Mungo Thomson: Time Life

Thomson’s epic stop-animation project opens a startling and profound conversation about history, technology and perception

This volume documents eight short stop-motion animations by Los Angeles–based artist Mungo Thomson (born 1969) that use reference encyclopedias, photobooks, how-to guides and production manuals as their raw material. The project imagines these books being scanned by a high-speed robotic book scanner of the type used by universities and tech companies to digitize libraries, and proposes such a device as a new kind of filmmaking apparatus. Thomson exploits the dualities of the digital and the analog, the video and the book, the automated and the handmade, binding them each together. The videos feature soundtracks by Andrea Centazzo and Pierre Favre, Laurie Spiegel, Sven-Åke Johansson, Lee Ranaldo, Ernst Karel, Pauline Oliveros, Adrian Garcia and John McEntire. The New York Times called Time Life a "thrilling accomplishment, adding a new chapter to the long conversation about photographs, mechanical reproduction and ways of seeing."