Ecstatic Truth is an annual symposium on animated documentary that takes place in a different country every year. We are interested in what animators and artists have to say about the work they make. This year, in conjunction with the Animation programme, it’s coming to Farnham! We have a different topic every year and this year’s theme is decolonisation.
What is decolonisation? In a nutshell, it is the idea that it might be possible to ‘unplug from the Matrix’ and find new ways to learn, think and act that are not imposed by dominant power structures.
How does that apply to animation? Our speakers will look at issues such as how to work collaboratively to tell stories of conflict or underrepresented peoples, how to counter bias in technology and whether animation can be used to express the voice and culture of indigenous peoples. There will be a range of approaches to making animation shown – from traditional drawn animation to the use of VR, AR, game engines, data and motion capture.
Farnham is a short train ride of one hour from London. Although there will be industrial action on the rail network 15-20th May, SW Rail trains should have no cancellations, although there may be minor delays.
To view a live streamed webcast on Thurs 18th May – click here DISCLAIMER: this live streaming is being offered for free in the interest of sharing knowledge. The symposium organisers cannot offer any technical support. You should not have to log in to Panopto or UCA to view the video feed. If you are external to the UCA network and not logged in then comments will be disabled. If the link does not work for you, please try another browser or your phone. The symposium is also being recorded and this will be made available after the event.
In this, our fourth symposium at the critical juncture of embodied, sensual perception and the processes and technologies of expanded animation, we turn our attention to kinaesthetic and physical presence. Our human senses of proprioception (detecting our own position in space) and the vestibular system (detecting gravity, movement and balance) allow us to map our surroundings, navigate through space and detect the proximity of others. In an age in which our city streets have become a film studio with our every movement tracked by surveillance cameras and our every thought, memory or social interaction mediated through the camera, GPS, microphone and motion sensors of our smart devices, what does it mean to have a body? In what ways can expanded animation explore the physical presence of the live human body in motion and what is the role of technology in relation to this?
Venue
The conference will be held at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. The media festival will take place on the 6th–10h of September 2023: https://ars.electronica.art/festival/en/.
Call for Papers
We are looking for thought-provoking proposals that present innovative perspectives on working in expanded animation with the live body in motion. The questions we are interested in include, but are not limited to:
How can we critically and creatively use live performance in animation and animation in live performance?
What can the liveness of performance bring to animation in terms of improvisation, participation, spontaneity and unpredictability?
Since ancient times, thousands of years of performance practice have produced many different ways to move a body from stylised forms of dance to exaggerated clowning. What is ‘life-like’ motion and why does psychological realism remain a goal for animated characters who are, after all, not human?
In what new ways can the properties of human kinaesthetics be applied to animation? How can balance, gravity, weight, movement patterns, spatial mapping and proximity detection be re-imagined and creatively explored?
What are the ethics of capturing and re-appropriating a performer’s physical movement signature with mocap? How can we counter the algorithmic biases built into the fabric of motion capture systems and the under-representation of different demographics in motion capture libraries?
How might the technologies of surveillance, motion detection and capture be subverted and used for new artistic purposes?
How can the space in which performance takes place be animated and what impact does this have on performer and audience experience?
Can animation be used in live performance to disrupt theatrical conventions such as the fourth wall and unity of time and space?
How can animation be used to create proximity and communal experience in connected audiences?
How can AI technology revolutionize/change the way we will animate human bodies?
What does it mean to have a body in interactive animated environments (metaverse, games, VR)?
Deadline
Submission deadline: Friday, 26th May 2023
How to Submit
We call for papers, presentations and responses to our themes above.
Abstract (brief summary of your proposed presentation) 500 words (including bibliographic references)
Short Biography – 200 words
Relevant links to moving image work/websites etc.
If the paper is practice-based, it should include reflection and contextualisation in addition to presenting the practice. We will not accept papers that propose to show the practice only.
Finally, we are unable to provide feedback on individual submissions.
