From the ossuary: animation and the danse macabre

The skeleton has been a key figure throughout the evolution of the animated image. Thisessay investigates how the danse macabre lies at the roots of animation, and has hence kepton reappearing as a motif throughout the evolution of the genre. The theoretical frameworkcombines film history with media-archeology and iconology. Ever since Athanasius Kircher’sfamous description of a magic lantern in the second edition of his publication Ars Magna luciset umbrae (1671), the image of a skeleton or the grim reaper has appeared time and again asthe key signifier in the process of animating (i.e., moving, resurrecting) still images. ChristiaanHuygens was, however, the first person to describe the projection of moving lantern images. Inhis notes of 1659 he included drawings, based on Holbein’s Dance of Death, of a skeleton toyingwith its own skull. As these optical instruments were also called ‘philosophical toys’, then theskeleton is the most appropriate motif, a memento mori in motion. Over the years the skeletonhas played a central role in phantasmagoric shows (an expanded media show orchestratedaround a hidden magic lantern), in the demonstration of the choreutoscope (an invention byL.S. Beale in 1866, and the first application of the Maltese cross for transporting film), and inmany early animation films such as fantasmagorie (Cohl) and skeleton dance (Disney). Fromits inception, animation has thus been used to illustrate acts of reanimation, bringing deadmatter back to life

Spaces of wonder: animation and museology

When animation leaves behind the limited confines of the cinema screen to surface in the white cube, artists and musea no longer simply offer the viewer something to look at, but place him or her inside a space that incites exploration. More than purely a filmic practice, animation needs to be understood as the staging of an agency: the manipulation of intervals, not only between film frames, but also between images and objects in space. As optical toys already demonstrated, the animated image can only occur thanks to physical action and physiological response, always mediated by the observer. The history of animation should therefore not be dissociated from larger developments within twentieth century avant-garde art, just as the genealogy of the museum, the parallel evolution of both architectural and technological strategies of visualization and presentation is also part of the history of animation. The question then imposes itself to what extent the practice of animation brings in it’s own set of ‘problems’ or paradigms, and whether these are really new paradigms, or rather rooted in the past

Lightning sketches

Graphology considers the range of graphic devices, used by artists working across the disciplines of film, photography, cinema and sculpture, to mediate direct experience. The scope of the exhibition reaches back to the beginning of the 20th century and includes artists who translate human agency into different forms of systematised representation, between the trace and the sign, between writing and drawing, between automatism and automation. Both exhibition and book renew questions about medium-specificity through the combination of works from very different eras and created by a various technologies. The featured artworks and essays investigate the human hand as a living seismograph of inner life, yet concurrently address the ‘mechanical unconscious of the machine’ which imposes itself on the human eye

Those who desire without end: animation as 'batchelor machine'

For the Quay Brothers, the migration of their animations into the realm of the exhibition space may be understood as a logical consequence of their aesthetic ambitions. Since the beginning of their career, they have been collaging together their personal art history from often wildly varying sources. They reanimate forgotten figures and anecdotes, taking their cue from minor footnotes and obscure references. Every film seems to operate like a private museum, or rather obeys the idiosyncratic logic of a household altar: an inscrutable assemblage of relics and memorabilia

Preface

edition: 1status: publishe