The Hands Around You
Pictogram
NG Sing-yiu, Brian 伍昇耀
Student of SM2105 Narrative Strategies and Aesthetics of Time-based Media
Abstract
The Hand was made by Czech Jiri Trnka in 1965, during the Cold War period. In this work, Trnka shows, from an individual person’s point of view, how easily one could become a slave under dictatorship. As an art-worker himself, Trnka knew that totalitarianism was a horrible threat for artistic creativity. I deem the protagonist of The Hand is Jiri Trnka himself, and this animation picture is his self-portrait. Three years after the work’s release, Prague Spring happened in 1968, resulting in the Soviet Union’s army occupying Czechoslovakia…
In my analytical pictogram, I illustrate how “the hand” takes control over the artisan (the protagonist). After a generative principle, I turn the idea of a hand into a seed: to show how it grows bigger successively and gradually occupies the centre of the artisan’s living and mental space. My pictogram also calls attention to a comparison between the artisan’s hand and the regime’s.
