Speculative animation: digital projections of urban past and future

This paper will explore the growing presence of digital animation within the work of contemporary visual artists, architects and designers concerned with urban geography. More precisely, it will examine how the use of digital animation has become a primary method for both envisioning alternative urban futures and reconstructing the traumatic past within socially and politically engaged work. In the context of urban speculation, digital animation has most often been used as a tool for visualizing large-scale, capital-intensive development plans. This is an animated future consisting of digital visualizations of high-end real-estate and populated by affluent, happy, racially homogeneous render ghosts. Alternatively, artists and designers have begun to employ similar software tools and digital animation techniques in order to re-potentialize the productive powers of the speculative. The paper will focus on four examples, two past and two future-oriented. The work of Eyal Weizman and the Forensic Architecture project has increasingly involved the use of digital animation techniques to both reconstruct and visualize key dates or events within moments of humanitarian crisis. In the Rafah: Black Friday case study, for example, digital animation and 3D modelling are used to reconstruct and present key events in a particularly intense four days of bombing during the 2014 Israeli military offensive in Gaza. The conceptual artist Stan Douglas has recently, and uncharacteristically, adopted digital animation and gaming technologies in his Circa 1948 collaboration with the NFB. The interactive app recreates a largely overlooked element of Vancouver’s past, the historical slum area of Hogan's Alley, notorious for its bootlegging, gambling and prostitution. The “speculative architect” Liam Young has been employing digital animation techniques to present urban scenarios that teeter between the utopian and dystopian. And finally, the artist Larissa Sansour merges live action and digital animation to visually depict bleak and disturbingly convincing Palestinian futures

Authentically Digital? Considering art knowledge in a technological age

This talk was provided upon invitation for Christie's Education Conference 2016: Creating Markets, Collecting Art London, 14 - 15 July 2016. Panel entitled: “Nothing like the real thing!” Connoisseurship; Dead or Alive in the Digital Age? organized by Elizabeth Herridg

Animating molecular life: an interview with Natasha Myers

In this interview, conducted by special issue co-editor Joel McKim, anthropologist Natasha Myers discusses her ethnographic exploration of how protein modellers attempt to render visible the nano-scale molecular structures that make up cellular life. Myers reflects on the ways these scientists make use of computer animation and other forms of embodied knowledge (including movement) as essential tools that allow them ‘to see beyond the limits of vision’. McKim and Myers discuss the tensions that arise when the goal of scientific accuracy meets the forms of aesthetics and style intrinsic to these activities of modelling. Myers identifies the ‘lively mechanism’ involved in the animated machines generated by the molecular scientists she observes

Stan Douglas and the animation of Vancouver's urban past

Stan Douglas is one of Canada’s most respected artists, best known for his highly conceptual work in cinema and photography. The themes, subjects, and locations he explores are often global in scope, and his challenging work is most often firmly situated in a gallery context. This chapter is an opportunity to explore Circa 1948 in greater depth in the context of Douglas’ larger body of work and as a significant example of animation and urban memory. While the work is clearly an unusual foray into animation and interactive technology for Douglas, it does intersect with his broader artistic interests in many compelling and sometimes unexpected ways. I ultimately argue that the digital renderings of Circa 1948 allow Douglas to re-animate Vancouver’s urban past, while simultaneously questioning the processes of development and economic change affecting the contemporary city, fueled in part by the growth of computer imaging and gaming industries themselves. The chapter begins with a brief description of the work itself before moving into a consideration of how it connects to some of Douglas’ recurring preoccupations, including his archival interest in the urban history of Vancouver, his examination of multiple and often conflicting experiences of modernity, particularly in relation to black identity, and his examination of the characteristics, affordances, and biases of the “apparatuses” of imaging technologies

The digital anachronisms of Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England

