Friday 2 March 2007, 18.00–20.00
Saturday 3 March 2007, 10.00–17.00
Sunday 4 March 2007, 11.00–17.15

Animation has an unlimited potential to visually represent events, scenarios and forms that have little or no relation to our experience of the 'real' world. Implemented in many ways, in many disciplines, it is increasingly influencing our perception and experience of the world we live in. This timely and groundbreaking international conference unites speakers from a wide range of research agendas and creative practices. It facilitates much-needed dialogue centred on the ubiquitous and interdisciplinary nature of animation, its potentially radical future development, and its ethical responsibilities for spatial politics in moving image culture.

The conference's contributors include Norman Klein, Michael Snow, Vivian Sobchack, Tom Gunning, Anthony McCall, George Griffin, Suzanne Buchan, Beatriz Colomina, Edwin Carels, Siegfried Zielinski, Lisa Cartwright, Johnny Hardstaff and Esther Leslie.

Especially since the digital shift, the uses of animation are no longer exclusive to cinema, and animation's origins in pre-cinematic optical experiments through avant-garde experimental film continue to evolve in fascinating ways. Artists increasingly incorporate animation in installations and exhibitions, architects use computer animation software to create narratives of space in time, and scientists use it to interpret abstract concepts for a breadth of industries ranging from biomedicine to nanoworlds. Pervasive Animation provides a dynamic international forum to explore animation's myriad forms and applications across a wide band of creative and professional practice.

The opening panel discussion on Friday 2 March is followed by a special presentation of Anthony McCall's celebrated 1973 'solid light' film event, Line Describing a Cone.

The symposium is supplemented by a short season of animated films in two sessions on Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 March 2006.

• Pervasive Animation: Programme One   Saturday 3 March 2007
• Pervasive Animation: Programme Two   Sunday 4 March 2007

Organised by Suzanne Buchan, Reader in Animation Studies and Director of the Animation Research Centre at the UniversityCollege for the Creative Arts, and Stuart Comer, Curator of Film at Tate. Project Administrator, Maxa Zoller.

A full conference schedule follows below.

Tate Modern  Starr Auditorium
£25 (£15 concessions), booking recommended

    

Programme

FRIDAY 2 MARCH

18:00-19:30
Welcome: Stuart Comer, Suzanne Buchan

Panel Discussion: Johnny Hardstaff, Norman Klein, Esther Leslie, Michael Snow, Vivian Sobchack
Moderators: Suzanne Buchan, Stuart Comer

19:30-20:45
presentation of Anthony McCall’s film event Line Describing a Cone (1973) and reception, hosted by Sage Journals

SATURDAY 3 MARCH  

10:00-11:15

Suzanne Buchan
‘Pervasive Animation, Ethics and Spatial Politics’

Especially since the digital shift, the manipulated moving image has been the focus of heated debates around representation, truth values and ethics. This talk considers the pervasiveness of animation across a wide band of platforms and explores how it can evoke empathy and emotion. Through a sample of Edouard Salier's, thought-provoking, bombastic Flesh (2005) it homes in on how these can contribute to engendering ethical awareness and ultimately responsibility in animation's makers, distributors and audiences.

Suzanne Buchan is Reader in Animation Studies and Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University College for the Creative Arts. A founding member and 1995-2003 Co-Director of the Fantoche Animation Festival in Switzerland, she has been described as a curator of, commentator on, and activist for imaginative animation internationally. Founding Editor of animation: an interdisciplinary journal, her publications and curatorships include Trickraum: Spacetricks that accompanied the eponymous exhibition at the Zurich Museum of Design currently on tour, and an edited anthology, Animated 'Worlds'. Forthcoming publications include a monograph on the Quay Brothers and an AFI Reader on Animation Studies.

Vivian Sobchack
‘The Line and the Ani-morph, or 'Travel is more than just A to B'’

One of the elements that separates live-action, photo-real cinema from animation is the line, a conceptual meta-object that has no existence other than as an idea or a graphic. There are no lines in photo-real cinema. Using five television advertisements for Hilton Hotels made by German animator Raimund Krumme, this presentation will address some of the paradoxes inherent in the single animated graphic line as both an abstract geometric construct and the eccentric visualisation of energy and entropy.

Vivian Sobchack is Professor in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media and former Associate Dean at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television. She was the first woman elected president of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and is on the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute.  She has published essays in many journals including Film Quarterly, Artforum International, and camera obscura, and her books include An Introduction to Film; The Address Of The Eye: A Phenomenology Of Film Experience; Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film; and, most recently, Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment And Moving Image Culture. She has also edited two anthologies: The Persistence Of History: Cinema, Television And The Modern Event and Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation And The Culture Of Quick Change.

