[-empyre-] Animation - posted by Paul Ward
Paul Ward
pward at aucb.ac.uk
Tue Feb 9 22:56:51 EST 2010
Hello everyone
Apologies for my tardiness in making an initial post. I am delighted to
be taking part in this web-forum - a chance to discuss some important
matters in relation to Animation and the scholarly activity that moves
around and within it. I am also pleased to be 'tag teamed' with Suzanne,
as we have worked together for a number of years (on, amongst other
things, the Sage-published 'animation: an interdisciplinary journal' and
2006's anthology 'Animated "Worlds"') and we have some areas where we
are in strong agreement . . . but some others where we part company!
This is great for a forum such as this. As Suzanne posted before me,
I'll pitch in with what I was going to say as an initial 'position
statement', but some of it will now be framed as a response to points
that Suzanne has flagged up. And I am sure there are going to be many
more things we will discuss and dispute as people join in!
First and foremost, I have always seen Animation as a field of activity
- and Animation Studies as the forum in which it is taken apart, kicked
around and put back together again - that is, to echo Suzanne,
'pervasive'. Or interdisciplinary. Of course, Animation and Animation
Studies are strongly (inextricably?) bound up with the categories of
which they are supposedly a sub-category - 'Film' and 'Film Studies'.
Much (though by no means all) Animation scholarship is concerned with
'mainstream' or studio work - predominantly from the USA. But there has
always been a tradition of people talking about 'non-mainstream' work;
or how the 'mainstream' and the 'non-mainstream' interact and are in a
dialectical relationship. And how Animation is part of or informed by
discourses from Graphics, Fine Art, Computer Science, Philosophy and a
multitude of other disciplines.
This is something that has interested me in my research into Animation
as an interdisciplinary field (see "Animation Studies, disciplinarity
and discursivity", Reconstruction, vol. 3, no. 2, Spring 2003.
http://reconstruction.eserver.org/032/TOC.htm) or Animation Studies as
the apparently paradoxical 'multi-sited site' where different
'communities of practice' intersect, overlap, collaborate and do battle
(see "Some thoughts on theory-practice relations in Animation Studies",
animation: an interdisciplinary journal, vol. 1, no. 2, Nov 2006, pp.
229-245). One of the explicit points in the latter essay was the
fluidity of what we are talking about here - Animation is and always has
pervaded.
I am certainly in agreement that a more nuanced and detailed focus on
the 'profilmic' elements of Animation - whether they be cels,
sketchbooks, storyboards, puppets - is going to strengthen our
understanding of the productions themselves and the people who made
them. But, despite Suzanne's reference to 'tired canons', I would say
that there is still much work of this sort to be done in mainstream
studio (and TV) Animation - we need to continue with work that attends
to the popular. Not at the expense of examining experimental or
independent work, but in recognition that they are part of the same set
of questions (the 'high/low' debate is often framed as an either/or,
when it is another dialectic, a conjoined twin).
The context in which I teach at the Arts University College at
Bournemouth (AUCB) is practice - though I am not a practitioner, the
students I teach are making animated films and the majority of them, no
doubt, want to go on and become 'Animators' in a professional capacity.
What is important is that the skills - practical and intellectual - that
they learn at AUCB are understood as transferable and applicable to a
wide range of contexts. In this sense, someone who has studied
'Animation' and made an 'animated film' as part of their studies is
fully equipped to go on and work in a variety of other contexts.
Implicit in my last comment is a question I'd like to raise: what is the
role and function of the education we are working within and towards?
What is the place of Animation as a *practice*? (And, how is *theory*
applicable to practice?) There is a grand tradition of apprenticeships
in Arts, Design and other crafts and the position of 'vocational'
training and education has to be seen as a continuation of this - albeit
one that is not fully continuous with (or even fully sympathetic
towards) the tradition that preceded it. I am certainly not arguing for
an instrumentalist view of (animation) education - there's an industry,
they need people-who-can, let's 'train' these students to *be* those
people - but the realities of 21st century capitalism mean that we have
to debate these matters as well as the points already raised. And a
fuller understanding of the political economy of all animation
production would be part of this.
Best wishes
Paul
-----Original Message-----
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
[mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Renate Ferro
Sent: 08 February 2010 19:09
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: [-empyre-] posted for Suzanne Buchan
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/37995738001/24
922396001&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/37995738001/24
922396001&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.
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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
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre
Art Editor, diacritics
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