by Sarah Treadwell and Paul Veart

In horror movies, bliss (especially sexual pleasure) is often followed by death but in this case it induces play. Yoko and the children, in the vertical space of the courtyard, joyfully explore time and gentle gravity. Yoko falls in slow motion towards the earth and a small boy catches her by the heel; 'light as a feather'. Girl becomes woman, cat, bird, feather in a stream of shifty alteration.

It is at this point of pure play, a condition outside economies of production or definition through use-value, that an external observation obtrudes. The ground, on which Yoko lay in bliss, looks up at the scene with a low angle fish eye. Yuki peers into the hole and a rat leaps out. The stream of rats that then leave the area are a warning; the ship is sinking, floating is no longer an option.

Following her disappearing cat's bell, Yoko finds Yuki scratching at a red door. Holding the cat Yoko looks into the space beyond the door; there is only blackness. Cixous describes drawing as a seeking in the dark - a never finished searching that is not directly answered but which provokes other 'secrets' to emerge. Sounds circulate in the blackness before Yoko, repetitions of her conversations, complicating linear time, activating ideas of surveillance.

At this point Yoko and Yuki are caught in the spotlight of a torch wielded by a gas masked rubber clad figure barely discernible as human. 'You don't belong here', he says and drags her away. The city is invoked at this point - crowded everyday life of a small street (where she presumably does belong) in opposition to the dark nothingness and white bliss of the house.

The forces of law, paternal prohibition, prevail with the children and Yoko being dragged out of the compound. Orders are given to seal off the area and this is achieved with pumped out whiteness. Is this the same whiteness that was associated with bliss, an act of obliteration casting bliss as the loss of self-definition in a merging that is also a forgetting?

The computer screen registers the effects of the house and site as a rendering anomaly and then records a 'reconfiguration' of the location. This is followed by a shot of blue sky which is also a blue screen with its tendencies to isolate and re-imagine context.

The haunted house has become a parking lot behind a mesh fence. The children, bored and sullen, try to activate the site but to no avail. Bottles smash and gravity works as usual. They depart sadly. Yoko standing at the perimeter of the remade site finds the tin can and picks it up - she too tests gravity and time. The can falls. Blood trickles from the cut it has made in Yoko's finger. It slowly winds down her hand and drips onto the stabilised facsimile of ground.

Cixous describes the search for that which it is desired to draw - 'the quick of life' - as a series of approximations, something small and precise like a speck of blood, a nail, a needle - small sharp probes which damage. The quick of life, existing both prior and post vision as an apprehension or awareness, can only be approached cautiously because with its visibility it will vanish.

Blood, the quick of life, which might stand as a proof of the body as an irreducible limit, a mark of biological origin, is problematised in this context. Yoko's body (that drips blood) refers to the computer-programmed bodies in the film the Matrix. In Beyond Yoko's body is a cartoon body, referring to a filmic body which represents a computer programmed body, and is physically drawn by hand from photographs of a young woman posed to anticipate the construction of the cartoon Yoko.

Yoko's fallen blood might also be a sign of a wounding. For Cixous the wound 'is a strange thing: either I die, or a kind of work takes place ... It is here that I sense things taking place. The wound is also an alteration. ... I like the scar, the story."³⁰ In Beyond the wound, like stigmata, is a sign of both separation and repair. The story ends with a return to the beginning, a scene of city life in which depressed looking people march across an intersection.

Filmmaker Morimoto was permitted to make an animation about everyday effects of the Matrix provided that the characters did not discover it. In Beyond Yoko and the children do not even seek the reasons for the strange anomalies in their world but the cat Yuki who, being animal, was not hooked up to the Matrix (the law), but was part of the programme, was able to know about its presence. The cat as a systemic anomaly that didn't necessarily work to maintain the system could perceive and enjoy its representational effects; Yuki passed between systems.

Cixous refers to passwords, (words that make passage between systems), as 'magic animots', 'animal-words' and registers a crossing between categories. The drawings that constitute the animation, Beyond, might be like Cixous' animots. They are of the everyday, fashioned by familiar techniques of animation, but in their representational complexity, in their unreliable categorization of life and the gravitational play that they both enact and picture, they seem to be drawings that cross the eyelid into the openness of the animal.

Wondering about people who seek finish, which she associates with the clean and the proper, Cixous poses a portrayal of truth in drawing that is characterised by a 'panting and unstable allure'; drawing that looks to the drawing yet to be made; drawing that sees itself from a distance even as it is emerging.

Perhaps architectural animation needs to acquire such engaged distance, such animal allure, by losing the didactic and linear techniques which proposes architecture as self evident, needing no telling, no bringing into the world. It might imagine instead a story like Beyond - a movie designed, shaped with responsive narratives - a hybrid design, part animal that is a spatial making that casts genre, categories and orders into doubt. The director of Beyond, Koji Morimoto certainly knew about categorical and temporal leakage; in a discussion on the making of the animation, he started by recounting a story from his childhood when he saw on the surfaces of his home, the wood-grain move.