Roughly sketched drawings—apparently made with a black crayon—on white background keep transforming somewhat clumsily into different images, while the accompanying audio changes in sync with the visuals. These shifts result in semantic cuts, create narratives that appear coherent yet seem somehow odd, or establish new semantic connections based on the differing audio.

“XNN (X News Network)” was made utilizing the rotoscope animation technique by tracing live action footage. The footage used in this case was culled from multiple news reports on a broad range of topics. In the movie that was realized this way, the newscasters’ announcements were broken up into phrases, to create audio fragments that were then reorganized and reconnected automatically and in a random fashion, yet adhering to the rules of grammar. The finished work presents the viewer with news that contain parts taken from reality, but that seem rather unlikely in this form.

The sense of distance between the artist and news reports in the media that is expressed through this work inspires the viewer to question the objective nature of “news,” and at the same time, to think about the fact that we normally believe what the news are telling us. The simplifications and deformations that the artist arbitrarily applied to the rotoscope drawings reflect the uncertainty of news as information sources.