Imagine a private clinic, inside an Hotel that you enter as a volunteer to undergo some mysterious tests. Imagine a somewhat suspicious Doctor that does everything he can to make you fill out the entrance form, and that in his secret rooms venerates an alter ego as disturbing as himself, talking an unknown language. Imagine a hotel hall filled with absolutely normal (before proving themselves absolutely foolish) people, with waiters that serve you weird tablets and a butt naked clown that farts and pulls his dick as he sees fit. Imagine a bar like the one in Shining, claustrophobic loculi like the ones in Cube, a ‘Topolino Boys Meeting’, surreal situations and dreamlike sets, and when you’re done, perhaps you could imagine only half of what you would experience entering Hotel. Not least because you enter it as a volunteer, so you have to expect at least a car crash, a plane crash and who knows what else.
The author of this lucid allucination, both funny and disturbing, baroque and minimal, is Han Hoogerbrugge, esteemed one of the greatest talents in flash animation. The Dutchman starts as painter and comicist, and he comes to the net in 1996. His works, from the first animated gifs to the great interactive flash films like Spin and Flow, show a firm poetic, and a mature use of the medium, making the best of it without yielding to his flatteries. A maturity that brought him some important acknowledgment, and a big retrospective at the Cyberart Festival in Bilbao this year.
Compared to the previous works, all performing the surreal adventures of his flash alter ego, Hotel enters a gap, and means a new departure point. It changes from ‘I’ to ‘us’, from the one-act play to a more articulate narrative: but without losing the freshness of a poetry that brings together slapstick comedy and Seventies psychedelia, pulp and science fiction, sense of the absurd and death metaphors, Mickey Mouse and David Linch, Matthew Barney and old Buck.
“Hotel” was produced by SubmarineChannel, the Netherlands.
