Hello, there! I’m Elk Paauw, self-published Seattle comics artist and queer transguy (he/him/his pronouns). I perform regularly as half of the cartoon band Spooky Action, and I host a monthly international animated children’s film series called Saturday Morning Cartoons at SIFF Cinema Uptown in Seattle, Washington. I’m here in Chicago until I chase after a PhD. Most of my work considers identity and the self, and my thesis website 4dtime.space is a blend of comics, geometry, and existentialism, and is a preamble to what I call a trans metaphysics.
Me!, 2020, Digital drawing
Homepage logo for website 4dtime.space
Go on a journey through spacetime via the medium of comics! Discover your place in the universe in this crossover metanarrative marrying block universe theory and comics theory. Learn how to consider your own life – and art! – as a 4-dimensional hyper-object and transcend your own conceptions of our universe.
Created as a thesis for the Visual and Critical Studies Master’s program, I built a website that is a comics-based philosophical defense of four-dimensionalism. I use the comics form itself to articulate truth claims regarding not only block universe theory, but expanding and remixing different strains of the philosophy of time as a whole. Through my research of four-dimensionalism in art movements (surrealism, dimensionism, and cubism), across different cultures, in theoretical physics (specifically string theory), geometry, religion, and cosmology, I begin to articulate my own existentialist synthesis of these ideas through the lens of comics formalism. Here I create and define the notion of a spacetime sausage as a way to understand the self through time as a four-dimensional hyper-object, as well as discuss how the comics form itself can be read analogically as a helpful tool to understanding how block universe theory actually functions in our universe as a whole. If you’d like to read more, please visit 4dtime.space; or, if you’d like to buy the “Origin Story” section in print, you can buy it at elkpapa.storenvy.com.