Keynote: Ghislaine Boddington, body>data>space
Creative Director, body>data>space / Reader In Digital Immersion, School of Design, University of Greenwich
Ghislaine Boddington is a curator, presenter and researcher, known for her pioneering work placing the body as the interface for digital technologies and exploring telepresence, digital intimacy and virtual physical blending since the early 1990s. Her research led practise, expert direction and curations include “Robots and Avatars” (EU/Nesta 2009-11), “me and my shadow” (National Theatre 2012), Nesta’s FutureFest 2015-18 and the recent exhibition/symposium Extended Senses and Embodying Technologies (UoG/UCA Sept 22). In 2017 Ghislaine was awarded the esteemed IX Immersion Experience International Visionary Pioneer Award for her long-term work on collective embodiment within digital immersion. She is an expert presenter for BBC World Service Digital Planet weekly radio show/podcast, a member of the DCMS College of Experts and a Trustee for Stemette Futures. Her websites can be found at Linktr.ee
Committees
The symposium is jointly organized by Dr. Juergen Hagler, Ars Electronica, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg and Professor Dr. Birgitta Hosea, Animation Research Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK.
Scientific committee: Professor Rose Bond, PNCA, USA; Andy Buchanan, independent scholar; Associate Professor Max Hattler, School of Creative Media, CityU, Hong Kong.
EXTENDEDSubmission deadline:Tues 7th March 2023 (midnight) Symposium details: Thurs 18th May 2023, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey, UK Submit proposals here via Oxford Abstracts:https://tinyurl.com/mr32u3rj
Keynote: Liliana Conlisk-Gallegos, The Coyolxauhqui Imperative (VR, 2020)
About Ecstatic Truth
Ecstatic Truth is an annual symposium on animated documentary founded in 2016 that explores issues arising from the interface between notions of animation and of documentary (conceptualised very broadly as non-fiction), with a particular interest in questions raised by experimental and practitioner perspectives. According to Werner Herzog, mere facts constitute an accountant’s reality, but it is the ecstatic truth (a poetic reality) that can capture more faithfully the nuances and depths of human experiences. Given that animation (or manipulated moving image in all of its expanded forms) has the freedom to represent, stylize or reimagine the world, it lends itself well to this aspirational form of documentary filmmaking. This year’s symposium will be held at UCA in Farnham, Surrey and its theme of decolonising animation has been developed in collaboration with our Keynote Speaker, curator, producer and cultural activist, Helen Starr.
Decolonising Animation
Foregrounding subjective experience and freed from adherence to the physical, medical and scientific norms of photo-reality, just what is animation capable of? After a disappointing trip to Hollywood in 1930, Sergei Eisenstein travelled to Mexico where he socialised with Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, absorbing non-Western ideas from a subaltern culture he very much admired and that clearly influenced his evolving thoughts on animation. In his writing on Disney, Eisenstein considers animation as a subversive form of shapeshifting that resists Western rationalism and binary thinking in its appeal to ancient, evolutionary memories of being formless protoplasm; to the limitless imaginative freedom of childhood and to a joyous return to a state of animism in which all aspects of nature are interconnected. He points out that animated figures squash and stretch with plasmatic elasticity; these unstable forms can change shape, species, gender or any other imposed boundary; can perform impossible tasks or survive death.
Despite all of its potential, Eisenstein asserts that animated film ultimately lacks consequence and is an escapist, golden daydream: “Disney is a marvellous lullaby for the suffering and unfortunate, the oppressed and deprived.”[1]But could animation be more than escapism and be made to matter? How might animation engage with notions of the human, of possible worlds, of post-, anti- and de-colonialism?
Coming from an intersectional perspective, this symposium seeks to listen to, unite, engage with and extend notions of opposition to ideologies of colonialism as applied to the practice and analysis of animation. All forms of colonialism, whether settler colonialism, exploitation colonialism, surrogate colonialism or internal colonialism, have one thing in common: the destruction of local and indigenous knowledge systems. Colonialism leaves in its wake extractive, material-based and non-sustainable cultures. How can we articulate and process these complex histories and struggles? Can animation liberate us from internalised empires of the mind? We are interested in debates around form and strategy as well as subject matter.
Call for Papers
We invite practitioners and theorists working in non-fictional animation to consider the following questions:
What happens if we rethink animation as a visioning and performance ritual with the ability for transportation into a poetic reality?
What are the implications of animation’s capacity for world building and worlding? Could animation be used to represent non-Western knowledge traditions?
As an artform in which the conventional rules of science, space and time cease to function, can animation be used as speculative fabulation to evoke a magical and poetic state that excavates Western anthropocentric worldviews?
How can animation and animation studies have a dialogue with the work of post-, anti- and de-colonial theory?
What epistemological strategies can be used in animation to interrogate complex histories of injustice and contested land rights?
What processes and methods of participatory production and co-design might be used to tell many stories while resisting possibly extractivist/exploitative tendencies of production that may otherwise be prevalent in animation practices?
