The video Volume 5. Sideways Thought is part of Time Life, a series of stop-motion animations that use reference encyclopedias, photo books and instructional manuals as their raw material. The project imagines these books being scanned by a high-speed robotic book scanner, the kind used by universities and tech companies to archive libraries. Time Life proposes such a device as a new kind of filmmaking apparatus: a machine making flip-book-like animations, spitting out short anthropological essays while digitizing books for the Internet.

Volume 5. Sideways Thought is a motion study of the complete works of Auguste Rodin, made by aggregating every possible photographic view of Rodin’s sculptures found in books on his work. Thomson assembles 360-degree revolutions around each sculpture, approximating a 3D digital scan of Rodin’s corpus using only 2D analog materials. The original musical score is by Ernst Karel, a musician and sound artist and co-director of the 2020 film Expedition Content.

link to video: https://vimeo.com/745396528?share=copy