Statement on dread for Volume I of the Venice Biennale Catalog
Joshua Mosley, April 13, 2007

The dialogue in the animation dread is loosely based on my reading of Pascal's Pensées and Rousseau's Emile. Both texts present the difficulty of resolving the human relationship to nature and existence while also accepting God as the creator.

The hints of monstrous parts in the figures of Cow and Dread indicate that the animals have nearly evolved to their normal forms. The dog has one head instead of three, and the cow does not have four human figures emerging from her back. The form of Dread, and his name, takes after the dog subject of Eadweard Muybridge's photographic motion study.

In past works, I've chosen a physical material for the puppets and a flat flickering hand-treated surface for the landscape. This combination seemed to create a separation between the bodies of the characters and the thoughts in their mind.

Each background in dread consists of irregular cycles of six digital photographs. The photos were enhanced in the translation from color to black-and-white so that small elements appear more numerous. My method of composing the music relates to the sampling process of the animation; in essence, it is an intricate assembly of short recordings of single notes.

The clay and resin figures were 3D scanned for the animation capturing the hand-modeled surface, then cast in bronze to make a fixed physical impression. The numeric figurative meshes that resulted from the scanning seemed to suggest to me that the characters' minds would not need to be pressurized in their bodies, instead the minds could be equally present in the landscape.