Co-incidental animation: Framing chance occurrences of illusion of movement as animation events

This research originates from a practice-driven urge to achieve simultaneity and immediacy in the creation and experience of animation by aiming to bring together construction, production and presentation of illusion of movement in time and place. Focusing on illusion of movement as animation, this research borrowed from the perceptual elements already employed in animation practices. However, recording a sequence – as in filmmaking – leads to temporal and physical distance between the creation and presentation of an animated work. Accomplishing the aimed simultaneity and immediacy suggested looking for ways to achieve illusory movement without producing material artefacts to yield it. In order to realise this goal, this research turned to performance studies, where ephemerality and immediacy are theorised as inherent properties of performance practice. Those insights from performance theory were developed as possibilities for animation within the research practice. Performance theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte’s positioning of performance event as open-ended and artwork as fixed was taken as a starting point. On the basis of that theoretical grounding, a process to unite separate phases in animation creation is explored in tandem with incorporating event properties into animation. The research asks the question: How can animation be created and experienced simultaneously and immediately, as ephemeral as a performance event? In this practice-based research, the enquiries were carried out through practical experimentation while building a framework for reference and analysis based on performance theories. As suggested by Gray and Malins, this study devised its own methodology where collecting visual, auditory and written data, building physical and developing theoretical tools, as well as working with participants provided methods to inquire an animation practice of immediacy. The research begins in animation practice, negotiating possible ways to create the illusion of movement. In order to understand how this illusion occurs in animation, the research looked at perceptual and cognitive mechanisms. The preliminary investigation of optical toys and flipbooks, rather than films, was then extended to non-visual modes of illusory perception, and possibilities through aural and haptic illusions of movements were explored. The study then introduced the theoretical framework to explore the immediacy of ‘event-ness’. Based on Fischer-Lichte’s framing of the four characteristics of performance, the framework through which to shape and analyse the research practice emerged: mediality (bodily co-presence), materiality (transience), semioticity (emergence of new meaning) and aestheticity (the experience of performance as ‘event’). The considerations of liveness, co-creation, ephemerality, and fixity of the research practice thus found structure for evaluation through Fischer-Lichte’s perspective. Finally, as contribution to expanding animation practice, it is proposed to approach animation as an event where illusory movement is observed through instructional scores. By calibrating and analysing possibilities of animation through the framework provided by Fischer-Lichte’s work, it becomes possible to amalgamate the three separate processes of animation – construction, production and presentation – into a single process, the animation event. In this event, the creation and experience of animation are simultaneous and concurrent; thus, providing an answer to the research question

Playin’ the city : artistic and scientific approaches to playful urban arts

An Theorien und Diskussionen über die Stadt mangelt es nicht, denn Städte dienen uns u.a. als Projektionsfläche zur Auseinandersetzung mit unserer Vergangenheit, der Gegenwart und unserer Zukunft. Diese Ausgabe 1 (2016) der Navigationen untersucht spielerische Formen dieser Auseinandersetzung in und mit der Stadt durch die sogenannten playful urban arts.The city has been discussed and theorized widely, and it continues to serve as a space in which our sense of the present, past, and future is constantly negotiated. This issue 1 (2016) of Navigationen examines new ways of engaging with cities through what are called the playful urban arts. Playful engagements with the urban environment frequently strive to create new ways of imagining and experiencing the city. In and through play, city spaces can become playgrounds that have the potential to transform people’s sense of themselves as human actors in an urban network of spatially bound and socio-economically grounded actions. Emerging from the playin’siegen urban games festival 2015, the essays and panel discussions assembled in this issue provide an interdisciplinary account of the contemporary playful urban arts. Wiht contributions by Miguel Sicart, Andreas Rauscher, Daniel Stein, Judith Ackermann and Martin Reiche, Michael Straeubig and Sebastian Quack, Marianne Halblaub Miranda and Martin Knöll, and Anne Lena Hartman

Between Stillness and Motion

New technological media such as film, photography and computers have altered the way we perceive possible relations between stillness and motion in the visual arts. Traditionally, cinema theory saw cinema and especially the 'illusion of motion' as part of the ideological swindle of the basic cinematic apparatus. This collection of essays by acclaimed international scholars including Tom Gunning, Thomas Elsaesser, Mark B.N. Hansen, George Baker, Ina Blom and Christa Blümlinger, starts out from a different premise to analyse stillness and motion as part of a larger ecology of images and media. They argue that the strategic uses of stillness and motion in art and entertainment since the 1850s illuminate and renegotiate urgent issues within both aesthetics, film, art and media history on the one hand, and, on the other, new perspectives on affects, memories and the contemporary patterns of communication and image circulation

The e-Volving Picturebook: Examining the Impact of New e-Media/Technologies On Its Form, Content and Function (And on the Child Reader)

