UK / Duration 2m 59s / 2010

Of Unknown Origin is inspired by the tape recordings of Raymond Cass, a hearing-aid specialist from Hull and one of the UK’s foremost researchers into ‘Electronic Voice Phenomenon’ or EVP.

EVP recordings present messages ‘of unknown origin’ heard in radio frequencies and background noise, and possess a distorted, unearthly quality. Many researchers into the EVP believe they are the voices of the dead. Through a series of fragmentary scenes rendered in pencil and watercolour animation we enter into an unsettling territory somewhere between the real and the abstract. We hear the strange sounds of the EVP, and Cass himself talking about his work. But the film is not ‘about’ Cass, instead it uses his recordings as a route to explore the hidden realms of the unconscious mind. The film mirrors the uncanny, inexplicable nature of the EVP, the mystery and poetry of the recordings, and challenges rational explanations.

Of Unknown Origin is an Animate Projects commission.

Edwin Rostron is an artist currently based in London. He was born in Doncaster in 1977 and grew up in Newcastle Upon Tyne. He studied Fine Art at Sheffield Hallam University and Animation at the Royal College of Art. His animations have been shown in exhibitions and festivals including onedotzero, Pictoplasma and the Australian International Animation Festival. Edwin works predominantly with animation and comics, using these forms as extensions of the drawing which drives his practice. His inspirations include the underground comics of Mark Beyer and Gary Panter, the Chicago Imagists, Neo Romantic painters such as Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland, and the post-industrial landscape of North-East England.

www.edwinrostron.net