Video artist and long-time Björk collaborator Andrew Thomas Huang takes us deep into a digital multiverse via this mind-bending collaboration with motion capture technology company Noitom, choreographer Nina McNeely and fashion designer Ashley Eva Brock. Originally conceived as nine looping video projections, designed for a gallery exhibition, a special edit of Huang’s project is presented above, exclusively for NOWNESS—inspired by the art of Flemish Renaissance painters Bosch and Bruegel, the book Networks of New York by artist and writer Ingrid Burrington, and Jim Henson’s colorful puppet show Fraggle Rock. Here, Los Angeles-based Huang offers some insight into his film:

“‘Flesh Nest’ is essentially my sci-fi Fraggle Rock-inspired trash opera. As a filmmaker who works frequently with visual effects, I’m often thinking about the art of world-building and the rules one lays out to abide by or break in order to make that world succeed. 

“I built this project around the concept of a digital afterlife. While we are often accustomed to seeing the internet portrayed as vector graphics, data visualization, or other sterile imagery like server rooms, I wanted instead to construct visual imagery that had the same efficiency and mythic vastness as a Medieval painting. When you look at the paintings of Bosch or Bruegel, who were inspired by the artwork of the Middle Ages, there are so many characters and spaces building up and crumbling down; with everything inhabiting a single scrolling tapestry-like space. 

"This project is very different for me: unlike my other VFX-heavy work, it remains deconstructed for viewers. Rather than spending lots of time to polish the FX and remove all the seams, it was important for me that there is an honesty about the artifice of this universe. This deconstructed approach involved having a bit of fun with the typical Hollywood visual effects workflow and exposing the process while we’re at it. Actors shot on blue-screen in rubber suits crawl in front of film equipment left in the frame. Motion captured avatars retain the glitches inherent from the imperfections of the capture process.

“Overall it took about a year to make this world rich and populated, and it was a new technical and stylistic leap for me to employ the use of so much motion capture; and to build a full visual effects world, while having the courage to leave a bit of it messy and untouched to keep it interesting and contemporary. I’m proud of this piece and grateful to the collaborators who joined with me to realize it in all of its strangeness.”