Made by hand

Although the mainstream animation industry has adopted digital production methods, the attraction of laborious hand-made methods for making animation persists in the independent sector. The chapter considers how ‘craftivist’ opposition to mechanical, technological and digital techniques is validated in this community of practice through ideas that haptic knowledge by skilled physical labour and an exploration of materiality, autographic mark-making and imperfection (Wabi-sabi) are guarantors of authenticity and individuality that can only be carried out by hand. Why is this? What ideas and assumptions can be seen to underpin the notions of craft and crafting? Tracing connections between craft and activism since the Industrial Revolution, this chapter critically reflects on discourses of craft and the handmade through reference to Ruskin (1851), Morris (1892), Hobsbawm (2000), Thompson (1980), Benjamin (1935), Krauss (2000) and Takahashi (2005). Whereas the experimental animation community privileges analogue, handmade processes that appear to oppose and critique commercial animation production, building upon Warburton (2016) and Frayling (2017) it is argued here that this approach is underpinned by nostalgia and often faked. What looks like a hand-painted animation could actually be a simulation that was ‘painted’ in a software package: a pastiche of manual labour. Aesthetics alone do not guarantee that a work of art opposes the mainstream. Instead of recycling the past to create ‘artistic’ animation, it is argued in the conclusion that contemporary practitioners can equally investigate issues of labour and materiality through digital tools and virtual materials such as in the ‘ugly’ CGI animation of Nikita Daikur (2017)

Susan Schuppli : Phony

Published in conjunction with her multi-site public art project, Schuppli’s CD-ROM, “Phony,” is an interactive document that addresses the many dimensions of the telephone: its history, its representations in popular culture, and related theories. Includes an analysis of the telephone by Media theorist Takahashi

Other Places : Reflections on Media Arts in Canada

"Other Places: Reflections on Media Arts in Canada is a ground-breaking book that documents the historical and contemporary contributions that First Peoples, racialized, differently abled, and LGBTQ artists and administrators have made to the media arts in Canada. This collection of texts and artist portfolios is meant to serve as a foundational resource for artists, curators, and educators who are interested in parsing out the political concerns and thematic complexities that arise from/within moving image practices that incorporate a broad spectrum of intersectional identity-based issues. Instead of an anti-canonic text, this project maps an alternate set of discourses, practices and views across the field since the 1970s." -- p. [4] of cover

Craft as critique in experimental animation

As a moving image art form, experimental animation blurs the boundaries between art and craft, intangibility and materiality, conceptualism and sensuousness in wide-ranging and thought-provoking ways. This chapter considers experimental animation alongside the concerns of craft as a physical, artistic and critical practice. It focuses in particular on issues of (im)materiality, the act of making and the significance of skill—the last of these especially as it relates to what craft theorists call “sloppy craft” (Wilson 2015, xxiv), or the purposeful application of imperfect technique as a subversive practice and form of social critique. Drawing from art history and craft theory, the chapter reveals some of the complex ways that craft undergirds and shapes our understanding of experimental animation as an art form