Category: video

Animated shorts 2022-2023

Brian Zegeer

My cg shorts from 2020 – 2023 depict human bodies at extremely close proximity. During the pandemic we were dealing with the dual pressures of distancing ourselves from society while at the same time being bottled up with those in our households for months at a time.

These animated shorts explore the terror of closeness in a global pandemic (or the exhaustion with intimacy among family members interminably breathing the same stale air) using the physics engine of the cg software to calculate trajectory of approach, the destructive consequences of touch. Bodies rupture in moments of contact, but sometimes reemerge as a something new, hybrid.

Under sufficient magnification, the body dissolves, pores open to reveal inner landscapes, gut biome, unraveled genetic threads. The body is an ecosystem and potential enemy, subject to violent virus-born storms of immuno-suppression and systemic collapse. Medical visualizations were the landscape of the pandemic era, the theater in which sublime forces played out.

Baal’s Garden

Brian Zegeer

Baal’s Garden (work-in-progress)
cut paper animation, custom score with digital processing
3 mins 51 seconds
2024

Baal’s Garden (work-in-progress) is a cut paper animation following a family’s visit to a greenhouse, and subsequent infection by a hybrid creature. The narrative is meant to challenge conventional species taxonomies, the separation between human, animal, botanical life forms that drive our extractive relationship with the natural world. In the video, an individual’s identity is imagined as the consolidation of various microbiological ecologies into an aggregate ‘I’, crowd psychology sharpened to a razor point in the family group mind.

This work continues my practice of incorporating sculptural works in my animations, and deputizes some of these sculptures to act as homemade instruments, comprising much of the score.

Inverted Corona

Brian Zegeer

Partial Documentation of my Queens Museum studio installation, and of the Corona Park environment. Video employs a 360-degree camera, and a sequence in which multiple cameras are embedded in a partially-disassembled sculpture ( l’Hermitage, an interface for the Little Syria Archive originally built for the 2015 Artist in the Marketplace Biennial at the Bronx Museum of Art), which is wheeled around the Corona Park grounds.
6 mins 34 secs
2016

Produced for BRIC Television, Media Arts Fellowship

The Book of Khalid the Movie

Brian Zegeer

A cycle of short mixed-media animations loosely transcribing The Book of Khalid (1911) by my relative Ameen Rihani. The video was produced in stereoscopic 3D, the tension between the two optical channels relating to the dual protagonists of this forgotten proto-Orientalist novel.

This series of works arose from the study of Little Syria , and is to some extent a culmination of the Little Syria Archive and related preservation work.