TV 2.0: animation readership / authorship on the internet

Traditional platforms for animation, such as broadcast television or cinema, are rapidly becoming obsolete as a new type of spectator demands more choice, the ability to interact with animated content and access to global distribution for their own user-generated work. Audiences are no longer satisfied with receiving a top down distribution of content from traditional cinema or broadcasters. Internet technologies are emerging to address this demand for active spectatorship and enable communities of interest to evolve their own alternative distribution methods. Viewing animation online has become increasingly accessible with the mass adoption of broadband and the emergence of new file formats. TV 2.0 is an amalgamation of Internet technologies that combine video on demand with the social networking capabilities of Web 2.0. In the age of TV 2.0, the role of the viewer has increased in complexity with new possibilities for active interaction and intervention with the content displayed. This new audience seeks a form of spectatorship that can extend beyond the passive recipience of programming distributed by elite broadcasters. TV 2.0 on the Internet has changed both methods of distribution and traditional patterns for the viewing of animation. However, any potential for democratic participation in the visual culture of moving images that this could entail may be a brief historic moment before the assimilation and control of active readership by mainstream corporate culture

Animation Installation: the Affect of Place

Goosebumps, hairs stand on end, a knot in the stomach, an inexplicable feeling of chill or even panic...walking through an unfamiliar place can have a visceral impact on the human subject. This artist’s presentation will consider the experience of viewing animation within the context of a site-specific installation and, through reference to examples of exhibitions by Birgitta Hosea in which contemporary animations are displayed as an intervention in historic spaces, will investigate the affect of site and the impact of the viewing context on the embodied perception of an animation

Beyond a digital écriture féminine: cyberfeminism and experimental computer animation

In the 1990s, Sadie Plant declared in Zeros and Ones (1998) that the future would be female since women were ideally suited to working with information technology. However, the numbers of women working in digital technology today remain disproportionately low compared to the population overall. Whatever happened to cyberfeminism? From the pioneers of the 1970s, the cyberfeminists of the 1990s and today’s intersectional post-cyberfeminists, radical artists have argued for the use of digital technology to critique, subvert, innovate and deliver social change. This chapter aims to re-evaulate the experimental practice of cyberfeminist artists and its relevance for contemporary practitioners. What does it mean for women to experiment in computer animation? Can digital techniques be used as a new form of language to represent the voices of those who are not normally heard in the mainstream? The chapter draws upon first-hand interviews, archival and historical literature review. Lillian F. Schwartz, Rebecca Allen and Vibeke Sorenson are presented as artist pioneers of computer animation in the 1970s and 1980s who advanced feminist ideas in male-dominated environments. Cyberfeminist discourses of the 1990s from Sadie Plant, VNX Matrix, Linda Dement and others then blended radical, post-structuralist French feminism with utopian ideas about the revolutionary potential of ‘new media’ for the creation of new, virtual worlds and the transformation of gender relationships. These ideas were subsequently accused of techno-naivity, essentialism and exclusivity. In the 21st century, post-cyberfeminist discourses are now re-emerging through xenofeminism, Afrofuturism and glitch feminism. The chapter concludes that inequality can be seen as hard wired into the very code of the technologies we take for granted due to the language used and assumptions programmed into them by the people who created them, and therefore, it is vitally important to ensure that a diverse range of people are inspired to work with technology

Substitutive bodies and constructed actors: a practice-based investigation of animation as performance

The fundamental conceptualisation of what animation actually is has been changing in the face of material change to production and distribution methods since the introduction of digital technology. This re-conceptualisation has been contributed to by increasing artistic and academic interest in the field, such as the emergence of Animation Studies, a relatively new branch of academic enquiry that is establishing itself as a discipline. This research (documentation of live events and thesis) examines animation in the context of performance, rather than in terms of technology or material process. Its scope is neither to cover all possible types of animation nor to put forward a new ‘catch-all’ definition of animation, but rather to examine the site of performance in character animation and to propose animation as a form of performance. In elaborating this argument, each chapter is structured around the framing device of animation as a message that is encoded and produced, delivered and played back, then received and decoded. The PhD includes a portfolio of projects undertaken as part of the research process on which the text critically reflects. Due to their site-specific approach, these live events are documented through video and still images. The work represents an intertwining, interdisciplinary, post-animation praxis where theory and practice inform one another and test relationships between animation and performance to problematise a binary opposition between that which is live as opposed to that which is animated. It is contextualised by a review of historical practice and interviews with key contemporary practitioners whose work combines animation with an intermedial mixture of interaction design, fine art, dance and theatre

