[-empyre-] design vs. animation

[Renate Ferro]

Dear empyre,

Our discussion this month is on animation and from my perspective
animation is a very broad and all encompassing medium and includes not
only high corporate production (disney, pixar) but also independent
artistic production.  That said what fascinates me is that there seem to
be two, maybe three trajectories of the discussion so far.  So I post this
question to all of you (I think this points to Tim's last post about film
theory) what's the advantage of theorizing about the moving animation as
opposed to the still frame?  What does it mean to take images that were
meant to be still, a painting for example, and activate the still image
via  data visualization?  What are the implications of studying the haptic
flow of the moving image and its affect?  Can we come up with some kind of
theoretical agreement about its effect on the maker, the theorist and the
viewer?

I think that the trend in Japan that Tom describes is one that warrants
some time to talk about.
snip........
> It is often said by scholars in Japan that character design has replaced
character animation; in fact, they say, there is so much emphasis on
design and typography that animation itself is vanishing.

It has been my observation that in watching most particularly art
students, their obsession with making obscures their understanding of what
is between and certainly of what is overall received by the viewer.  In
observing the computing students working on gaming, their obsession with
the programmatic aspects clouds their visions of the image and also the
moving images overall affect on the viewer. For this reason I see the
process of animation a multi-disciplinary venture.  Just look at the
credits of the movie Avatar and the orchestration of the cast of
thousands!


Thanks Tom for the link to toL's Tamala 2010...I'll share it with my
students tomorrow as well as  your glorious description of the theory of
culture and flow!

Best to all of you.
 Renate


Renate Ferro
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of Art
Cornell University, Tjaden Hall
Ithaca, NY  14853

Email:   <rtf9 at cornell.edu>
Website:  http://www.renateferro.net


Co-moderator of _empyre soft skinned space
http://www.subtle.net/empyre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre

Art Editor, diacritics
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/