“ The unconscious is structured like a language”

-Jacques Lacan

Slovenly Peter, a collaborative animation, is our culminating work in the visual arts at Bennington College. The work is an adaptation of a series of cautionary tales written for children called ‘Der Struwwelpeter’ in the 1800s by a German psychiatrist, Heinrich Hoffmann, for his young boy. The children's book is comprised of ten illustrated and rhymed stories , mostly about children, that demonstrate “bad” behavior and the consequences for particular actions, such as being cruel to animals, not eating the food you are served, and sucking your thumb. Taken as a whole the stories form a psychic system, although extremely nonsensical and absurd, that functions as a set of rules or laws for what is good behavior and what is bad behavior. Slovenly Peter extrapolates the model of bad behavior from the book and creates a character who embodies that behavior and who reaps it’ s consequence. Within the animation itself, 'good' and 'bad' behavior are treated as socially conditioned constructions of a bourgeois society and it's morality and whose power is instrumentalized through fear of punishment. The story centers around Peter, who is no longer a child but still young, as an inmate in a insane asylum undergoing experimental treatment for severe schizophrenia in the form of electro-shock therapy. In the timeless, catatonic, and hallucinatory state following his 'therapy', Peter experiences visions of his childhood, his home, and his mother and father. These visions or flashbacks are a way for Peter's hidden personality to emerge in which he can not only relive his past and take control of his former childhood but to re- experience the domination his father and mother had over him. Perhaps the story of Peter tells us that a 'good' person is not the product of a morality that uses fear and punishment to enforce its regulations and prohibitions, but rather a severely warped and malformed human being. The plot of the story follows a path through Peter's psyche, through the unconscious itself, and the nature of a consciousness that has no concept of reality outside of the mind and whose system is foreclosed. The story takes a viewer through Peter's inner landscape and functions as a window into his mind. We appropriated and adapted analytical frameworks such as Freud's language of the mind, Jung's notion of universal archetypes, and Lacan's theory of foreclosure to represent the mind of Peter. Not only is the project an investigation into the language of the mind and the idea of representing madness, but an investigation in art-making in terms of the language of film and the language of drawing, and ultimately merging philosophy, psychology, and art into an experiential modality.

We are filmmakers whose work explores different methods of compiling images to create animation. Max is a digital artist whose work focuses on simulation through technological means and Tyler is a picture-maker who explores the traditional process of animation, drawing sequences frame-by-frame, and the relationship between the world and language through comic representation and abstraction. Slovenly Peter is synthesis of these two modes of working and making animation. We see Slovenly Peter as a statement about the type of animation that can be made by our generation outside of a big budget situation. Fusing technology and art, utilizing the film language enabled by advancement in simulation programs, and combining the digital and the analog enabled us to create this style of animation. Both of us had to draw his own conversation out of the history of animation and film, representation and simulation to inform the work and the process. This project began in the spring of 2010 at the Bennington College and took a year of process and execution to complete the finished product. Slovenly Peter is available for viewing on YouTube.com. Enjoy!