Each of Beckman’s works has a haptic feel, which isn’t only due to the bricolage aesthetic of DIY and punk that characterizes her work. Even today, the artist mostly continues to do without digital technology, working instead with Super-8 and 16mm film, physical models, and time lapse. A number of her significant works date from the 1980s, when technology was transitioning from analogue to the digital age. As such, a few of the animations in Cinderella recall the cult film Tron (1982), whose producers were able to create a digital scenario primarily with analogue techniques. Beckman, in turn, refers back to elements of the digital in her almost demonstratively analogue-looking imagery. Cinderella, for example, is structured into a number of different levels, and text symbols occasionally float through the scenes. The format reflects the artist’s interest in the constructivist-structuralist theories of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, who saw our relationship to the world as developing along different ‘stages’ — from sensory-motor intelligence through formal operational intelligence.
