Music and Video by Jenna Hoffart

Human Emotion Machine is a series of Videos. In my mind, I am just a Human Machine powered by Emotion. My soul is expressed through my Art, because my art is more me than anything else I know. I believe that My Art communicates my heart, soul, and life-energy more than my natural, physical body ever could.

I use the Plasma Ball in these videos, as for me they represent a mode of travel through many different perceived “realities” in my life. Digital, Physical, Life, Death, and Dreams. For as long as I can remember, my Baba had a Plasma ball on her coffee table. I was obsessed with the thing. There it is in the Physical world. When I was really young, I remember having a dream where I was in a dark, circular room with a Plasma Ball sitting on a table on the other end of a huge pit in the center of the room. I started walking towards the ball, and fell into the pit to my death. There it is in the Dream world. In January of 2020, my Baba passed away. Now the Plasma Ball belongs to me, and sits in my house. It makes me think of her and also of death. There it is in the world of Death. By creating digital art pieces (These videos, as well as still-digital pieces I have created of Plasma Balls) I have now brought the Plasma Ball into the Digital world.

Sometimes it feels challenging to separate these worlds, for me, and that is why I’ve in the past chosen to avoid the Digital world, in order to not add another layer of confusion, as I’ve always had anxieties about whether I’m really in a Dream or in a VR-type simulation, rather than the “real” world, whatever that is. Recently, in the year 2020 and everything it brought us, I’d been forced to spend more time in that Digital realm, and have decided to accept it, and embrace it, as that was the only way for me to continue making my Art while in University. That is what many of my projects made this year are all about.

This video was created through stop-motion 2D animation. Every frame was drawn and put together to create the illusion of motion.

The sound was created by hooking up my cello to a looping pedal, and playing with layers of ambient sound.