—in this case, clothing. I studied textiles at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, and wove a ten-meter cloth out of my handspun woolen yarn. After studying weaving for some years, I no longer considered the loom my friend. I finished my work with the loom by making a chaotic web and taking apart the loom to try to understand how the computer's binary system was built on the principle of the loom. Having broken down the loom, both its system and its furniture, I came to realize how two messages—thread up, thread down, 0 and 1, or on and off—can lead to endless patterns. After destroying the loom, I started breaking down cloth in the Academy's paper beater. This beater was given to Norway by the US after World War II in the 1950s as part of the Marshall Plan. Having been tormented by unskilled students like myself for years, the beater was no longer very effective. Pulp made from rags in the beater always retained visible parts of the cloth. For an early book project, titled Memories (2006), I used cloth as a metaphor for memories. Some years later I made an animated version of the book titled Occident (2011). The term is derived of the Latin word "occido" which means to fall down, to go down, set (of heavenly bodies), perish, die, or pass away.1 The title Occident refers both to memories becoming more and more vague, and to the part of the film made by scratching undeveloped 35-millimeter film stock, which will perish over time as it is exposed to light. Even paper does not last forever. Any material has one goal: to return to its origins, to degrade. I use time as a material in my work. All of the processes behind my work are time consuming: making paper pulp, making paper, carving the puppets, and the stop-action animation process. The slow pace allows me to reflect on the work as it progresses. All the technology we are surrounded by these days makes everything go fast. Making films with its slow and steady progress calms me down. In one of my recent films, I made the props by spraying pulp, made of waste paper from 14 years of making paper, onto the sheets of my earlier book Memories. Paper is easily recycled again and again, to create new forms, new films, adding memories and time to the work at hand. Time is also a theme in my work: memory, forgetting, time in animation and time in real life, time and archives. With the book Memories, I began investigating "archives" as a theme. I researched the history of books, writing technologies, and the materials that supports them, rather than the content of what we write. I read thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Friedrich Kittler and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht. Archives and the materiality of documents that are the building blocks of our collected writings have a great influence on the way we think and how we shape history and culture in our minds. These themes have remained at the center of my work for more than ten years. Papermaking has been a crucial part of my work: making a utopian archive consisting of marionettes and their books of handmade paper. In the beginning my utopian archive was like a scenery. The marionettes told their wordless stories out of the fibers of the sheets of paper; pure materiality would tell stories out of the paper structure. The archive was silent and still, like a pantomime. Its stories needed motion, to be brought to life. I began animating the frozen stories. Having worked with handmade paper for some time, I chose to use paper to build the scenery for my films. At first it was a challenge to have the paper look a specific way, for example, a house. It would perhaps have been more convenient to use wood or metal. But after years of building props out of paper, I cannot think of any material which is more flexible than paper. It can be turned into anything, by papier-mâché techniques, casting, spinning into thread, kniting, weaving or crocheting, origamifolding, or just tearing it up. The first animation I made, Morphology in the Morning (2010), was a spider's story, spinning her web at 4 am. This film was inspired by the story of the late Judith Scott who was born deaf, mute, and with Down syndrome. Her sole communication with the world A still from the animation Morphology in the Morning, 2010. Set is approximately 23 x 47 x 27 inches; spider webs: spun kozo; garden: abaca, cotton, and kozo handmade papers; branches: old books; leaves: oak leaves treated with sodium hydroxide. Birth of a Book, 2014, animation and book sculpture. Each sheet: 11 x 19 inches; watermarked cotton rag paper. summer 2015 - 13 A still from the animation Occident, 2011. Set is approximately 23 x 30 x 19 inches; background: kozo in several layers with coal between the layers and small cast-paper elements; Muy's model: colored abaca. A still from the animation Vannevar, 2012. Set is approximately 23 x 47 x 27 inches, origami-folded paper, straw, and kozo colored with graphite. sensilla on its legs. Spiders feel the world through their threads. I believe that our first meeting with the world is also through touch, and by textiles. The first thing that is done to us as we are born into the world is to be wrapped inside a cotton cloth. In 2014 I produced a book titled The Birth of a Book, a book-sculpture and an animation. It forms an Ouroboros in its narration and as a sculptural work. In the animation it forms a loop, beginning and ending with a crocheted cloth of paper threads. The Birth of a Book consists of a dialogue of watermarks, between the front and the back sides of the pages. The sheets are made of cotton rag which gives the book a special softness. Touch is a reason why I have chosen to work with paper. I much rather prefer modeling cotton pulp than building with styrofoam. I can spend the whole day working with natural fibers instead of working with a plastic keyboard in front of a screen. The material foundation of writing has been a main theme in all my films. What may seem as pure abstractions and pure thought are dependent on some sort of material; either parchment, paper, or silicon. I work with the traditional material of archives: paper. The puppets in my animations are surrounded by paper in many ways: it is their habitat, they talk about paper, they work with paper, they make paper; everything has something to do with paper. In The Story of Muy (2011), Muy tries to comprehend some curious events by building a paper model of what he experienced. The paper model turns out to be a mess, but Muy was by wrapping yarn around various objects. Art historian John MacGregor compares Scott's fiber works with Peter N. Witts' experiments in the 1960s in which he found that if spiders were stimulated by amphetamines, caffeine, or other drugs, they would not