What colonial legacies do the tools and technologies of animation structure into our usage of them? Do the tools and technologies of animation practice reflect the interests of colonial legacies? In what ways might we be vigilant of these in order to question them and imagine technologies that work to counter such interests?
How can we rethink reductive notions of ‘primitive thought’ and ‘atavism’, as expressed in historic texts such as that by Eisenstein, and use animation to articulate indigenous knowledge and culture?
Submission Details
We call for papers, presentations and responses on our themes of decolonisation, in all its different manifestations, in relation to non-fiction manipulated moving image and animated documentary, in their most expanded forms.
Submission is via Oxford Abstracts at this link:https://tinyurl.com/mr32u3rj. You will be prompted to create a free account with Oxford Abstracts.
Your submission should include:
Title of your presentation
Abstract (brief summary of your proposed presentation) 500 words (including bibliographic references)
Short Biography – 200 words
Relevant links to moving image work/websites etc.
If the paper is practice-based, it should include reflection and contextualisation in addition to presenting the practice. We will not accept papers that propose to show the practice only.
Finally, we are unable to provide feedback on individual submissions.
Keynote Speakers: Helen Starr and Liliana Conlisk Gallegos
Helen Starr, Founder @ The Mechatronic Library
Helen Starr (TT) is an Afro-Carib curator, producer and cultural activist from Trinidad, WI. She began curating exhibitions with artists such as Susan Hiller, Cindy Sherman and Marcel Duchamp in 1995. Helen founded The Mechatronic Library in 2010, to give marginalised artists access to technologies such as Game Engines, Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR). Helen has worked with many public institutions such as Wysing Art Centre, FACT, Liverpool and QUAD in Derby. Being Indigenous-American Helen is interested in how digital artforms transform our understanding of reality by world-building narratives through storytelling and counter-storytelling. How, by “naming one’s own reality” we can experience the Other. Helen is on the board of QUAD, Derby and on the Computer Animation Jury for Ars Electronica, Linz. In 2020 she developed the concept of a Fluid or DAAD Futurism with Amrita Dhallu and Salma Noor.
Liliana Conlisk-Gallegos
Liliana Conlisk-Gallegos aka. Dr. Machete or Mystic Machete is from the Tijuana-San Diego border region in Southern California. With the goal of advancing the certain decolonial turn, her live, interactive media art production and border rasquache new media art pieces and performances generate culturally specific, collective, technocultural creative spaces of production that reconnect Chicana/o/x “Mestiza” Indigenous wisdom/conocimiento to their ongoing technological and scientific contributions, still “overlooked” through the logic of the decaying Eurocentric project of Modernity. In her Tijuana-San Ysidro transfronteriza (perpetual border crosser) perspective, the current limited perceptions of what research, media, and technology can be are like a yonke (junkyard), from which pieces are upcycled and repurposed to amplify individual and collective expression, community healing, and social justice. She has organized and curated over 14 community-centered, interactive, decolonial, community building, and environmentalist, research-based multimedia artivism and critical intervention performances and her work has been exhibited at ACM|SIGGRAPH, The García Center for the Arts in San Bernardino, Human Resources Art Museum in Los Angeles, the PAMLA Arts Matter of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association, and the Guizhou Provincial Museum in China. Her most recent curation was The Future Past v. Coloniality: Decolonial Media Art Beyond 530 Years, supported by the Digital Arts Community for ACM SIGGRAPH (https://decolonial-media-art.siggraph.org)
She is Associate Professor of Decolonial Media and Communication Studies at CSU San Bernardino and a member of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Committee. Her writings have appeared in Critical Storytelling from Global Borderlands: En la línea, Vol. 8, 2022 (Brill Publishers), Re-Activating Critical Thinking amidst Necropolitical Realities: Politics, Theory, Arts and Political Economy for a Radical Change, 2022 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), A Love Letter to This Bridge Called My Back, 2022 (The University of Arizona Press), Departures in Critical Qualitative Research 3 Vol. 10, 2021 (UC Press), and Journal of Latinos in Education Vol. 20, 2018 (Taylor and Francis).
Organising Committee
This symposium is jointly organised by Professor Birgitta Hosea, Anna de Guia-Eriksson and Nikki Brough, Animation Research Centre, University for the Creative Arts, UK; Helen Starr; Dr Tereza Stehlikova, University of Creative Communication, Czech Republic; Tangible Territory Journal; Dr Pedro Serrazina, Lusófona University of Lisbon, Portugal.