Q&A

11:15-11:45
Tea and coffee

11:45-13:15
George Griffin
‘Concrete Animation’

A discussion of the perennial tendency to deconstruct the web of animated illusion by focusing on its constituent parts, processes, and materiality. From Émile Cohl and Winsor McCay to flipbook artist/wanderer Volker Gerling, whose work is ‘animated’ by the viewer, and Gregory Barsamian, whose phased kinetic sculptures are ‘animated’ by strobe light, we are entering a realm of devolution. Griffin will also discuss how his anti-cartoon works, Step Print and Block Print, fit within the continuum.

George Griffin grew up in Tennessee, served in the Army, and studied political science at Dartmouth, before arriving at New York City in 1967, where he apprenticed in commercial animation studios. Influenced by Robert Breer and Saul Steinberg, he has made over 20 films, from self-referential cartoons, abstract experiments with music, to gallery installations and flipbooks. Griffin has written essays and books on animation; served on international animation festival juries; received a Guggenheim Fellowship; and also taught at Harvard, Parsons, and Pratt. In 2006 he completed a 10 minute cartoon, It Pains Me to Say This and produced an animated documentary celebrating the centennial of the MacDowell Colony.

Anthony McCall
'Then and Now'

A discussion about what has changed in McCall’s own practice between the Seventies and the present. This will include reflections on traditional film animation and digital animation, on expanded cinema and art installation; and on differences between the early group of films and the most recent works.

Anthony McCall's films and installations from the 1970s, such as Line Describing a Cone,Long Film for Four Projectors, and Four Projected Movements, represent a corporeal and sensuous meditation on the medium of film and the politics of the audience’s physical and conceptual relationship to it. Using rudimentary animation techniques, these works take as their starting point a simple line drawing, the illusion of movement, and the irreducible, necessary conditions of cinema: projected light, and real, three-dimensional space. Beginning with Doubling Back in 2003, McCall returned to the solid light form. Since then, with works like Breath,Exchange, andBetween You and I, Then and Now, he has developed a group of important new installations which radically expand on the earlier series and continue to merge the field of the 'real' with the event of projection itself. McCall's work has been presented recently at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; IAC Institut d'Art Contemporain, Villeurbanne, France; Peer Gallery and the Round Chapel, London; Kunsthaus Zürich; and ZKM / Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe. His work is represented in collections internationally, including Tate, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Museu d’Art Contemporain de Barcelona; and Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt.

Q&A

13:15-14:15
Lunch

14:15-15:45
Tom Gunning
‘The Soul of Things: Animating the Inanimate in the Uncanny and Fantastic’

Cinema, Jean Epstein claimed, revealed the soul within the seemingly inanimate world. The uncanny—Freud and Jentsch claimed—had some relation to the way objects might seem to be alive. The traditions of object animation in film from early cinema to the avant-garde continues a tradition that stretches from the theurgy of antiquity to the modern dreams of artificial life. This talk will explore this theme and its implications.

Tom Gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of the Humanities at The University of Chicago in the Department of Art History and the Committee on Cinema and Media. He is author of two books, D. W. Griffith and the Origins of America Narrative Film (University of Illinois Press) and The Films of Fritz Lang; Allegories of Vision and Modernity (British Film Institute), as well as over a hundred articles on early cinema, the avant-garde, film genres, and issues in film theory and history. His publications have appeared in a dozen languages. He is currently writing on the theory and history of motion in cinema.

Siegfried Zielinski
‘Dead Bodies & Living Machines’

Animated film is historically a product of industrialisation. It was an unbloody alternative to traditional anatomy, taking bodies apart, putting them together again and making them move (in an illusionary manner, of course). Zielinski will discuss animation within the framework of a broader genealogy of machines of the living / living machines.

Siegfried Zielinski is Founding Director of the Academy of Arts & the Media Cologne and holds the chair for Theory – Archaeology & Variantology of Media at Berlin University of the Arts. At the European Graduate School Saas Fee he holds the Michel Foucault professorship. He has published numerous books and essays in many different languages, mainly with a focus on the archaeology/variantology of the media. His most recent books in English are: Deep Time of the Media (MIT Press 2006), which also has been published in Chinese, German and Portugese, and Variantology 2 (Koenig, 2006). Zielinski is member of the Academy of Arts Berlin, the European Film Academy and the Magic Lantern Society of Great Britain.

Q&A

15:45-16:15
Tea & coffee

16:15-17:45
Edwin Carels
‘Borderline Behaviour – Drawn towards Animation’

Ever since animation pioneer Émile Cohl made his debut, many artists have been hard to situate in the interval between live action and animation, between animation and the visual arts, between animation and graphic design. This talk presents some notes on an expanded notion of animation as a state of mind, a strategic approach to both technology and to the imaginary.

Edwin Carels (1964) is the head of the film and media department of the MuHKA (Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium). He is also the programmer of the Exploding Cinema section for the International Film Festival of Rotterdam, The Netherlands. As a curator and as a writer, he explores cinema, media archeology and contemporary art.

Johnny Hardstaff
‘The Impossibly Real: Green Belting the Imaginary’

Before we have explored what CGI technology can really do, it seems that CGI technology is exploring what we can do. Animation is being used within corporate advertising to render the visual obsolete as a medium for the conveyance of messages of emotional or intellectual value. Discuss.

