For the feature film L’étourdit, I collaborated with Paris Lavidis, a PhD student supervised by Slavoj Žižek, who directed the film. The film is based on a key text by Jacques Lacan, an influential French psychoanalyst who offered one of the most influential interpretations of Freud’s work through the lens of language and mathematics. The film turns the theoretical text into a narrative centred a one-night stand between a man and a woman and it’s aftermath. In Lacan’s view, structures of language make us sexual beings, which means that for humans, sexuality is not complementary, but rather displaced in specific ways that Lacan maps out through the mathematical discipline of topology. My role was to visualise these structures as they manifest in the couple’s encounters.

Working in Blender and After Effects, I moved beyond purely aesthetic design, engaging in a rigorous but nonetheless creative process. I used accurate mathematical formulas to model and animate the torus, Möbius strip and cross-cap, which Lacan used to map the topology of the subject, following Lavidis‘ lead. I was responsible for the entire pipeline, animating the complicated transitions between these objects to represent the shifts in the relationship. I also prepared the preliminary compositing and handoff to color grading and final composition.