image/Word.​not_a_pipe=(Magritte)

A lone man in an overcoat and bowler hat is obscurely displaced as he dances on a deserted windy beach, over a grassy knoll and through pedestrians in a crowded street. The figure represents Magritte’s familiar symbol of the "Everyman". Kinetic and fast, the film uses surrealist techniques, frames within frames, dynamic text, and familiar objects that float around the dancer – an apple, a pipe, an umbrella – to transform the image beyond the real. The live dancer, represented by the same "Everyman", also comments on the signifier versus the signified, the danced image versus the dancer. Michel Foucault’s text Ceci n’est pas une pipe is referenced by transposing words and images into code patterns from programming language such as HTML, Cold Fusion and Java. In addition to the hypertext that floats through the image, time-code and key-code – acknowledged film references – are burned into the bottom of the image, while the music drives the hyper-speed of the editing. Created at the turn of the 21st century when the Internet was still a new phenomenon, multiple screens, the danced image, Foucault’s coded language and Magritte’s "Everyman" combine to explore the distinction between similitude and resemblance.