Report about the 12th Society of Animation Studies Conference
‘Digital Challenges-Expanded Boundaries’
Norway, Trondheim, 5 – 9 August 2000
“Talking Like Dinosaurs: Dispatches from the SAS”
As historians and scholars of the media generally use the term, ‘animation’ signifies an area of filmic operation that has been exploited by advertisers and global television channels. This description not only limits the intellectual study of the complexities of animation and its largely unexplored history, but also denies the study of the processes by which animation has entered the whole media spectrum. In particular, it insulates teachers of media studies at all levels of the educational system from the necessity of including animation studies in their curriculum and discourse. In our daily lives we cannot escape animated forms, because they have become firmly fixed in our own media culture.
This situation is further complicated by other animated occurrences such as LCD display screens. These manifestations occur with such increasing frequency that we fail to ‘know’ animation when we see it. The skill of post-production animators renders their art almost invisible, and while we still console ourselves that we can distinguish the cyber-actors from their biological counterparts, how do we begin to unravel the knot of motion-capture and animation in the TV series Starship Troopers? To add one final layer of complication to an already confused matter, we can no longer be secure in ‘knowing’ what kind of animation we are looking at when we do see it. Increasingly, traditional forms of animation are being either rendered through digital programmes or else being copied entirely in algorithmic code. In these ways then, South Park and Futurama are only the most culturally visible tip of an iceberg that might soon go all the way down.
All of this is really only to say that animation surrounds us, and with the centrality of computer networks to the workplace has become incorporated into our daily patterns of work and leisure. But it is one thing to say that we cannot escape animation and quite another to say that we cannot ignore it. For in any number of ways, at least in the educational context of media studies, we still do. Confronted with ‘the second media age’, as one writer describes it, cultural critics and journalists have clamoured to find new ways of describing our hyper-mediated world of information and visual overload. So quickly have we bought into the idea, or perhaps hope, of new media that it is now almost impossible to find an article or book about the media which doesn’t contain talk of cyber-this, virtual-that and digital-everything.
Quite ironically, however, animation, so central to ‘new media culture’, once again risks being exiled from it’s own empire, squeezed out of our critical vocabularies and thus out of existence, surviving at the margins of description, on the edge of extinction.
In August, the Society for Animation Studies’ 12th annual conference convened in Trondheim, Norway to discuss the current position of animation both culturally and in terms of scholarship and education. The theme – ‘Digital Challenges-Expanded Boundaries‘ – reflected the dual sense of uncertainty and promise that computer technologies afford the art and commerce of animation. Likewise, its intensions were both broad and refreshingly speculative, directed with equal verve towards redescription of the past in the cool light of the present, and towards possible but as yet unknown futures. Topics ranged from the scholastic question of (re)defining animation to accommodate new modes of, and spaces for animation; to David Williams‘ historical re-evaluation of stereoscopic techniques; to the practical questions of teaching animation in various educational and funding contexts. While on the one hand, the breadth of these concerns and the differing modes of presentation left one feeling as if sufficient attention hadn’t been paid to any of the areas, on the other hand, it was precisely this broad approach by both academics and animators that exposed the limits of our current understandings, and at the same time but began the process of redressing the shortage.
Bubbling just beneath the various surfaces of all of these concerns, however, was the question of the relationship of animation to the technologies that enable it, in particular electronic technology. But while delegates were united in the fact of technological revolution/ evolution, it was possible to discern that there were different attitudes towards it. Robin Allen‘s painstakingly researched and beautifully illustrated discussion of the multiple artistic sources which conspire in the aesthetic splendour or Fantasia couldn’t, in spite of itself, help but betray a sceptical assessment of the corporate and technological calculation of Fantasia 2000. This scepticism was perhaps best captured by a fellow delegate’s grimace, when on hearing my interest in the proliferation of animated forms on digital displays and information screens rejoined with ‘it isn’t real animation though, is it?’ Of course, that final ‘is it?’ was packed with anxiety: the anxiety that the art of animation will be, or maybe already has been swept away in the tidal wash of commerce. I have no way of answering his significant question, no way of judging the terms of the relationship between traditional forms of animation and their digital progeny – only ways of thinking about it, of exploring it. In other words, I am not sure that I know how to use the term ‘animation’, except as a collection of what increasingly seems to resemble a disparate set of activities, forms and products, united by nothing more (or less) than complicated aesthetic and industrial lineages. And I am not concerned that my more watered-down, less prescriptive approach to animation sacrifices either its formal or creative essence for two reasons. Firstly, animation has always been an unruly form, proceeding from no single natural origin or legitimate discipline, but rather from hybridised, bastardised and mutated forms, existing and developing, as Marina Estela Graça implied, in the interval between forms. And, secondly, while I agree with Estela Graça in that the animated form seems capable of creating hitherto unimagined and unimaginable possibilities, I can see no reason why those possibilities cannot be both, and simultaneously artistic and commercial. For in any number of ways, animation is the perfect commodity of contemporary media markets – infinitely malleable, endlessly exploitable, animation is bound up with the amoral logic of capital itself.
