Ecstatic Truth X: Animating Hope, international symposium on documentary animation, presented in association with UNDER_the_RADAR Festival and the University of Applied Arts Vienna. Book a free place here.
Ecstatic Truth returns for its tenth edition with a three-day gathering of artists, filmmakers and researchers exploring documentary animation in its most expanded form. The symposium takes its name from Werner Herzog’s idea of ecstatic truth — a form of truth that exceeds the merely factual. Animation is uniquely positioned to work in this register. It can render memories, dreams, inner states and dispersed timescales, showing aspects of reality inaccessible to live-action cinema while openly acknowledging its artifice.
Our 2026 theme, Animating Hope, asks what documentary animation can do in a moment saturated with information, simulation and uncertainty. Rather than adding to the noise, can animation transform data into meaning and experience into understanding? The symposium includes presentations, screenings and discussions addressing speculative futures, resistance, memory, and new documentary forms emerging across installation, performance and hybrid cinema.
Schedule: April 26 – 29 2026
Sunday 26.04.2026
UNDER_the_RADAR Festival
@ Raum-D / Museumsquartier, Quartier 21, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna
18:00 Opening and Introduction – UNDER_the_RADAR
18:10 (approx.) BroschAI – Distorted Dreams – with Juergen Hagler
19:00 (approx.) Water works: Video as Painting – with Pietro Gardoni
19:45 (approx.) Austrian Animation – Competition 1
20:45 (approx.) Chillin´ Out
Monday 27.04.2026 10:00 to 13:30
Ecstatic Truth X: Animating Hope – Symposium Day 1
@ Art x Science Seminar Room 1, 2nd Floor, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Georg Coch Platz 2, A 1010 Vienna
10.00 Intro
10.10 – 11.00 KEYNOTE: JUERGEN HAGLER
“Animating an Archive” – Artificial Intelligence and Cultural Heritage Interpretation in the Work of Klemens Brosch
This presentation explores the potential and limitations of artificial intelligence in animating and interpreting cultural heritage, focusing on the archival works of Austrian artist Klemens Brosch. Drawing on the projects “Brosch AI – Distorted Dreams” (2025) and “Unfinished Decay” (2026), it examines how generative AI transforms historical drawings into animated audiovisual narratives while raising questions of stylistic fidelity, authorship, and authenticity. Rather than treating AI – generated artefacts as flaws, the projects frame distortions and inconsistencies as meaningful interpretive gestures. These transformations resonate with Brosch’s psychologically charged imagery and open a speculative space between preservation and reinterpretation, while also revealing limits in handling complex line work, material specificity, and historical aesthetics. Combining practice – based research with critical reflection, the keynote presents AI not as a tool for reconstruction but as an interpretive collaborator. It situates these experiments within debates on digital heritage and authorship, arguing for a nuanced understanding of AI – driven cultural interpretation that acknowledges both its creative potential and its constraints.
11.00 –11.10 Coffee break
11.10 – 12.30 PANEL 1 Ecstatic Truth: Uncertainty, Speculation and the Not-Yet
Animating Hope Beyond the Archive: Augmented Reality Documentary as Decolonial Epistemic Practice
Bahar Kiamoghaddam
Computational Witness: Data Visualisation as Ecstatic Truth in Documentary’s Epistemic Futures
Isaac Parkinson
I argue that computational visualisation in investigative documentary from groups like Forensic Architecture and filmmakers like Laura Poitras makes visible patterns of state violence that conventional footage cannot capture. The use of spatial modelling and statistical rendering to expose what official narratives obscure draws on Bloch’s idea of “concrete utopia” by carrying genuine political potential. I also consider the risk that visualisation can become polished and depoliticised imagery, shaped more by algorithmic logics than by accountability.
Morgenglanze
Xavier Gorgol
This presentation approaches the “mawkish” through animation as a minor yet persistent mode of queer resistance. Operating through stratification and relation, it challenges dominant regimes of clarity, hierarchy, and fixed identity.
Animation unfolds as an archipelago, a constellation of fragments that do not resolve into unity. These fragments continue their metamorphosis.
Where Shall We Place Our Hope? The Ethics of Instability and the Thinking Hand in William Kentridge’s Animated Process
Andrijana Ruzic
This paper explores William Kentridge’s animation as an act of ethical witnessing, analyzing how his studio practices embody hope through the instability of animated marks. By examining “Waiting for the Sybil” and “Self-Portrait as a Coffee Pot,” I argue that Kentridge’s work resists closed narratives and fosters an open dialogue with fate, highlighting the importance of mistakes and the unfinished nature of creation as a form of ethical responsiveness.
