SPOORCLOUD
SPOORCLOUD
Lantana Starr | Flicker | Oolooolio
My aunt had this fish tank she never cleaned. Not neglect exactly — she had a theory about it. Said the whole point of a tank was to let it become its own thing, and if you kept interfering you were just making it about you. By the time I was twelve that tank had an entire civilization in it. Things growing on things. Snails moving with the slow confidence of something that has never once been late. The tank had become its own ecosystem, fish included.
I thought about that tank a lot while I was making Spoorcloud.
The animation runs slow. Slower than I usually work, slower than feels comfortable, slow enough that you might think something is wrong with the file. Nothing is wrong with the file. The plant forms rise. Spores move through the air the way spores actually move, which is not dramatically. Beetles proceed with beetle priorities. Bees work the flowers the way bees work flowers, which is without ceremony and with total commitment.
Fescennine scored it, and he did what I did, which was resist. The music builds — there is a build, I promise — but mildly, the way pressure builds in a room where nothing has happened yet.
Then the creature shows up. Pink, purple, furred in a way that suggests it has never been cold a day in its life. It catches spores out of the air, one at a time, patient as a heron. An insect intervenes. Sternly. The creature leaves. The beetles and bees come back and resume their business, because they were always the ones this place belonged to.
My aunt's tank eventually cracked and had to go. She was sad about it for weeks. I asked if she wished she'd cleaned it more, taken better care. She said she didn't know what I was talking about, that tank was perfect.
Watch Spoorcloud on the Oolooolio YouTube channel HERE.
