Overview

In 2010, an interactive animation based on Zdeněk Sklenář's illustrations for the book The Monkey King (Czech 1961) was created for presentation at the EXPO in Shanghai. One of the co-authors of the animation was Martin Búřil. The basis of the video Monoscope no. 3 is the basis of the flat animation of the stories of The Monkey King, from which all graphic data of the original illustrations has been removed. His fights with the Jade Emperor are converted into collisions of colored rectangles of a generic monoscope, a calibration pattern that automatically replaces missing data in the After Effects software. Búřil's Monoscope is a technical ready-made and an animated film of pure form devoid of content. If the original Monkey King was an extension of Sklenář's drawings with a media superstructure, Monoscope is a pure manifestation of this superstructure, everything that was added to the original artistic content.