawings, each exploring what is possible with accessible tools and average computing. Amir has been featured by Adult Swim, Vimeo, GIPHY, in Times Square, and at film and music festivals around the world. He is currently an artist-in-residence at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City.

Daylight is a 3D music video about the star crossed relationship between the Sun and the Moon. The textured lo-fi animation style, in combination with the music by brz gives the whole video a nostalgic feeling. I decided to elaborate on the feeling by giving the Sun “happy cone vision” through which they see the world. This is what nostalgia can feel like, a romanticized image of the past. It’s important to be aware of the cones we build in our own lives – making Daylight helped me to do exactly that.

Peter Burr: Autumn (3:00 min)
Peter Burr (b. 1980) is an artist from Brooklyn, NY. His practice engages with tools of computer animation and the video game industry, often in the form of immersive cinematic artworks which have been presented internationally at Documenta 14, Athens; MoMA PS1, NYC; and the Barbican Centre, London. Working under the alias Hooliganship, Burr founded the video label Cartune Xprez, which produced live multimedia exhibitions and touring programs of experimental animation. Burr is also the recipient of numerous prominent grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), a Creative Capital Grant (2016), and a Sundance New Frontier Fellowship (2016). He is currently a visiting artist at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Autumn was commissioned by the band Bear In Heaven for the release of their 2014 album Time Is Over One Day Old. The work takes inspiration from a variety of sources, including the Maxell 1979 “Blown Away” advertising campaign and esoteric film references such as Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister Harmonies, Konstantin Lopushansky’s A Visitor to a Museum and Andrzej Zulawski’s On A Silver Globe.

David OReilly: Quarantine Dreams (11:10 mins)
David OReilly is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Starting his career as an independent animator, he created numerous award-winning short films, such as Please Say Something and The External World. He has written for TV shows such as Adventure Time and South Park, and created fictional video games in Spike Jonze’s Academy Award winning film Her. He is the creator of the groundbreaking universe simulation game Everything, narrated by Alan Watts. His most recent work includes pioneering Augmented Reality effects which have been viewed over a billion times across social media.

Earlier this year, OReilly set up a voice mailbox to record people’s dreams during the pandemic, and used them to create Quarantine Dreams — layering narrated voice recordings with formless music and stunning geometric imagery. The result is a mesmerizing journey that intertwines individual thoughts and subconscious fears, reflecting upon the effects of “social distancing”, in which traumatic experiences and the changes in our daily lives are collectively shared and retold.

Quarantine Dreams is part of the Corona Voicemails series of films, each of which are performed and captured in a single take, with no edits or post-production, using a custom developed visual synthesizer which David designed to perform animation live. The system allows for over 100 parameters to be modified in realtime, giving each performance an analog feeling with unique imperfections that become part of the film.

Leah Shore: Don’t Touch Your Face (1:10 min)
Leah Shore is a NYC-based independent filmmaker and commercial director. She is recognized for her meticulous style, visual storytelling, humor, and emotionally driven content, and has shown her films at festivals, museums, and galleries worldwide. Shore was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces in Independent Film” and has been written about in VICE, The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, Nowness, Indiewire, and Animation Magazine. Her film OLD MAN is currently playing on the Criterion Collection. Shore’s commercial clients include Comedy Central, Adult Swim, MTV, Viceland, Sesame Street and more.

I was in the midst of the pandemic, isolating with my mother, having panic attacks, high risk, afraid, and Gina Volpe (Lunachicks) came to me with this wonderful song and asked me to make a music video for her. This gave me life when I was at my worst, and what better way than to illustrate an adorable cat bitch-slapping men? The video was produced in two rushed weeks. I storyboarded the piece first, and then animated it with Rob Yulfo using Adobe Flash.
Inspiration: Angst. Pandemic. Living in NYC. Being a young high risk adult. Masks. Idiocracy. 
Wear a mask and don’t touch your face and also listen to Gina’s music. 

The Cuts and Burns Online Screening Series is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts under Governor Andrew M. Cuomo’s Regional Economic Development Council Initiative