be able to spin their web in regular spiral structures.2 We now know that spiders also spin chaotic webs if they are hungry or dying. In Morphology in the Morning I took this comparison further, creating a narrative lecture which tells the story of the spider's tactile world: it communicates, hunts, and mates by vibration of its web, which it receives by does not give up. He climbs into the model to see if it can tell him something despite its chaos. In Vannevar (2012), the Countessa writes with three-dimensional paper sculptures, and the Archivist sorts papers by their properties and structures rather than content. The puppets in the live-action sequence in The Upper Floors (2014) are made solely out of paper. The heads are cast kozo, and the bodies are torn and crumpled linen paper. In the accompanying CD with an audio-play version of the film, there is uncertainty whether the puppets are paper scraps, found in garbage cans, or actual human beings. In both scenarios, the puppets symbolize the taboos in the archives, the sensitive information such as criminal record or health information. In the audio-play version, the puppets are paper scraps thrown away in the paper recycling bin. Currently I am working on a film about protection of privacy and the conflicting nature of sensitive information stored in archives. Sometimes the best way to protect the privacy of an individual is to destroy the documents. On the other hand, the documents may contain important evidence that could secure the rights of the individual, as well as preserve historical details to better understand the present. The property of paper and the papermaking process are used as metaphors for these subjects throughout the film. Paper gives my films a dreamlike appearance. When familiar objects like chairs or closets are made out of paper, they extend the magical and illusory feeling of animation. A spider's web made of spun mulberry paper, is not really a spider's web. A room made of linen paper is not actually a room. I never intend to make props look exactly the way they look in real life. The puppets don't act as humans do in real life, the sounds aren't actual recordings: birds flying are sheets of paper flapping, a breeze will be sounded on the accordion, and so on. All in all, when making an animation, I try to emphasize the artificial aspect of animation, otherwise why animate in the first place? The complete and total illusion of my films supports my aim to tell pure fiction. In many of my exhibitons, I exhibit the paper scenery from the films, revealing the scale and the methods I use to create the films. For the exhibition "The Upper Floors" I installed paper buildings in the gallery space, mixing the natural material with digital screens and projected animations. A viewer could look inside the buildings and watch an animation. The screens inside the paper buildings were clearly visible from the outside, so that the constructions would be easily understandable. In this way, the viewer gets a feeling of satisfaction, just like a good ending of a book. Animation is made up of 25 frames per second. Essentially animation is thousands of photographs. By photographing the paper, I choose the angle, exposures, focal lengths, light. By these means I can bring forth the structure, color, and texture of the paper. In Vannevar (2012), I made high-shrinkage linen pulp which I dried on Plexiglas. I placed three large sheets a bit apart, and lit each one with an LED light from underneath. The twists and turns of the fibers became visible in layers, evoking the ominous sky in the scene where Vannevar arrives on a distant island after a rowing trip over the ocean. Paper is a suitable material to animate, to move little by little, with some control over the way it moves. In The Upper Floors (2014), I animated the folding and unfolding of a paper sheet, marking the beginning and the ending of the film. Alfi Olfi, the woman with the machine in Vannevar, tells her story by folding and unfolding tessellations. Tearing linen paper, as Vannevar does in the opensummer 2015 - 15 ing of The Upper Floors, is more controllable than tearing thinner, more flexible paper. By making my own paper from scratch with raw materials, I am able to create exactly the kind of paper I need with specific working and aesthetic properties for animation and for bringing out specific moods. This would be much harder if I had to buy ready-made paper. In my forthcoming shadow theater The Upper Floors, Part 3, I am using a traditional papermaking technique for creating the shadow play—watermarks. Henrik Wergeland walks through Oslo, at the time called Christiania, in January 1841, for his first working day as Norway's inaugural head of the National Archives. Wergeland will have the massive job of working his way through enormous heaps of papers—archival material sent from Denmark to Norway after Norway becomes independent from Denmark in 1814. I filmed Wergeland's walking trip through Oslo using a pre-cinema technique. He is animated as a zoetrope, his silhouette turned into a watermark, lively walking through a paper-silhouette city that grows larger and larger as he progresses to Akershus Castle, which housed the National Archives at the time. It is nearly impossible to imagine exactly how life was like in the 1800s. We cannot really get a grip on it. It is a bit like trying to catch a shadow—like reading a book solely made out of watermarks. Paper has been an important medium for my artwork, but I have also come to appreciate it simply as a tactile, soft, white, aesthetic material. I enjoy the calmness when lifting the papermaking mould from the vat, slowly tilting the frame, and watching the water pour off the sheet. Internet and digital e-books seem far away at that moment, almost as if the computer were never invented. I am back in the sixteenth century. Making paper connects me with history, and I appreciate practicing a traditional technique which has meant so much for our culture. The animation technique I use in the films is also classical, following the traditions from the early years of animation. I do not use CGI or FLASH; I do very little postproduction and I don't touch Photoshop or After Effects. My animations are raw, with mistakes and errors as anything handmade would have. And even though paradoxically the films are shown as flat, digitial screens of pixels, animating with classical techniques and utilizing handmade paper breathe life into the handmade scenery and puppets, and gives the films a rich, warm texture. ___________ notes 1. "Occido," Wiktionary, last modified August 20, 2014, http://en.wiktionary .org/wiki/occido. 2. John MacGregor, Metamorphosis: The Fiber Art of Judith Scott (Oakland, CA: Creative Growth Art Center, 1999).
