Monomyth: gaiden / Departure (2018) is a short animated video exploring the artist’s relationship to their digital avatar Yourself, as well as the processes involved in the creation of a multi-layered image world.
As a self-aware protagonist moving along the frayed edges of fictional and real worlds shaped by narrative traditions, Yourself attempts to navigate landscapes that have become oversaturated with movies and fiction. Through the disentangling of these realms comes an assessment of ideas of a singular truth, and an attempt to pinpoint the shifts and discrepancies in a linear personal narrative that arise when journeying through an elusive multiplanar reality.
Structured as the first part of the hero’s journey trope, the video investigates how real life might be experienced as a film.
Running time: 12 min
Monomyth: gaiden / Initiation (2019) follows the protagonist Yourself as she treks through liminal spaces, investigating broader ideas of time and motion through worlds via anecdotes of pilgrimages inspired by pop-culture. Through the accumulation of realms, avatars and lived experiences arranged within a linear timeline, Initiation suggests a perspective that expands beyond a straightforward succession of frames as defined by narrative order. Using journey tropes as a stepping stone into constructing complex image-worlds that allow for time expand sideways, the video aims to open up ways for multiple layers of experience to co-exist within one non-localised identity.
Running time: 13 min
In the monomyth (or hero's journey), the third larger narrative section of the story, Return, traditionally shows the protagonist leaving the Underworld behind and returning to what for them is real life. Monomyth: gaiden / Return (2019) investigates whether a stark return is possible in an interwoven network of virtual realms, digital technologies and non-localised identities.
The video explores the instabilities that arise at the nexus of common dichotomies: real and fictive, cinematic and animatic. Yourself, a self-aware protagonist moving along the frayed edges of various worlds shaped by narrative traditions, attempts to disentangle and undo landscapes that have become oversaturated with fiction. From the connecting tissue between seemingly self-contained realms, multiplanar worlds of experience arise.
What does the end mean for a world that is driven by narrative significance? There are holes in these landscapes, in the places not visited by the player.
Running time: 13 min
Monomyth: gaiden / Master of two worlds (2020) suggests taking on a position of constant introspective analysis. The worlds in the video are in an ongoing ontological state, questioning where one story ends and another begins as we weave our ways in and out of realms defined by narrative order. Not so much a story as a politics of storytelling, the work offers a grounding point amidst a spectacle of shifting perspectives, bringing Yourself's journey to an end outside of aesthetic and narrative hierarchies.
Running time: 11 min