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Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions

An animated surrealist film visualizing temporal, immaterial sensations as spatially material extensions of the body. Like the physical matter of the body and the electric experience of the psyche, this hybrid animation style demonstrates the unification of the carnal and the spiritual through the materiality of stop-motion paint and the super-saturated color of digital animation. My fascination with human origins, particularly our gifts of individual personality, self-awareness, and intelligence, drives my inspired pursuits through art history, cognitive science, and theoretical physics.

  • Kaeti Leila MacNeil
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short, Student
  • Runtime:
    2 minutes 30 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    April 1, 2022
  • Country of Origin:
    Canada
  • Shooting Format:
    Digital
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    Yes
  • Student Project:
    Yes - OCAD University
  • Mindfield Film Festival
    Albuquerque
    United States
    August 27, 2022
    Official Selection
  • Salon des Refusés at the OIAF
    Ottawa
    Canada
    September 22, 2022
  • The Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image
    New York City
    United States
    October 14, 2022
    Best Animated Short
Distribution Information
  • CFMDC
    Distributor
    Country: Canada
Director Biography - Kaeti Leila MacNeil

Kaeti MacNeil is an American surrealist artist creating paintings and animations. Her film Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions (2022) won Best Animated Short at the Artists Forum Festival of the Moving Image in New York City. Her work depicts temporal, immaterial sensations and perceptions as spatially material extensions of the body. She earned a BFA with Distinction from OCAD University in Toronto specializing in Drawing & Painting: Digital Painting and Expanded Animation. Her fascination with human origins, particularly our gifts of individual personality, self-awareness, and intelligence, drives her inspired pursuits through art history, cognitive science, and theoretical physics. Her work has been exhibited in Toronto, Seattle, Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York City.

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Director Statement

Carasoul: a Portrait in Nth Dimensions is an animated surrealist 4K film. The film depicts temporal, immaterial sensations and perceptions as spatially material extensions of the body. This vision of invisible dimensions within a human experience is grounded in biological and biographical forms.

This work is for feeling thoughts around you like waves and forms, invisible yet tangible. One named experience is the Carasoul, the head-soul moving like a merry-go-round. It’s the imagination, the mind’s eye, the visuospatial sketchpad of the psyche surrounding the body. The Carasoul questions how one experiences time, the location and duration of consciousness, the life force, and the imaginal mind. These unseen yet vitally tangible experiences envelop our bodies in extra dimensions. Nth dimensions expresses the uncertainty about the nature of the unseen layers of reality we live within.

My fascination with human origins, particularly our gifts of individual personality, self-awareness, and intelligence, drives my inspired pursuits through art history, cognitive science, and theoretical physics. Hilma af Klint’s Paintings for the Future exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City deeply moved me to explore my own understanding and communicate it through animated paintings and breath vocals.

Like the physical matter of the body and the electric experience of the psyche, this hybrid animation style demonstrates the unification of the carnal and the spiritual through the materiality of stop-motion paint and the super-saturated color of digital animation. This film fills a space in contemporary animation between abstraction and figuration, the mundane and the mystical, feeling a way through color and voice to share a vision of how human beings are more than they appear. A metaphysical transformation takes place expanding an individual beyond the boundaries of their interior towards a larger intersubjectivity. It is a hybrid, fluid vision of intersectional bodies communicating in the global sphere.