Technological Animation in Classical Antiquity (ed. with T. Bur and I. Ruffell). Oxford University Press (original) (raw)
Related papers
Animation, 2008
The exhibition Eyes, Lies and Illusions held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne and the Hayward Gallery in London was a selection from the 20,000 optical toys, scientific instruments, antiquarian books and visual entertainments in the collection of Werner Nekes, the German experimental film maker. This article begins with a consideration of the historical trajectory of belief in the afterlife in relation to 'animation', the imputation of a soul to anything that appeared to move itself. The second section suggests that animation techniques bear witness to the persistence of atavistic beliefs in modernity. The third addresses the proximity of technology and magic in animation, and proposes a more extended use of the term 'animation'.
With a Philosopher's Eye: A Naive View on Animation
Animation: an interdisciplinary journal, 9, pp.65-79., 2014
Animation has never been a subject that has attracted much interest from philosophers, except perhaps from a very few interested in the philosophy of film or perhaps in visual aesthetics. Aspects of philosophical thinking may well be relevant to animation, however, and animators and theorists of animation have certainly shown an interest in philosophy: most often in time, movement, and process. But it is one thing to draw on philosophy in working within a field, and another thing to try to think philosophically about that field. In this admittedly naive view of animation -naive because it comes from philosophy to animation rather than the other way around -animation is explored from an explicitly philosophical perspective, with a particular focus on animation as a 'making move'.
In Aristotle's physics and biology, matter's capacity for spontaneous, opaque, chance deviation is named by automaton and marked with a feminine sign, while at the same time these mysterious motions are articulated, rendered knowable and predictable via the fi gure of ta automata, the automatic puppets. This paper traces how automaton functions in the Aristotelian text as a symptomatic crossing-point, an uncanny and chiasmatic fi gure in which materiality and logos, phusis, and technē, death and life, masculine and feminine, are intertwined and articulated. Automaton permits a mastery of generative materiality for teleological metaphysics, but also works to unsettle teleology's systematic and unifying aspirations.
Animation: The New Performance?
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology , 2010
From the 1950s through the 1990s, the trope of performance was elaborated across a range of academic disciplines, providing a platform for comparing the construction of identities through mimetic embodiment in ritual, work, and everyday life. Today, as animation is being remediated through digital media, both scholars and participants in various types of online communities are beginning to use animation as a trope for human action on/in the world. This essay attempts to bring together the insights of recent scholarship in various disciplines in order to outline a general animation model, first presenting some of the characteristics of animation that allow it to draw connections between social, technological, and psychic structures, and then examining some of the ways that the models of animation and perfor- mance interact in contemporary subcultural practices. [animation, performance, reme- diation, media ideologies, techno-cultures]
Magical and Mechanical Evidence: The Late-Renaissance Automata of Francesco I de' Medici
In the realization of moving automata for Francesco I de' Medici's sixteenth-century Villa Pratolino outside of Florence, the memory of antiquity informed both the practical and theoretical operations of these " living statues. " The 1587 description of the villa and its wonders, Delle Maravigliose Opere di Pratolino, & d'Amore by Francesco de' Vieri, associates magical traditions of statue animation with Renaissance automata in a passage that cites Aristotle's description, rooted in atomism and sympathetic magic, of the physical process by which Daedalus animated his legendary wooden Venus. From the fifteenth century onwards, the rediscovery and popularity of Neoplatonic and Hermetic philosophical texts in the Renaissance perpetuated Greco-Egyptian methods of investing man-made vessels, typically cult statues, with some kind of " life " from received celestial influences, thus manufacturing the " living gods " of antiquity. Simultaneously , mechanical texts which preserved mechanical devices and principles from ancient Alexandria were being assimilated to the engineering repertoire of Western Europe, and air and water were harnessed to impart movement to the early modern automata which graced Italian Renaissance hydraulic villas and gardens. For the court of Francesco I de' Medici, the division between our modern scientific concept of air and a metaphysical " spirit " was not yet drawn, and manipulating this occult " influence " was invested with a mastery of a far broader, unseen sphere. For the court philosopher De' Vieri, Neoplatonic and Hermetic writings furnished alternative and not necessarily contradictory understandings of various hidden forces which could cause statues to move. In the late sixteenth century, a much broader conception of " nature " allowed for the confirmation of invisible or " occult " phenomena which did not preclude the magical philosophy of antiquity from being related to the empirical discoveries being made via the production of new mechanical devices. De' Vieri's 1587 panegyric to Pratolino demonstrates that the mastery of mechanical as well as esoteric magical philosophy came to feature in the propaganda of the newly-invested Medici Grand Duke.
The Politics of Animation and the Animation of Politics
This article demonstrates how political inquiry can guide the study of animation. It proceeds by investigating animation's minor status within film and media studies and then the expansion of its definition and conceptual associations. This expansion has philosophical implications, which are explored in this article through the work of Jeff Malpas and Bruno Latour. By examining how these philosophers discuss animation and animated examples – puppets, in particular – this article demonstrates a shift from thinking of animation as expressing mastery and illusion to thinking of animation as expressing transformation, heterogeneous action, and distributed agency. This shift challenges philosophy's opposition to rhetoric, poetics, and technology, and in turn challenges modern binaries between nature and culture, science and politics, reality and artifice, facts and fetishes, and it presents the world as animated. The author argues that this idea need not obfuscate the many different moving-image technologies that have been designated animation or cinema, and contends that some of these, such as animated cartoons, directly engage the confusion about animation caused by modern binaries. This argument proposes studying animation through multiple modes or lenses in order to prevent dominant realist modes of inquiry from stifling the uncertainty and pluralism that are central to animation's capacity for political expression.