Iconsider Moving Illustrations of Machines a revisionist animation. It ignores all of the tenets of traditional animation: color, hypernatural movement, and the depiction of vibrancy and life. The only characters as such are machines. I began work on this film as a commentary on the 1997 cloning of Dolly the sheep. I wanted to visualize a hybrid world where the line between organic machines (such as cells) and their man-made counterparts (such as microchips) begins to blur. There is a duality that has crept into our technological consciousness—first, the idea that any complex mechanism, including a living mechanism such as an ovum, can be described as a “machine”. And conversely, the idea that mechanisms with extreme complexity, even man-made mechanisms, must at some point be considered “alive”. For instance, the CPU of your average desktop computer can now outperform many insects in terms of information processing power. Does this suggest that microchips are in some way “smarter” or more “alive” than insects? I used this broader paradigm of the machine concept and applied it to a narrative that encompassed many of our emotional perceptions regarding cloning. Setting a provocative tone, the film opens with the mission statement of scientist and entrepreneur Richard Seed: God made man in his own image. God intended for man to become one with God. We are going to become one with God. We are going to have almost as much knowledge and almost as much power as God. Cloning, and the reprogramming of DNA, is the first serious step in becoming one with God.

My film introduces this machine world in a series of images consisting only of the benign spinning and turning of various mechanisms. The world lacks a sense of scale and orientation, is surreal and mysterious, but is also beautiful. The second sequence begins with an unsettling image of worm-like machines. They appear more complex, but still seem metallic and manmade. Then the ova are introduced and the rest of this sequence details the ova’s journey from being "hatched", to being inseminated by the mechanical worms, to being inscribed with information by the needle of an ominous cloning device. After the rest of the eggs have been inscribed, they slowly conglomerate as the music builds, and in the end they appear indistinguishable in a mass, an organic surface that is the accumulation of these altered organic machines.

Moving Illustrations of Machines wishes to reconsider what it means to be living. Has technology and cloning changed the definition of the word machine? Is the human machine open to revision by humanity itself? As our technology becomes unfathomably complex, will the human ovum become as eligible for alteration as any of our mechanical gadgets? Machines doesn’t propose to answer these questions, only to present them and ask the viewer to consider them, as cloning and related scientific issues continue to surge to the forefront of our ethical and moral quandaries.