Scientific committee also includes:
Balvinder Mudan, UCA; Dr Will Bishops Stevens, UCA; Jane Cheadle, UCA; Dr Yingying Jiang, BUCT
Contact
All questions about submissions should be emailed to ecstatic.truth.symposium@gmail.com
Ecstatic Truth is supported by:
[1] Sergei Eisenstein, On Disney, trans. Alan Upchurch (London; New York; Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2017).
Synaesthetic Syntax is a one-day symposium on Sunday 11th September as part of the 10th Expanded Animation section of the Ars Electronica Festival. The event explores the complex relationship between sensory perception and expanded animation. In focussing on the primacy of the senses, the symposium aims to ask questions about the seduction of technology and how to maintain a discourse of what is fundamental about being human. This year’s theme is touch, gesture and physical movement. For more details about the presentations and how to view them online, go to the website for Expanded Animation.
We are delighted to welcome our keynote speaker and winner of a Golden Nica at this years Prix Ars Electronica: Rashaad Newsome. He will be giving his keynote presentation at 14.00 (CET) on Friday 9th Sept.
To be human, to be in a body, is to move and to feel; to move as it feels and to feel itself moving.[1] However, bodies do not exist in isolation. Bodies collide with one another in social contexts. They have the power to affect others or to be affected themselves. Bodies are structured by culture, but they can also resist. Motion and sensation felt in the body leads to change.[2]
At the time of organising the symposium, a line of tanks, armoured vehicles and troops 40 miles long were approaching Kyev: literally illustrating change in motion through technology. How can animation respond to this? How might technologies of gesture, proprioception and motion be used to create animation that goes beyond formalism and is able to reflect upon the forces that seek to contain movements towards change?
The sensation of touch can be brutal and violent or tender and loving. Through ‘haptic visuality’[3], a sense of touch can be evoked in animation by triggering physical memories of smell, touch and taste that engages the viewer bodily to convey cultural experience rather than through a use of language. How can touch be used in animation to create community or share memories?
Presentations:
The presentations respond to the following questions:
How to critically reflect on the tools and technologies of touch and movement used to create animation – motion capture, tablets and pens, sensors – and the data sets and libraries that they create?
How might the capture of motion, gesture and proprioception be used to innovate and tell stories of new communities?
What is the role of touch in conveying memory?
How might touch and biofeedback data be used in new ways to create animation?
[1] Paraphrase from p1. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002, Duke University Press) [2] Cf. Massumi, op. cit. [3] Laura U Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (2000, Duke University Press)
Guizhou Provincial Museum 29/4/22-31/8/22 Curated by Birgitta Hosea, Zhang Xiaotao, Li Fei
Featuring 44 international digital media artists, 54 works of art and covering 2200 square metres, this is Guizhou Province’s first international exhibition of digital art. The works cover a range of techniques, disciplines and approaches including interactive media, virtual reality, robotics, immersive installations, experimental animation, artificial intelligence and archaeological visualisation.
The central theme of Fission is the multiple different forms that digital art can take. Like the process of nuclear fission, the concept of digital art has become unstable and shot off in many different directions from its starting point at the intersection of science, technology and art. With transient populations, contradictions and conflicts between social interaction, capital and information, in our era of globalization technology and media reshape the world. Fission is a meeting in virtual time and space of digital art from the media laboratory to the public arena. It marks the rapid development of science and technology and provides a microcosm of the intersection of different cultures at a time of great change.
The exhibition is divided into four sections: 1) The Rebirth of Antiquities: the fusion of archaeology and digital art. 2) Post-life imagery: the connection between humans and nature, society and technology. 3) Synthetic Worlds: The Connection Between Virtual Reality and Real Worlds. 4) Algorithmic Images: The Meaning of Digital Art.
Co-curator, Birgitta Hosea, talks about the exhibition:
Co-curator, Zhang Xiaotao, talks about the exhibition:
International symposium in which expanded animation and experimental moving image intersect with documentary, 22nd April 2022, University of Creative Communication, Prague, Czech Republic
Etymologically “to attend” comes from Middle English (in the sense ‘apply one’s mind or energies to’): from Old French atendre, from Latin attendere, from ad- ‘to’ + tendere ‘stretch’.
