Jess MacCormack

An experimental animation that illustrates a surreal internal landscape occupied by child creatures and animal imagery. A child goes off to school and must reevaluate everything they have known. Fish, dogs, cats & birds interact with fish tanks, living room furniture, poppies, school busses and the first artificial heart technology. They morph and combine with one another, changing masks and creating new creatures in the strangely internalized and claustrophobic environment that they inhabit. Relationships between the objects, animals and sound create a commentary on seeing and invisibility as experienced by the body. The menacing feeling of animalistic predators and prey seeps into every scene, as odd sexual metaphors manifest with alien-like qualities. Everything points against one of the narrative claims that, “Nothing ever happened.”

An experimental animation with original sound exploring “how identity development is informed (and sometimes controlled) by psychiatry’s relationship with capitalism and its broader political objectives.” The video focuses on three themes: the history of psychiatry and its relationship to capitalism/consumerism in North America, the MKULTRA experiments in Montreal during the Cold War, and how the self-help movement depoliticized leftist movements after 1960s.The video combines MacCormack’s own research inspired by the work of British documentarian Alan Curtis, whose The Century of the Self (2002, 240 minutes) is one of many texts and influences apparent in this sweeping work.