HYMN

2023

Animated short, 1:22

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***this film contains flashing imagery as well as themes of body image issues and allusions to purity culture, please proceed with care***

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“Hymn” explores how archaic technology intersects with how I have viewed my body and relationships with men throughout my life.

Through a combination of dissecting the ideology of my upbringing and fusing my relationship with my body to my relationship with technology, specifically when I was growing up. The music track is entirely comprised of samples from over 50 songs, mostly recognizable rock and pop music from the 70’s through the early 00’s and noises from Space Cadet Pinball and tech that died out during my childhood (dial-up, etc.).

Rather than me myself, I use a character called Lola to act as a buffer between my creating self and my experiencing self. Lola helps give me a buffer between myself and the subject matter of my work, which can be quite personal and get rather serious at times.

The project came out of a recent realization that I had: I don’t miss my childhood at all, and I think a lot of people would find that unusual. If there are two things I associate with my childhood, they are technology evolving at breakneck speed and evangelical purity culture. I don’t miss the rules, the regulation, the expectations imposed on me for as long as I could remember. Most of my work attempts to deconstruct this, or at the very least examine it, on some level, and for this project I specifically wanted to tie this ideological deconstruction to the media, technology, and sounds of my youth.