Hungry Ghost

Guido Devadder & Kaitlin McSweeney

synopsis

Lenght

6m53s

Year

2022

university

LUCA School of Arts, Belgium

technical info

Director: Guido Devadder
Sound: Kaitlin McSweeney

Hungry Ghost contemplates the insatiable desire that drives, but also haunts, humanity. Similar to Schopenhauer's concept of Will and Eastern philosophy, desire is both the spark of life and the fire that consumes us. This poetic journey into the hazy underworld of the human psyche is visualized through a series of animated sculptures, based on the principles of 19th century optical toys, such as the phenakistiscope and zoetrope. Thus, loops become the essential building blocks for pacing both sound and image, allowing a holistic relationship to emerge between both.

Hungry Ghost is part of Guido’s PhD research on the remediation of looping proto-animation devices in contemporary moving image art: From Post-cinema to Pre-cinema and Back: A Media Archaeology of Loop Animation.

Guido Devadder is an artist and PhD researcher at LUCA School of Arts in Brussels, where he also teaches at the Department of Audiovisual Arts. A fascination for the idiosyncrasies of obsolete visual media and abandoned modalities of creating and perceiving moving images is at the core of his research. Combining old and new, his work explores the materiality in contemporary moving image art and tries to formulate a meta-critique on the slippery concepts of reality and illusion through animation. Currently he is also involved in the FilmEU RIT project Expanded Memories.