Symphony In Sweeatch: The Crazed Other-World of Dax Norman_2021

TICKETS

Dax Norman clearly has Picasso and Dali trapped in his imagination – and it looks like they’re both fighting hard to get out.

Nothing will prepare you for an immersion into the hyper-animated world of Dax Norman. His films approach and rush past as a kind of tumbling, mutating surrealist caravan being chased by a predator just off the screen. This is not a parade of animated imagery that screams meaning – it just screams… and that’s enough!

Dax Norman’s work is not something that you experience so much as something you let happen to you. The roiling, ceaselessly morphing psychedelic imagery should be exhausting but it’s just the opposite – inspiring, beautiful, bursting with ideas and it’s colourful beyond description. At heart, it’s an explosive expression of the pure and simply raw power of what makes animation different from every other artform.

MIAF 15 Trailer
Dax Norman
USA, 2015, 0’30
In 2015 we got lucky when Dax agreed to create a one-of-kind killa trailer for MIAF.

Heartbeat Walkin’
Dax Norman
USA, 2021, 3’30
Heartbeat walkin’ every way – I hope you’re feeling sladifferous today!

Symphony In Sweeatch
Dax Norman
USA, 45’45, 2021
The main event! A champagne-opus of surreality that is probably just about as close as it possible to get to the molten core centre of an animated imagination. The outcome of several years of building an understanding of his 5,000 loop library, Dax Norman gradually linked “time and space and sound together through intense repetition and live design decision-making in performance”.

Says Dax, “This is an experiment with perception, to be sure, as all of my works have been for more than two decades, spanning various art forms. This is about a deepening of the understanding of time and space, and the relationships betwixt, and the intuitive link between art and science, and the self, and its relationship to the subconscious”.

The music, too, has an equally complex and experimental development pathway. The soundtrack, by Bill Byrne, was “created by using software to analyse the animated imagery and generate rhythms and melodies based on the colour and movement of the imagery. This compositional data was fed to a modular synthesizer as the primary instrument for the music contained in this film, combined with samples and recordings created by the artist himself”.