Experiencing Interruptions?

One Life

One Life is an experimental animation that deals with themes of family, love and loss. The viewer is presented with a panoramic view of impossibly profuse apple blossom. During the course of the sequence the camera moves through a landscape consisting entirely of clouds of white flowers, occupied by a large family of bees. At first the bees behave naturally, wandering around lazily and feeding on the blossom, however, as the camera moves into the forest of blossom their behavior becomes less and less normal. The bees start to form dramatic lines and swarms, delineating increasingly complex curves and arabesques. Their performance climaxes with a dance in which the swarm creates a series of mysterious figures and knot patterns. This takes place against a flowery back drop that has become similarly excessive, arranging itself into a completely symmetrical stage for their performance. The soundtrack includes fragments of dialogue from television soap operas apparently playing in an adjacent room. The power of familial bonds emerges as the core of both the hive and the soap opera.

  • Stephen Hilyard
    Director
  • Project Type:
    Animation, Experimental, Short
  • Genres:
    Art
  • Runtime:
    6 minutes 39 seconds
  • Completion Date:
    September 1, 2007
  • Production Budget:
    0 USD
  • Country of Origin:
    United States
  • Aspect Ratio:
    16:9
  • Film Color:
    Color
  • First-time Filmmaker:
    No
  • Student Project:
    No
Director Biography - Stephen Hilyard

Stephen Hilyard is an artist and Professor of Digital Arts at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He creates artwork in a wide range of media both digital and traditional. A common theme in his work is the paradoxical nature of our impulse towards the profound, at once both sincere at an emotional level whilst remaining in every way mediated by our culture. His work explores the problematic power of ideals. His work often involves the creation and manipulation of images and video using software developed for the entertainment industry. He creates art work that tells lies in order to problematize the idea of “truth”. His art projects have involved travel to a number of remote locations, including diving in a frigid Icelandic lake and a number of expeditions to Svalbard international territory in the high Arctic.

Hilyard’s work has been exhibited internationally, including galleries in New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle, Minneapolis, London, Berlin, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Dubai, Sao Paulo, Riga, Perth and Sydney. Hilyard’s practice has been supported by grants and fellowships from The Huntington Library, The Harpo Foundation, The American Scandinavian Foundation, The McKnight Foundation, The Wisconsin Arts Board and the Minnesota State Arts Board.

Add Director Biography
Director Statement

My work deals with the power of ideas, and ideals. I am particularly interested in a range of concepts that might best be described as “the profound”. My work identifies our various understandings of the profound as ideals. As ideals they are necessarily unachievable. Never the less we continue to strive for experiences of the impossible profound - such concepts as The Sublime, The Divine or True Love. For me there is something tragic in this yearning for unpresentable concepts, maybe even pathetic, but there is also something heroic in the fact that, in the face of inevitable failure, we continue to live our lives and build our worlds according to these ideals, we continue to believe. Time and again we return to a re-affirmation of the profound. The artist and the mountaineer and the lover all know this.
Ultimately, my work is designed to remind the viewer that she is in the presence of artifice - that this work is attempting to present something of a profound nature, but that it is failing because of its connections to the concrete. In this the viewer might recognize her own condition.