This essay considers the unusual blend of historicity and digitality present in Ben Wheatley’s Civil War period film, A Field in England. Focusing on the sometimes overlooked post-production techniques involved in the creative process (including colour-grading, sound design and editing), the essay argues that the film’s affective intensity is generated, at least in part, by the use of ‘digital anachronisms’ to disrupt the historical integrity of the narrative. By making a comparison to the politically motivated anachronisms of Peter Watkins’ historical films, the essay concludes by suggesting that a significant, but disturbing continuity may exist between A Field in England and Wheatley’s films situated in the present

Filling in the voids : Berlin's "Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe"

This thesis takes Peter Eisenman's soon to be built Holocaust memorial as a focal point for considerations of contemporary memory practices that test the limits of representation. It begins by situating the memorial within the spatial and discursive landscape of contemporary Berlin, one that is dominated by the mythology of former chancellor Helmut Kohl. The intended function of Eisenman's monument is then questioned through an examination of its relation to several central figures of deconstruction and trauma theory, such as the chora , the uncanny, and the witness. This thesis ultimately argues that the Eisenman memorial problematically presents the Holocaust as a sanctified event that is beyond even partial comprehension. By positioning the traumatic events of the past as impenetrable voids that lie beyond the limits of representation, the monument assumes the ethical burden of remembering, rather than dispersing this ethical call amongst its audience. The emerging aesthetic tradition of the counter-monument is looked to for examples of self-critical contemporary memorials that initiate an active process of remembering within specific communities

Animation without animators: from motion capture to MetaHumans

The digital humans are among us. In February of 2021, Epic Games, developers of the Unreal Engine, a leading video game software engine, announced the impending launch of its MetaHuman Creator application. “Creating truly convincing digital humans is hard,” acknowledged Epic’s press release (Unreal 2021), while claiming that the MetaHuman Creator could provide real-time generation of high-fidelity digital characters within minutes, drawing from an available library of pre-set faces, 30 available hairstyles, 18 body types, and with the ability to further custom sculpt the avatars. By April an early access version of the creator app was available and seemed to deliver on Epic’s early promises – near photo-realistic digital characters created with adjustable facial features, skin complexion, make-up, teeth, and hair (see Figure 1). A legion of MetaHumans ready to populate a developing Metaverse – free to travel across gaming environments, VR experiences, and animated films, but decisively tethered to the Unreal platform. Perhaps most significant in terms of their actual use, MetaHumans emerge fully “rigged” for animation (embedded with a series of manipulation control points) and available for live linking to a number of performance capture applications

Deep learning the city: the spatial imaginaries of AI

This chapter examines how deep learning neural networks and computer vision technologies are impacting the design, organization and occupation of cities. It begins by providing a brief history of the development of “deep learning” approaches to artificial intelligence. The chapter then focuses on the ways artists and designers have begun to engage with deep learning and computer vision in order to highlight critical questions, especially about the ethical issues surrounding the training datasets these systems depend on. The chapter discusses three art and design examples that shift focus specifically towards the city and spatial concerns, considering the ways these works explore machine learning (the opportunities it presents and the problems it raises) within a specifically architectural or urban context. Book synopsis: This book explores what’s happening to ways of seeing urban spaces in the contemporary moment, when so many of the technologies through which cities are visualised are digital. Cities have always been pictured, in many media and for many different purposes. This edited collection explores how that picturing is changing in an era of digital visual culture. Analogue visual technologies like film cameras were understood as creating some sort of a trace of the real city. Digital visual technologies, in contrast, harvest and process digital data to create images that are constantly refreshed, modified and circulated. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a different example of how this processual visuality is reconfiguring the spatial and temporal organisation of urban life

Open Cultural Data: Discussing Digitisation

This post was contributed by symposium organizers PhD candidate Hannah Barton, Dr Joel McKim and Professor Martin Eve. The Open Cultural Data Symposium took place at Birkbeck on the 25 November 2016 and was co-sponsored by the Vasari Research Centre for Art and Technology and the Birkbeck Centre for Technology and Publishing