Apartment

Apart­ment
ani­ma­tion, 56 mins
2008

Apart­ment is a 56-minute cell and col­lage ani­ma­tion inspired by Georges Perec’s 1978 nov­el La vie, mode d’emploi, in which the author takes the read­er through 100 rooms of an apart­ment build­ing, fol­low­ing a knight’s move in chess. Roy’s one hun­dred vignettes fol­low a sim­i­lar path through an apart­ment build­ing, and inves­ti­gate a num­ber of inter­sect­ing ideas: nat­ur­al his­to­ry, utopia, hedo­nism, and human-ani­mal distinction/relations to name a few. Wild plants and ani­mals slow­ly take over dete­ri­o­rat­ing rooms as the res­i­dents grad­u­al­ly suc­cumb to a mys­te­ri­ous virus. The piece could be inter­pret­ed as offer­ing an anti-human­ist sce­nario with­in a post-his­tor­i­cal era.

Sound was produced by Graham Meisner.