Púlsar: Andrew Norman Wilson

On the first day of the Covid-19 lockdown in New York Andrew Norman Wilson was evicted from his sublet and decided to board a $30 flight to Los Angeles that evening. From a cottage that faces the Hollywood sign, he began to dwell on an encounter he had with a woman driving alongside him on the highway, emphatically singing along to the song he was listening to through the same radio station. That song was Phil Collins' In the Air Tonight.

Ode to Seekers 2012 (2016) was the second project Wilson developed in collaboration with Romanian animator Vlad Maftei. It was initially conceived when he was being treated at Rockland Psychiatric Center in Orangeburg, New York, where the abandoned children’s ward seen in the video can be found. Loosely based on John Keats’ poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820), the film emerges by applying the formal techniques employed in Keats’ ode to an infinitely looping video. Ekphrasis —the verbal description of a work of visual art— shifts from Keats’ urn and the celebratory scene it depicts to an abandoned children’s ward at a mental institution and a computer-generated scene composed by Wilson and Maftei… “What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”.

A camera lens with a range of 75mm to 1500mm, propelled by an amphetamine-fuelled stream-of-consciousness rant, repeatedly zooms onto the balcony of an apartment in Chicago’s iconic Marina Towers inhabited by the narrator, two artistic collaborators, and his twin boys. After zooming in on a series of meme-influenced tableau, the camera idles on a recreation of a papier-mâché Pikachu that went viral after being posted on Reddit in 2013. From here on, the narrator has an imaginary argument with his fellow citizens about what kind of environment is simulated for Pokémon when they’re transformed into light and stored inside a pokéball between battles.

The Unthinkable Bygone (2016) was the first project Wilson developed in collaboration with the animator Vlad Maftei, whose experience includes realistic simulations of vital organs for the healthcare industry as well as an incredibly elastic 4D Spongebob Squarepants film. For Wilson, such overlaps of scientific visualization and popular cinematic technique are essential when understanding science as a cultural practice that offers information about matter without revealing an absolute truth. Together Wilson and Maftei created a 3D model of Baby Sinclair from Jim Henson’s animatronic puppet series Dinosaurs (1991-94) and subjected it to several forms of scientific analysis, including simulation, dissection, reflection, and endoscopy. What emerges is an infinite loop in which speculation on an organism’s intelligence, experience, and points of view inevitably reveals the influence of cinematic and televisual conventions and leaves us knowing less than we did at the beginning of the experiment.

Peppermint Park was an educational home video series produced in the 1980s by a group of investors seeking to profit in the wake of Sesame Street and the model it pioneered for educational children’s entertainment. The show features a cast of puppet characters who teach children various lessons, such as the alphabet, numbers, colours, animals, and more. As a kid, I remember watching some VHS copies of the show a family friend had and being terrified by an unexplainable dance sequence performed by a scarecrow puppet. Recently, some clips from the show resurfaced online and my relationship with the dancing scarecrow has shifted from horror to obsession.