[-empyre-] post

[T Goodeve]

Hello everyone:


I'm not sure I posted correctly. I sent this last night as a reply. Sorry if
I'm confusing anyone. Thyrza

Sorry I’ve been so lax as a discussant-generator but here I am with some
thoughts and reflections. If it’s okay just an aside first: off the top of
my fingertips—many of you make stuff you love and live for, also write about
with great passion, and the animated worldscape is still and ever will be
one of magic and wonder I hope (you have the romantic here), i.e., endless
visual and aural reimagings via its ability, or definition, whether anlogue
or digital, to do anything and everything within and beyond the spacetime
continuum. But sometimes I miss the basic humor, wonder, and sheer “wow” of
the simplicity of animation. I mentioned in a post. The blank page and the
dot. We lose track, myself included, analyzing the life out of things
sometimes and to do this with animation seems particularly perverse. I
realize I set myself up for a bit of ridicule here but alas, someone has to
speak up for the puppet doll in *Street of Crocodiles* who cradles the bare
light bulb baby in its arm and brings it back to life with light, or the
frayed and earnest bunny who does his best to keep up with the spinning
demented ping pong balls and a pair of disembodied knee socks and slippers
moving up and down on tip toes in the Quays “Are We Still Married” —up and
down, up and down. I think Christopher Sullivan was trying to get at this
but not everyone is out to do what he does nor interested in the way I am or
the Quays or for that matter, those who use it for visualization, but
depending on why you do what you do we are here to discuss the breakthrough
insights of theory and technology and animation, but it’s just sometimes
I’ve felt we’ve let the technology get away with doing too much of the
talking, not that it doesn’t have a lot to say.

But a more hardy, if overly general, topic is temporality and time, now-time
vs say the way cinema’s capturing, sculpting, control of time was such a
huge part of its magic. Siegfried Kracauer describe in an essay how powerful
just “having” the wind in the trees —a moment— captured on film is for him.
How different from one of my students when I showed some film, perhaps
Tarkovsky,” Why does he keep leaving the camera on the trees so long?”
Students of cinema are different. We know this: ADD and short digitized
attention spans. But how do you see this in your worlds of animation either
in terms of resistance or something emerging that is part of this. One thing
I thought was very relevant was the post of the shift tilt which is amazing
and disturbing in this respect. Lots to say about it: not only the time
lapse but the way the world is miniaturized. Here the real profilmic world
is literally made into an stop motion animated “cartoon”. One could talk
about the Quays work and time – both in terms of period and affect; rhythm
and texture of their worlds (*In Absentia*, the film they made with
Stockhausen, is in some ways about light/time, metaphorically written all at
once over and over (the character n the film) hence no time. Endless time.
Speed of light…  .) But I do not know what people have seen. I am more
interested in hearing you all discuss temporality and animation “today”—both
theoretically and examples. These discussions are so energetic. They amaze
me.

Thanks, Thyrza
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://mail.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/attachments/20100225/4128f8b5/attachment-0001.html