Unlike other forms of media, it is impossible to eradicate the art-form animation, from animating. The process entails creation. Again, it was Estela Graça’s discussion of the physiology of animation which reminded us most forcefully that even the most sophisticated computer technologies are, and are condemned to remain so, merely tools to be manipulated by animators. She argued that the ‘process of animating’ has always necessitated invention and experimentation, describing animation as a ‘laboratory’ with the media arts. On this view, computer animation is the end point of a series of processes, which, by stretching our senses and challenging our perceptions, appear capable of ‘widening the scope of our mental life.’
The strength of this approach, it seems to me, is that it impels us towards inventing ways of speaking about transformation and continuity in the same breath. Thus, traditional modes of animation anticipate electronic modes in so far as they structure their history and demand renewal. In other words, the question of the current state of animation is not simply a technological one: it is first and foremost an aesthetic or poetic one.
This notion of the poetics of digital modes of animation, found resonances in a number of other discussions during the week. Lucy Childs‘ immensely enjoyable and enlightening exploration into digital puppetry went as close as any to convincing even the most reluctant among us of the continued centrality of the human to the practice of animating. In tracing the historical and formal lineages between ‘real’ and ‘virtual’ puppets, Childs demonstrated how, against commonsense perhaps, the ‘ghost of happy accident’ is as endemic to, and as inevitable in electronic forms of puppetry as classical. Using screen-captures form Maya, she talked the audience through a case study ‘happy accident’, suggesting along the way that the almost interminable levels of complexity built into 3D animation software make the creative accident not less, but all the more likely. At any rate, what Childs’ discussion convincingly demonstrated was that the turn towards electronic modes of animation does not necessarily subordinate art to science or surrender creation to market forces. Rather, artists and animators are making use of science and technology precisely in order to explore and determine new ways of seeing and expressing.
Keith Bradbury‘s discussion of animation as offering a spiritual aesthetic space within the predominately instrumental logics of new electronic media was certainly the most speculative of the conference, but perhaps one of the most useful. Useful not in the sense of providing neat answers or points of resolution, but useful in the sense that it confronted, head-on, the question of where animation now begins and ends. If indeed our bodies are now to be understood as Cyborgs, amplified by their interaction with and reliance on technology, and if this state of affairs calls into question the distinction between mechanical and biological, then animation – being animated – might prove to be a useful starting point for understanding our own involvement in techno-culture. (In this sense, Motion Capture can be seen as a palpable link between bio-mechanics and animatics).
This broadening of the conception of animation is both exhilarating, and for some, risky. Either way, electronic modes of animating give us cause to ponder: Neither graphic or photographic, digital imagery exists outside, or at least on the outskirts of our current linguistic classifications. Indeed, the new arts of the computer, the Web, the console, the data screen – the multi-media and hyper media arts – are beginning to contest the whole area of what seemed to be the separate technologies of cinema, TV and computer, and also to contest the formal distinctions which have historically seemed to separate animation from film. At every turn, the exuberance of animation exceeds the boundaries of our current critical vocabulary. For in describing animation, which now need not be simply graphic or photographic – neither this nor that, or this and that – it is my hunch that we will also either implicitly or explicitly be producing a vocabulary which describes large chunks of contemporary media practice.
To shrug off old vocabularies, or better still to forge new ones will help us become more sensitive to the complexities and contradictions that attend animated forms, as well as to the unique pleasure and frustrations they afford. It will also save us scholars from trying to pour new forms into old bottles, bottles which, in any case, have already sprung unpluggable leaks. A number of contemporary scholars, including myself, are doing their best to complicate the paint-by-numbers picture of media studies which continues to keep animation on the back-burner of our research agendas. From my own work, I would suggest that unless media studies steers away from its old ‘disciplines’ into un-chartered waters, it risks becoming fossilised in its own vocabulary of photo-mechanics. Better to be out of control for a while than bound by well-worn traditions. If it is now possible through digital animation to walk with dinosaurs in an increasingly seamless fantasy world, then we should stop talking like them and find new and more adequate ways to describe what we are doing and can do.
Paul Watson
A slightly shorter version of this review article appears in issue 3 of ‘Animation UK’ (2000). It is used here with permission of the author and publisher.