[-empyre-] Animation and desire

[Richard Wright]

After many years, last week it so happened that I had my first ever  
opportunity to produce a walk cycle. It was quite a magical moment,  
to make this little apeman shuffle across the screen as though I was  
teaching him how to take his first steps. It reminded me just how  
powerful the practice of animation is for the animator, how it can  
feel less like "being creative" and more like an actual act of  
creation. Despite the fact that we are very much aware of the  
technical way in which animation is produced, we know the rules and  
the skills involved, its conditions of production are often no more  
open to question than the image of the heroic, lone artist animator  
invoking an illusion of life like the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  
Paradoxical that such a potentially open and materialistic practice  
could generate (through a displaced sense of wonderment?) such  
romantic "modes of subjectivity". I am reminded of an interview with  
Bruno Latour for the current Animism show in Antwerp where he reacted  
to an interviewers question with "Animation isn't magic. It's  
science. You cannot do magic!" But then he does have a very  
particular view of science...

For one way to resolve this once and for all, please see the  
following: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jpoLkKYsUDE

Richard

On 2 Mar 2010, at 13:17, Thomas LaMarre, Prof. wrote:

>
> There have been so many interesting threads to which I have wanted  
> to contribute over the past couple weeks, but unfortunately (even  
> as we were discussing temporality) time seemed in short supply  
> (especially since I went away on holiday).  So I hope it doesn’t  
> seem too awkward to make some comments now, as a sort of general  
> response to prior threads.
>
> I have really enjoyed the discussions of animation techniques and  
> instruction, the stream of references to so many talented  
> animators, and the overall sensitivity to the diversity of  
> animation production, distribution, and reception.  These threads  
> have made me think of animation or animations in a very different  
> way.  And I found myself thinking about some very old questions  
> about the relation between techno-aesthetic forms and socio- 
> economic forms.
>
> It’s clear that for a lot of us the techniques and aesthetics of  
> animation are a powerful draw, and even through this month on this  
> list we’re creating a sense of a deeper appreciation of making,  
> watching, and thinking about animation.   Because we like animation  
> techniques so much, and because we’re forming a sort of public  
> around this, this gives us a sense of being able to see the process  
> of production in the moving images called animations.  Particularly  
> with respect to more experimental fare or smaller scale production,  
> we tend to focus on the effects of production techniques. Or at  
> least I find myself moving in that direction, probably because I  
> get very geeky about animation.
>
> So this made me wonder about the extent to which it is possible to  
> read images in terms of intentionally deployed techniques, and to  
> read techniques in terms of social form or production dynamics.  I  
> think it was Richard who issued a challenge by underscoring that  
> the techno-aesthetic is not in the software but in how the  
> implications of the software are worked out.
>
> It was a truism of kind of analysis inherited loosely from Marxist  
> analysis and ideology critique that works of art to some extent  
> ‘negate’ their conditions of production. Not negate in the sense of  
> erasing, but in the sensing of masking or distorting or  
> transforming them. For one kind of ideology critique the goal of  
> analytics was to read the contradictions within the work of art  
> back to the conditions of production, as a sort of ideological  
> distortion. In any case, it wasn’t enough to call on the intentions  
> of the artist or author as a final explanation. There were broader  
> ideological issues.
>
> Psychoanalytic criticism gradually transformed this understanding,  
> by shifting our reading of difficulties of the image toward the  
> unconscious rather than material conditions of production.  So  
> there was something deeper than the wills of creators, or  
> historical material conditions (but related to them) — something  
> like a subject formation or a configuration of desire.
>
> In other words, in animation studies, there are still these very  
> large almost unmanageable questions about how the sites of  
> indeterminacy in material technics (say, software) are worked out —  
> and questions about the levels at which are we addressing this — at  
> the level of the artist, of the school, of studios, of movements,  
> of fans or publics, material conditions, or desire?  Obviously,  
> things get sorted out in all these registers, but to make that a  
> conclusion seems to me to neutralize any sense of there being  
> something at stake in thinking through animation specifically, and  
> asking what animation today makes us confront that we wouldn’t  
> otherwise encounter.
>
> These sorts of questions came to mind because it seems to me that  
> in the 1990s, as animation became pervasive or ubiquitous,  
> discussions took a riff on the older Marxist notion of revolution  
> in the context of media.  Which is to say, in many variations on  
> ideology critique, the truth about material conditions is thought  
> to emerge at moments of radical transformation, usually revolution  
> (but then other thinkers added festivals and shocks of  
> enlightenment).  And it seems to me that from the 1990s when we  
> talked about everything becoming animation with the emergence of  
> the digital, it was as if media transformations were a sort of  
> revolution that promised to let us see through moving images to  
> their materials conditions – at the moment of their transformation.
>
> This has become an almost default point of departure, and is useful  
> in many ways.  But it seems to me that there is a risk in us  
> getting carried away in two directions.  First, we can get carried  
> away with a sense that we can read animated images transparently.  
> Second, we can get carried away with an attention to each and every  
> small technical transformation as a guarantee of transparency,  
> which is an overdetermined tendency under conditions of permanent  
> and pervasive media transformation.
>
> Not sure what the answer is, but it seems to me that questions  
> about desire once again become crucial.  I very much doubt that  
> animation studies will adopt the psychoanalytic paradigms of film  
> studies.  The most prevalent psychoanalytic inflected paradigm in  
> animation studies is the uncanny (unheimlich).  This seems to me  
> interesting, but oddly the uncanny in animation studies seems to  
> have been disconnected from questions of desire and from the socio- 
> economic formation of ‘home’ or the Heimlich, making for an  
> generalized unheimlich.  The other popular paradigm is that of  
> illusion or the illusion of life, which as I explained previously  
> is not entirely persuasive, for it has tended to reinscribe a  
> simplistic divide between reality and fantasy at the outset, making  
> fantasy (and thus desire) somehow not real.
>
> I wonder if the re-emergence of non-Freudian psychologies and  
> therapeutic analytics (old and new) in recent years is not of  
> interest to us in animation studies: Peter Sloterdijk, William  
> James, Félix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers, among others, and even  
> the so-called panpsychism of Whitehead.
>
> In any event, given the interest in experimental animation, I  
> wanted to mention some Japanese animators worth a look (last name  
> first), some of whom have already been mentioned:
>
> Yokoo Tadanori
> Aquirax
> Kuri Yoji
> Yamamura Yoji
> Kawamoto Kihachiro
> Asano Tadanobu
> Katô Kunio
> Murata Tomoyasu
> Tamura Shigeru
>
> The ‘Ganime’ series has produced many art animations, and the  
> recent ‘Aoi bungaku’ does wonderful interpretations of classic  
> novels.  The ‘Fuyu no hi’ series uses an animation by Yuri  
> Norenstein as the point of departure for animated responses by a  
> series of Japanese and international artists in the manner of  
> Japanese linked verse.  There are also recent omnibus animations by  
> Studio 4C: Genuis Party and Genuis Party Beyond, as well as older  
> omnibus collections like Robot Carnival and Memories.
>
> Because of the strength of animation production in Japan, and its  
> decentralization, the line between the experimental and the  
> commercial is not strict, and many avant-garde artists make more  
> commercial video games and animations.  Also, Shinkai Makoto at age  
> 19 produced an animated film by himself on his laptop with as much  
> technical sophistication as Miyazaki Hayao: ‘Voices of a Distant  
> Star.’  It is brilliant. And the IG Pro director Kamiyama Kenji is  
> clearly the next great commercial director in TV animation.
>
> I am sure that I am forgetting lots of names. But I wanted to  
> mention at least a few.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Tom
>