Hand-drawn video animation, color, silent, 9:47, 2025

Airopaidia is an exuberant text-based color animation that compresses the 1783 book of the same name into a short film. The title and text come from English aeronaut Thomas Baldwin’s nearly 400-page attempt to describe the complex new technology and experience of balloon flight. An encyclopedia of the aerial, Airopaidia includes the author’s mathematical calculations together with overflowing language and discussions of how to know if you are ascending or descending, what kinds of properties light and clouds have, and how to use spices, pigeons, barometers and ribbons in conducting a variety of experiments. The mix of language and affect in the text inspired the rapid pace of the language in the film. The color fields developing behind the words are meant to inspire, confuse, match and separate from the words appearing on screen. The animation Airopaidia attempts to communicate the overwhelming experiences of the aeronaut’s first flight and the pleasure the filmmaker had in reading the book and making the film.

Production, Animation, Edit: Jenny Perlin

Support provided by the Oslo National Academy of Art