The technology of the codex book and the habit of reading appear to be under attack currently for a variety of reasons explored in the Introduction of this Dissertation. One natural response to attack is a resulting effort to adapt in a bid to survive. Noël Carroll, leading American philosopher in the contemporary philosophy of art, touches on this concept in his discussion of the evolution of a new medium in his article, “Medium Specificity Arguments and Self-Consciously Invented Arts: Film, Video, and Photography,” from his Cambridge University Press 1996 text, Theorizing the Moving Image. Carroll proposes that any new medium undergoes phases of development (and I include new technology under that umbrella)). After examining Carroll’s theory this Dissertation attempts to apply it to the Children’s Picturebook Field, exploring the hypothesis that the published children’s narrative does evolve, has already evolved historically in response to other mediums/technologies, and is currently “e-volving” in response to emerging “e-media.” This discussion examines ways new media (particularly emerging e-media) affect the published children’s narrative form, content, and function (with primary focus on the picturebook form), and includes some examination of the response of the child reader to those changes. Chapter One explores the formation of the question, its value, and reviews available literature. Chapter Two compares the effects of an older sub-genre, the paper-engineered picturebook, with those of emerging e-picturebooks. Chapter Three compares the Twentieth Century Artist’s Book to picturebooks created by select past and current picturebook creators. Chapter Four first considers the shifting cultural mindset of Western Culture from a linear, word-based outlook to the non-linear, more visual approach fostered by the World Wide Web and supporting “screen” technologies; then identifies and examines current changes in form, content and function of the designed picturebooks that are developing “on the page” within the constraints of the codex book format. The Dissertation concludes with a review of Leonard Shlain’s 1998 text, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, using it as a departure point for final observations regarding unique strengths of the children’s picturebook as a learning tool for young children

Bildmedien

This volume brings together a selection of contributions on the forms and functions of both contemporary and historical visual media. It aims to bring a range of perspectives from philosophical, cultural studies, and media studies on the materiality, semiotics, and aesthetics of images and other visual media forms into productive dialogue with each other

Autostereoskopische Wiedergabesysteme

Wir leben in einer Zeit rasanter Veränderungen in der Medienwelt. Die Fortentwicklung der Informationstechnologie, die Vernetzung durch das Internet und der Wandel von analogen zu digitalen Arbeitsweisen bilden die Basis für weitere Neuerungen in diesem Bereich. Eine dieser neuen Technologien, die meiner Meinung nach das Potential in sich trägt neue Standards für die Darstellung und Wahrnehmung von Bildern zu setzen, möchte ich in dieser Arbeit vorstellen: Autostereoskopische Wiedergabesysteme. Verfahren, die eine dreidimensionale Darstellung und das Betrachten dieser ohne Hilfsmittel wie Polarisations- oder Shutterbrille ermöglichen. Mein Ziel ist es mit dieser Arbeit einen aktuellen Überblick über dieses sich rasch entwickelnde und bislang noch unübersichtliche Themengebiet herauszuarbeiten. Einleitend werden in Kapitel 1 die wesentlichen historischen Entwicklungsschritte geschildert. Das 2. Kapitel erläutert die Voraussetzungen für dreidimensionales Sehen, das 3. Kapitel autostereoskopische Lösungsansätze unterschiedlicher Hersteller und Projektgruppen. In Kapitel 4 wird beispielhaft das weite Spektrum von Einsatzmöglichkeiten autostereoskopischer Systeme in den Bereichen Unterhaltung, Industrie und Medizin aufgezeigt. Das letzte Kapitel behandelt Fragen zur Produktion von 3D Content und der Konvertierung von 2D zu 3D. Um zusätzlich neben der theoretischen Betrachtung auch praktische Erfahrungswerte mit einfließen zu lassen, war es mir wichtig neben der Quellenrecherche Meinungen und Standpunkte von Personen einzuholen, die bereits in ihrer beruflichen Praxis mit diesem Themengebiet in Berührung gekommen sind

Media-specific metareference in film

Im Fokus dieser Arbeit stehen Vielfalt und Kreativität metareferentieller Praktiken, die in den Filmen Woody Allens zu finden sind. Dabei wird der Begriff der Metareferenz, der ursprünglich aus dem Bereich der Literatur kommt, auf das Medium Film ausgeweitet.This thesis focuses on the diversity and creativity of metareferential devices, which are to be found in the films by Woody Allen. Thereby, the term “metareference”, which originally derives from the field of literature, is expanded on the medium film

Animation & Cartoons

An animated cartoon is a short, hand-drawn (or made with computers to look similar to something hand-drawn) moving picture for the cinema, TV or computer screen, featuring some kind of story or plot. Animation is the optical illusion of motion created by the consecutive display of images of static elements. In film and video production, this refers to techniques by which each frame of a film or movie is produced individually. Computer animation is the art of creating moving images via the use of computers. It is a subfield of computer graphics and animation. Anime is a medium of animation originating in Japan, with distinctive character and background aesthetics that visually set it apart from other forms of animation. An animated cartoon is a short, hand-drawn (or made with computers to look similar to something hand-drawn) moving picture for the cinema, TV or computer screen, featuring some kind of story or plot (even if it is a very short one). Manga is the Japanese word for comics and print cartoons. Outside of Japan, it usually refers specifically to Japanese comics. Special effects (abbreviated SPFX or SFX) are used in the film, television, and entertainment industry to visualize scenes that cannot be achieved by normal means, such as space travel. Stop motion is a generic gereral term for an animation technique which makes static objects appear to move

The Art of Movies

Movie is considered to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten and inspire audiences. Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as — in metonymy — the field in general. The origin of the name comes from the fact that photographic film (also called filmstock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist — motion pictures (or just pictures or “picture”), the silver screen, photoplays, the cinema, picture shows, flicks — and commonly movies