At a time when attending an event can mean two things: being present in person or virtually, new questions are raised about what attendance means. If attendance and attention have the same etymological roots, can we consider attending as a form of attention rather than requiring physical presence? And if the essence of attention is its elasticity, can we argue that attention is able to stretch to overcome physical distance? That our shared attention (as well as time and virtual platforms) allows us to be in attendance, together, no matter how physically displaced we are.
According to philosopher and cognitive scientist Lucas Battich (TT journal 3) shared attention not only helps us learn better, it is also multi-sensory. Is therefore watching a film together more illuminating than watching it alone, in separate spaces? What effect our new, so called “hybrid reality” has on our attention? Which role do the so-called proximity senses play in being attentive, attending to presence?
Attention is a precious and limited human resource which is under pressure: multiple forces constantly fight for our attention. Not just every day demands but social media, advertising and various other inventions of our late capitalist world, which understand that attention and money are intertwined. Attention is what makes us present, attention is learning, attention is the fabric of our experience, attention is being conscious, being conscientious, it is our future memory: we remember what we pay attention to, the rest becomes an unconscious assimilation of facts. And as we know from advertising methods, subliminal messaging can affect us on a level where we are unable to rationalise its effect, hence are more vulnerable.
Film (and moving image) as a medium has long been associated with memory: Like the mind it records and edits, what it deems significant. It can capture moments in time, make them conscious and preserve them for the future. It enables us, the viewers, to attend to the presence of those that came before us, even if they no longer share our everyday reality… Temporal and physical distances are bridged.
In association with Animation Research Centre, University for the Creative Arts, UK; Lusafona University, Portugal and Tangible Territory journal
My installation, Holes, ran at ASIFAKEIL, Q21, Vienna from 1/12/21 – 20/2/22.
I gave a presentation about the installation at Belvedere 21 Museum of Contemporary Art for the Under_the_Radar festival in Vienna on 27th March 2022.
I’ll be giving an updated version of this talk at Animafest Scanner IX as part of the Zagreb Animation Festival on 7-8th June 2022.
Some stills from the film, that has sound design by Anat Ben-David:
The short film, Holes, that is shown in the installation has just started on the film festival circuit and has so far been shown at:
A version of Holes (the installation) is included in Fission: The New Wave of International Digital Art at Guizhou Provincial Museum from 29th April – 31st August 2022.
Due to the lockdown in Austria, I was unable to travel to install this work in person, so I am very grateful to Stefan Stratil and Holger Lang for putting it together for me and the exhibition has now opened. It’s seen through the windows of the gallery, so can be visited as part of a lockdown-compatible walk in the area.
The show was due to have an opening event as part of the Under_the_Radar festival, but this is now postponed. We hope that the festival can run at the end of January and plan a finishing event and presentation about the exhibition then. All is dependent on the pandemic and the regulations in place in Austria then. More news to follow.
The next Ecstatic Truth symposium on experimental and expanded approaches to animated documentary will be held in Prague on April 8th. It will take place at Vysoká škola kreativní komunikace (University of Creative Communication) in conjunction with the Tangible Territory journal. It will be a hybrid event – both in person and online.
In this second symposium for Expanded Animation at Ars Electronica, we continue our exploration of affect: how animation is felt through sensory information processed by the body. For the second year, this takes a focus on inter-relationships between hearing and seeing.
From the early pioneers, both the audio and the visual components of moving image have been intrinsic to the medium. According to experimental filmmaker Walter Ruttmann (1887-1941), the ‘music of light has always been and will remain the essence of cinema’. Another pioneering avant-garde filmmaker, Germaine Dulac (1882-1942), connected this with movement, ‘cinema and music have this in common: in both movement alone can create emotion by its rhythm and development’.
Our intention with this symposium is to go beyond superficial, formal connections between sound and animated images to think about how the senses are engaged and thus the central role of the body in engaging with perception and experience. Indeed, philosopher, Maurice Merleau Ponty argues that synaesthetic connections – the cross-wiring between all our senses – is at the root of perception, how we understand the world. In using digital technology we are working with a synaesthetic medium in which all sense perceptions can be codified as inputs and expressed in a common language of zeros and ones that can be fluidly interchanged.
In raising issues about the senses and the body, we are also responding to these peculiar times of pandemic when so much of our interactions have been mediated through a screen rather than through direct experience and physical encounter. We have chosen a range of different speakers who responded to our themes in different ways and I do hope you find all of the talks thought provoking and inspiring.
Expanded Animation 