Betweenness

The practice of Oliver Laric is based on the idea of variation, where matter and form are never fixed and instead subject to continuous transformation and becoming. Also, Betweenness, Laric’s immersive animation, questions the permanence of forms, pointing to their variation, multiplication, and hybridization through time. Objects, animals, and humans are no longer static or even clearly distinguishable entities. They are depicted as hybrid creatures, which mutate from character to character, from person to object, or from animal to machine. Human and non-human classification is rendered obsolete, favoring instead a more complex understanding of organisms and their interdependencies.

Developed through a method of a defined set of black lines set against a white background, the animation is made through the changing position of these lines over time as part of a vector graphic. They draw silhouettes of people, animals, organisms, which morph into one another, creating a cosmos of matter, and a sense of becoming. Accompanied by a soundtrack composed by Ville Haimala, with whom Laric regularly collaborates, the work functions as a visual poem where traditional hierarchies between animal and human have been blurred, and where hierarchy imposed upon our understanding of nature as the Other and subject to domination and power imposition has been rendered obsolete.