Hiroaki Umeda is one of five artists commissioned by the London International Mime Festival to create a short film that isn’t driven by spoken text as part of the festival’s online material.
The London Mime Festival 2022 is running until 6 February, both in person and online. Access to online shows can be found here.
Although intriguing and beautiful, Mold 1 is to me, unfortunately, the weakest entry on this list of shorts. It features green computer-generated matter that oscillates and flows into various shapes, seeming at times like sand or water.
The film is meditative and pleasing to the eye, and would no doubt be interesting as a part of Umeda’s portfolio of work but falls a little short as a standalone. Umeda has stated that the work is his experiment in choreographing a digital object and bears a fair bit of resemblance to his physical work.
Although this is interesting conceptually, in the context of a mime festival I personally prefer to see physical work, be that with the human body, puppets, etc. as digitalisation comes to be the norm in so many other art forms, sometimes in place of the physical. However, this should not detract from the fact that Mold 1 is still a wonderful piece of art.
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