Prelude

This short cartoon is a spin-off from the hour long, Laws of Motion in a Cartoon Landscape, (2011-2016). We see the cartoon avatar of the artist walking through backgrounds from Roadrunner cartoons, avoiding traps set by Wile E Coyote, recalling the visual language of Paris,Texas (1984). The text is composed from edited fragments from Wordsworth’s poem, Prelude (1798-99), written about the Lake District and reflecting back on the poets life. Here the Lake District is now a desert and the poet a cartoon, and an analogy is set up between the impossibility of transcendence or oneness with nature that Wordsworth describes, and the cartoon figure, who seems like a ‘last-man’, unable to access cartoon motion and instead bound to earthly, Newtonian principles.  In the background are billboards with allusive headlines from the website Buzzfeed, which try to boil things down to an essence in the form of a list, such as “10 Things You Have Been Doing Wrong This Whole Time”. The etherial soundtrack is an edit of a composition by The Caretaker, used with permission.