You're not hallucinating — you're just watching a film by this week's Exhibitionist in Residence

You could ask Gustavo Cerquera Benjumea what it's like to be an animator, or you could watch "11:59." It's one of the videos appearing on this week's episode of CBC Arts: Exhibitionists, a voyeuristic short that lets you spy on the possibly supernatural tenants of a computer-generated apartment block. As the camera peeps through window after window, you'll encounter ghosts glued to laptops, spinning hand-drawn heads, abstract shapes that pulse to an anxious clarinet score.

"It's about the weird, hectic, strange mental space you might get when you're working with animation," says Benjumea with a laugh, though all those weird and strange feelings have hardly turned him off if it. The 33-year-old even teaches animation, among other digital media arts, at OCAD U and Brock. And in his personal practice, he's increasingly creating video installations that project his original animated films over sculptures made of paper — a way of blurring the borders between the two forms.

I do like the idea of ghosts, or an apparition or a hallucination. It's kind of like making something visible that wasn't there before. In a way, animation works that way, too.- Gustavo Cerquera Benjumea

"I like that kind of hybridity of things, of not knowing exactly where one technique starts and another one begins," he says. In the case of "11:59," for example, there's a mix of 2D and 3D animation, but the short, which he produced as part of a 2016 residency at the Toronto Animated Image Society, is lighter and goofier than most of his work. Still, he explains that there's a common link connecting it to the other videos appearing on this week's show.

"I do like the idea of ghosts, or an apparition or a hallucination," he says. "It's kind of like making something visible that wasn't there before."

"In a way, animation works that way, too," he says.

"Making ghosts appear — there's a fascination there, and I think part of it has to do with being Colombian." Benjumea's from Bogata, though he's been living in Toronto almost 17 years. There are a few personal points of reference that inspire him to conjure hallucinations in his artwork, examples ranging from a religious upbringing (where things like possession and speaking in tongues aren't normal, per se, but hardly a stretch of faith) to his home country's wealth of psychedelic plants, and the Indigenous spiritual traditions connected to them.

"Visions from ghosts, visions from psychedelia — I think they can carry a lot of meaning," he says. So when you see something spooky pop up in one of his films, it might be a tool to communicate a bit of history or information maybe — or in the case of "11:59," something closer to a joke about how much time he spends staring at his computer.

Take a look at some of the work you'll find on the show.

Stream CBC Arts: Exhibitionists or catch it on CBC Television, Friday nights at 11:30 p.m. (midnight NT) and Sundays at 3:30 p.m. (4 NT).