“Linear Narrative” Animation
1.5 minute excerpt of 16 minute loop
Animated May 2025-January 2026
From “Tapestry #1: Linear Narrative,” embroidered May 2021-May 2022
Linear Narrative is a structuralist animated loop that brings to life the hand-embroidered 7 foot long “Tapestry #1,” a piece that I made to explore the concept of “radical linearity.” On the tapestry, a single continuous line of embroidery floss contorts itself into various designs and colors. By zooming in and following this line across the entire expanse, I seek to explore a certain experience of time that is experienced linearly, that is, one moment after another. Linear time gets a bad rap nowadays, critiqued for being the time of heteropatriarchical capitalism, that asks us to conform to certain teleologies of logic, seeping into our bones through the 9-to-5 work day (as just one example). I would argue that this is a misunderstanding, or at least a cheapened form of linearity, that instead functions on ellipses. This form of time asks us to fast-forward or skip past the things in life that are “boring,” such as that work day, to shut our brains off and produce for the wealthy corporate class, or asks us to elide and ignore certain injustices in order to continue functioning. I would argue that linearity, radically conceived, is actually counterposed to that idea, in that it challenges us to live in every moment and consider all things more evenly. Radical linearity means one does not get to skip past the boring or inconvenient parts of life but instead confront them, live with them, or change them for the better. At the same time, it brings increased attention to the unique twists and turns that a day can bring.
In animating this piece, I found my body conforming to a sort of animation-sewing, in which I was pushing the tapestry through the needle’s eye of the camera aperture, using a detached keypad as a foot pedal to take each frame. In this way, even though the embroidery itself was hand-stitched, the animation process reflected machine sewing fabrication.