Johnny Hardstaff is an unusual hybrid, working both as a designer and director, and as an animator and academic. Hardstaff works very much on the fringes of the creative industries, and increasingly beyond in the pursuit of radical and progressive non-commercial applications of design. Maverick and revisionist, Hardstaff, through his practice, research and development, writing and teaching, seeks to challenge accepted commercial design models and develop different opportunities for personal graphic expression. A graduate of St. Martins School of Art, Hardstaff has directed films for Radiohead, Orange, PlayStation and the BBC amongst others. His work has been screened and exhibited at major London galleries and venues including Tate Modern, the ICA and the NFT, in venues across Eastern and Western Europe, and as far afield as Hong Kong, Japan and Korea, where his first retrospective was recently held.

Q&A

19:00
Pervasive Animation Film Programme One

SUNDAY 4 MARCH

11.00-12:30:

Lisa Cartwright
‘Tourettic Animation: Disordering Movement’

Taking at its word the definition of animation as liveliness in the way somebody speaks or behaves, Cartwright will look at films by and about people with neurologic differences, Tourette syndrome and Autism to suggest new ways of thinking about bringing the imagination to life and expanding ideas about ordering movement and rhythm beyond the neurotypical. Clips of works by and about youth with Tourette and Autism will be screened and discussed.

Lisa Cartwright is Professor of Communication at the University of California at San Diego, where she teaches in Science Studies and Critical Gender Studies. Her books include Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (Minnesota 1995), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford 2002) and Moral Spectatorship: On Technologies of Child Voice, Agency and Affect (in press with Duke). She is currently a visiting professor of art, architecture and design at Kingston.

Beatriz Colomina

Title TBA

Beatriz Colomina is Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. She is the author of Domesticity at War (ACTAR and MIT Press, 2006), Doble exposición: Arquitectura a través del arte (Akal, 2006) and Privacyand Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT Press, 1994) and theeditor of Architectureproduction (Princeton Architectural Press, 1988), Sexuality and Space (PAP, 1992), and Cold War Hot Houses: Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy (PAP, 2004).  She is the organiser of the exhibition ‘Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X’ at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the CCA in Montreal. The show will travel to several cities in Europe and Asia starting with Documenta 12 and the Architectural Association in London.  Recently she received a Graham Foundation grant for her next research project ‘X-Ray Architecture: Illness as Metaphor.’

Q&A

12:30-13:30
Lunch

13:30-14:30
Michael Snow
'Frame by Frame'

Snow’s talk will address how he was introduced to animation (in 1956), his first and then his most recent uses of animation. He will also discuss the incredible range of current animation, its unprecedented availability and possible futures.

The Canadian artist Michael Snow works in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, video, film, photography, holography, books and music. In the 1960s and 1970s Snow produced a number of significant films, such as his seminal Wavelength (1967) and La Région Centrale (1971). Recently he has been using special effects and animation in his filmic work, for example Corpus Callosum (2002). Snow’s work is represented in private and public collections world-wide, including the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa), the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Museum Ludwig (Cologne and Vienna), Centre Georges-Pompidou (Paris), and both the Musée des Beaux-Arts and Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal.

Q&A

14:30-15:00
Tea and coffee

15:00-16:30
Esther Leslie
‘Liquid Animation and the Freezing of Reflection’

Animation has a new visibility, hitched to the buyable worlds of seeing in LCD and Plasma. Animation is everywhere, introduced even into the still photograph of the archive in the Ken Burns Effect. But its opposite is increasingly prevalent: de-animation – the stilling of the moving image through image effects, such as bullet time and timeslice. Control over the visual field in these examples compromises Walter Benjamin’s ‘optical unconscious’ and challenges his utopian pulverising of space and time, as well as Eisenstein’s analytical space-time shifts.  This contribution probes animation’s old and new complexes of stillness and movement, time and technology and fluidity and matter.

Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London.  She is the author of Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde (Verso, 2002) and Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto, 2000). She is on the editorial boards of the journals Historical Materialism, Radical Philosophy and Revolutionary History. Together with Ben Watson, she runs a website of polemics, rants and pictures called Militant Esthetix: www.militantesthetix.co.uk.

Norman Klein
‘Expanded Animation: Five Hundred Years of Stories and Environments’

Animation is much older than cinema, with roots deep in architecture, folklore, and theatre. These sources are proving deeply relevant today, now that expanded animation serves as the central paradigm for storytelling and navigation in our globalised, digitized civilization.

Norman Klein is a cultural critic, media historian and novelist. He uses animation in a wide range of books, including Seven Minutes: the Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; and The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects. His award-winning database novel, Bleeding Through (2002) has appeared in over forty venues. Next, he is completing a science-fiction database novel: ‘The Imaginary Twentieth Century’ (Oct., 2007).

Q&A

16:30-17:00
Goodbye, wrap-up

18.00
Pervasive Animation Film Programme Two