[-empyre-] posted for Suzanne Buchan

[Renate Ferro]

Dear empyre,

Last week's guests and participants developed a cohesive and impressive
set of
debates and discussions, along with a plethora of publications not normally
associated with 'Animation Studies.'

Renate invited me to participate this week with a focus on the Quay
Brothers works,
since their DORMITORIUM exhibition was recently on display at Cornell
(after being
in Rotterdam, Philadelphia, New York etc).  I'm happy to do this, as my
forthcoming
book The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom will be published
this fall by
University of Minnesota Press, but also because Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
(week 4) is
also intimately familiar with their works (I cite her Artforum piece that
is a rich
and articulate exploration of their works).

A way of forming a continuum with last week would be to explore what Tom
Lamarre
wrote Feb 4th: "In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari present a model for
thinking
about continuity and process by way of three syntheses - connective,
disjunctive,
and conjunctive" – I found a potential for understanding the Quays' works
via a
notion of 'disjunctive synthesis' (and it was Tom who generously spread
those pearls
in front of me) via notions of vitalism that are grounded in Schopenhauer,
Bergson
and Heinrich Von Kleist. Discussing their poetics could also be a start,
or if
participants want to pose questions we could go from there.

I do however have a few other themes I'd like to put on the virtual table.
Because
last week was centred on digital CGI image production, techno-aesthetics and
reception, I'd suggest a shift to the stuff, the material, the artefact
used to make
pre-digital, or 'pure' animation, be it 2D, painted, drawn, puppet or object
animation, particularly in independent work that operates outside the
tired canons
of animation scholarship.  Tom mentioned an archive with 100,000 hours of
anime; the
ARC archive has an estimated 2 million artefacts – production materials,
sketches,
drawings. etc. – the profilmic materials used to make animation before the
digital
shift. These artifacts are increasingly rare since digital production
began. Debates
around the 'high/low divide between animation and art in the 'art
economies' is part
of this, as are installations (I'm thinking in particular of Gregory
Barsamian's
machines
(http://www.gregorybarsamian.com), that I consider 'extracinematic animation.

Another theme is one last week also touched upon (Tom used the term
'ubiquitous'),
is a notion of 'pervasive animation' and its multiplatform manifestations.
The
current paradigm of animation studies resides in a hegemonic corpus of
narrative and
commercial cinema production. Last week's thread named a plethora of
platforms and
areas of visual culture production that are indicative of both a wide gap
between
production and consumption across platforms and its academic, critical
counterparts.

In terms of medium specificity, we could discuss the 'manipulated moving
image' (a
term I prefer to the rather 'fuzzy' and unsatisfying one of 'animation'), its
relation to experimental film. I'm also happy to discuss

A bit more information that might be helpful:

PhD in Film Studies from the University of Zurich and Guest Professor at
Stuttgart
University for Applied Sciences, University of British Columbia Film
Department and
most recently at 'Boundary Crossings' at Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Founding
member and Co-Director 1995-2003 of the Fantoche festival in Switzerland
(www.fantoche.ch), and active as a film, exhibition and conference curator
including
Pervasive Animation, Tate Modern 2007 (webarchive:
http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/37995738001#media:/media/37995738001/24922396001&context:/channel/most-popular).
A founding member of Cinema and Media Studies special interest group
Ex-FM, Buchan
has published on a range of topics, including spatial politics, animation
spectatorship, animation curatorship and James Joyce. Many of my ideas about
interdisciplinary animation studies are in Editorials for animation: an
interdisciplinary journal (accessible online)


Prof Dr Suzanne Buchan
Professor of Animation Aesthetics
Head of the Animation Research Centre
University for the Creative Arts, Farnham College
Falkner Road
Farnham, Surrey GU9 7DS, UK

Tel:+44 (0)1252 892 806
www.ucreative.ac.uk      :      www.ucreative.ac.uk/arc

P Help save paper - do you need to print this e-mail?

Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal
http://anm.sagepub.com

Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal is the first cohesive
international refereed
publishing platform for animation that unites contributions from a wide
range of
research agendas and creative practice.

>Now online:
The Pervasive Animation symposium, a collaboration between the Animation
Research
Centre and Tate Modern is now available online, featuring Norman Klein,
Michael
Snow, Vivian Sobchack, Tom Gunning, Anthony McCall, George Griffin,
Suzanne Buchan,
Beatriz Colomina, Edwin Carels, Siegfried Zielinski, Lisa Cartwright, Johnny
Hardstaff and Esther Leslie:

http://channel.tate.org.uk/media/37995738001#media:/media/37995738001/24922396001&context:/channel/most-popular

Now a University!

One of Europe’s leading arts and design institutions, the University for the
Creative Arts builds on a proud tradition of creative arts education
spanning 150
years. Our campuses at Canterbury, Epsom, Farnham, Maidstone and Rochester
are home
to more than 6,000 students from 76 countries studying on courses in fashion,
graphics, design, media, fine art and architecture.


The views expressed in this email are those of the author and not
necessarily those
of the University . This message may contain confidential information and
will be
protected by copyright. If you receive it in error please notify us,
delete it and
do not make use of it, or copy it. Any reply may be read by the recipient
to whom
you send it and others within the University. Although we aim to use
efficient virus
checking procedures, the University accepts no liability for viruses and
recipients
should use their own virus checking procedures.






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/