Drawn Together: Collaborative Performance

In the collaborative work of Drawn Together, a group formed by the artists Maryclare Foá, Jane Grisewood, Birgitta Hosea and Carali McCall, diverse practices are collectively materialised through performance drawing. Focusing on the notion of fragmentation has been instructive in identifying how the collaboration binds together a series of fragments and discontinuities that are enacted and reassembled in unpredictable and new ways

dotdot dash

dotdot dash was commissioned in 2018 to be experienced by walkers in a series of site-specific artworks in Gravesend for the ACE-funded Night Walking North Kent festival by InspiralLondon, a collaborative artists’ project led by Charlie Fox of Counterproductions. InspiralLondon is based on a 300-mile walking trail around London in the shape of a spiral created by Charlie Fox and divided into 36 individual walks along which the group carry out regular walks and art works. Determining a route by chance through drawing a spiral across the city creates an unpredictable path through London that ends in Gravesend. dotdot dash investigates whether it is possible to make site-specific, live animation and how that could be carried out through participation. Furthermore, following discussions with the InspiralLondon group about privilege and who is able to walk around freely in the dark at night, dotdot dash is a collective action to reclaim the night through light and noise and, thus, combat the vulnerability that women, LGBT and other minority groups feel about walking in the city at night. During this live performance, each participant is given two laser pens and invited to follow Birgitta Hosea’s instructions as to what type of marks to make and colours to use. Conceived of as a concert of visual music, Hosea bases the orchestration upon a chance-based graphic score and encourages the audience to sing along. Although many other artists have used light painting as the basis for photography, such as PiKAPiKA and even Picasso (with Gjon Mili), this is not a set up for documentation, but about the embodied experience of taking an active role in the communal, creation of a live animation of lights with choral singing with results that resemble the scratched-on film, abstract animation of Len Lye

Creative Actuality: Modes of Animated Documentary

The use of animation to create documentary film raises epistemological issues about the status of non-photographic and non-indexical forms of moving image to represent ‘reality’. This paper examines Bill Nichol’s concept of ‘modes of documentary’ in conjunction with examples of non-fiction animated films drawn from the RCA archive that draw upon actuality and lived experience to form their subject matter in order to analyse a range of strategies for the construction of truth claims through animation. This presentation was given at Chengdu University as part of the first ever national Animation Studies conference in China and published in the conference proceedings. The author was subsequently awarded a visiting professorship by the University’s animation research unit – the Sichuan Province Animation and Comics Research Centre – in recognition of her contribution to Animation Studies

Erasure

Scouring, scrubbing, sweeping, bleaching, rinsing, brushing away – all of these words refer to different ways of removing dirty marks during the act of cleaning. All of these processes were also used to make the works in Erasure, a body of work brought together as a solo show at Hanmi Gallery, Seoul. The exhibits included a short film that the exhibition is named after, installations of animation projected over wall mounted objects, defaced books, photographic documentation and remnants from a performance that took place at the private view. The word ‘erasure’ has a number of possible interpretations that could refer to removing part of a drawing, cleaning away dirt, censorship or obliteration. Through animation, sequential works on paper and performance, processes of erasure are used to record the duration and actions of domestic labour. Inspired by Judith Butler’s notion of performativity, the works investigate how invisible labour can be made visible through a physical and material approach rooted in auto-ethnography. Based on the artist’s personal experience of working as a domestic cleaner and memories of her Grandmothers, these works use repetitive actions of scrubbing and scouring and the textures of ink, bleach and other cleaning products to reanimate household labour. Although other female artists have engaged with acts of cleaning that are performed and then documented – e.g. Sophie Calle (1981); Mierle Laderman Ukeles (1973) or the removal of surfaces – e.g. Naomi Uman (1999), Adrian Piper (2003) or an animated cleaning lady – Zilla Leutenegger (2010), this series of works employs the techniques, tools and materials of cleaning in order to directly. record domestic and manual labour. This is intended to give a voice to the experience of working-class women, whose perspective is erased from society in general and rarely shown in the gallery context

On paracinema and the dematerialisation of animation

Although the technologies used in contemporary expanded animation are digital, this kind of work builds upon expanded cinema’s legacy of avant-garde practice. This chapter draws upon one strand of expanded cinema - paracinema - as defined by film theorist Jonathan Walley, who uses the term in the sense of the dematerialization of film into idea. Based on archival research and unpublished materials by VALIE EXPORT and Anthony McCall, examples of their expanded practice in paracinema are presented where film becomes live event and, thus, questions the institution of cinema, its strategies of voyeurism and perception. Extending this idea and building upon animation theorist Alan Cholodenko's notion of animation as concept, the animated performance and installation work of contemporary artists Tingting Lu and Birgitta Hosea is proposed as a form of para-animation. Working at the interface of live experience and recorded media, these works dematerialize animation and investigate the inscription of movement over time as concept rather than purely technique