Scene changes with plastic visual rhymes

In 1946, the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí was given the opportunity to realize an animation called Destino in cooperation with Walt Disney. The painter was highly motivated to explore different kinds of smooth transitions between the scenes. For Dalí, this was a way to further develop his already elaborated method of polyvalent ‘double images’ by enhancing it with explicit dynamics. A short typology of the different alternatives to the hard cut that Dalí envisioned is given here. The key aspects are anamorphosis, transmigration of forms, metamorphosis, figure/ground-reversal and change in reaction. The Japanese artist Tabaimo shares several iconographic motifs, as well as formal solutions, with Dalí. With her animation installation teleco-soup, it can be shown that astonishingly small pictorial interventions into a scene suffice to completely transform the interpretation, spatial suggestion and the way the beholder is located in relation to the image. Although objectively the scene remains similar, a great deal changes at once. Therefore, these ‘visual rhymes’ can be considered as condensed, elegant and surprising forms of expression.