“Cleanroom” is a collaborative animation made by Anastasia Komar and Kate Stone. The artists combined stop-motion and hand-drawn animation techniques to construct a narrative that takes place across two sacred spaces and two interwoven times: an ancient temple and a bio-tech cleanroom. The animation travels from one room to the next through air vents and outlets, leading from pristine labs to crumbling stone corridors. The cleanroom exists within the temple and the temple sits within the cleanroom, like an infinitely looping nesting doll.

The spaces are occupied by characters both physical and invisible: artifacts and electromagnetism, deities and microscopic particles. A disembodied face floats in a black void and acts as an omniscience force, a silent narrator, watching as the viewer is led by air flow and light from room to room. One space is guarded by a fragmented stone lion, ticking and rotating like a security camera. One contains a portal to the black void. Another glows with a blue UV light that cleanses the space. The invisible forces - air, static, magnetic fields - accumulate to conjure an ancient machine, a technological ghost with an indecipherable message.

Both temples and cleanrooms are dedicated to the creation, storage and worship of sacred objects - material things imbued with immaterial meaning and value, representative of deities and higher powers, be they spirits or microchips, natural forces or prescription meds, myths or fake news. Cleanrooms are contemporary sacred spaces - sterile, sealed and controlled - for the creation of technological components and pharmaceuticals. Temples are sacred spaces for spiritual worship. Museums, where most ancient sacred objects exist today, are another kind of sacred space, similarly pristine and climate controlled but rather than protecting new creations, they preserve the past, out of context and often stolen. Here, the cleanroom, the temple and the museum exist in tandem and in opposition: spirituality vs. science, each with their own gods. Here, the anachronism of the ancient relics within the cleanrooms suggests that all things will one day be artifacts, doomed to obsolescence and robbed of context.