12.30 – 13.30 Panel Discussion
UNDER_the_RADAR screenings:
@ Raum-D / Museumsquartier, Quartier 21, Museumsplatz 1, 1070 Vienna
18:00 Shadows of Ourselves – Installation, Screening & Talk – with Pedro Serrazina
Tuesday, 28.04.2026
Ecstatic Truth X: Animating Hope – Symposium Day 2
@ Art x Science Seminar Room 1, 2nd Floor, University of Applied Arts Vienna, Georg Coch Platz 2, A 1010 Vienna
10.00 -10.50 KEYNOTE: GABRIELE JUTZ
“Ecstatic Modes of Observation” in Emily Richardson’s Aspect (2003) and Daniel Steegman Mangrané’s 16 mm (2008–2011)
Colin Williamson (2015) characterizes “an ecstatic mode of observation” as a state that surpasses ordinary perception. Two examples of this are Aspect, by British filmmaker Emily Richardson, and 16 mm by Spanish-Brazilian filmmaker Daniel Steegman Mangrané. Both films feature forests and are shot on 16 mm, yet they use vastly different methods. Richardson documented an English forest over the course of one year in a labor-intensive process, using still images and time-lapse photography to compress twelve months into nine minutes. However, Steegman Mangrané’s exploration of a dense Brazilian rainforest employed structural filmmaking strategies. His modified 16mm camera moved along a tensioned steel cable, a perfectly straight line through the winding jungle, producing a continuous long shot at a constant speed, with the film roll’s duration dictating the film’s length. By comparing Aspect and 16 mm, my presentation will examine their representational strategies and analyze how they challenge anthropocentric perspectives on more-than-human biosystems, including trees.
10.50 – 12.00 PANEL: Changing perspectives: On Hope and Recovery
Lights All Askew in the Heavens: Animating Hope through the Physics of Resistance
Osi Wald
“Lights All Askew in the Heavens” is a solo animation exhibition presented in Jerusalem in 2025. The project documents the effort to maintain a coherent inner life within a fractured collective reality of war and protest. Guided by the principle that rotation does not disappear but is transformed, the work seeks to reframe the animated loop. Rather than a repetitive trap, it becomes an engine of hope – a rhythmic persistence that enables change through continuous movement.
Looking back to previous drawings: Anthropophagy and the recovery of better futures
Virgilio Vasconcelos
This presentation discusses how animation, in moments of social and technological disruption, can be a place to recover the “Lost Futures” described by Mark Fisher by looking back at the Brazilian Modernism’s Anthropophagic movement. Building on Oswald de Andrade’s metaphor and postcolonial thinkers, I propose animation as both a place and a metaphorical act of “active hope”, that digests external influences to synthesize better futures by creating new images. By examining solarpunk productions as metamodern practices, the research suggests animation can offer ways beyond postcolonial melancholia toward imagining achievable, existing alternatives rather than impossible utopias.
GospodinA: Alimentary Animation and the Body as Projection Space. Performing 1980s State Motherhood Through “Palatal” Cinema
Rares Augustin Craiut
GospodinA is a performance protocol in which alimentary gestures inherited from 1980s socialist Romania become the material of a documentary animation practice. Drawing on recorded transmissions between the presenter and his mother — a living archive of survival cooking under Ceaușescu — the paper proposes palatal cinema: a mode in which the mouth, hand, and digestive body function as projection spaces for state ideology and collective memory. The presenter argues that alimentary gestures resist fixity in the same way animation resists indexicality: both operate through transformation, approximation, and the trace of absent originals.
12.00 – 12.10 Coffee break
12.10 – 12.40 INVOCATION: TEREZA VIOLET STEHLÍKOVÁ
Radical Hope – Art and the Space of the Not-Yet
In this presentation, Tereza Violet Stehlikova draws on ideas from her book Exiled from Our Bodies: How to Come Back to Our Senses to explore radical hope as something that emerges not through technological optimisation, innovation or the promise of ever-greater control, but through our capacity to remain open to the unresolved, the ambiguous and the not-yet-formed. Reflecting on art’s ability to create liminal spaces in which habitual ways of seeing begin to dissolve, she considers how both art and nature can open up new possibilities for perception, meaning and transformation. The talk will also include a screening of Stehlikova’s 2011 film Nameless Wood, whose exploration of landscape, atmosphere and sensory attention remains deeply connected to these concerns.
12.40 – 13.30 ROUND TABLE: 10 years of Ecstatic Truth – Hope in an Age of Uncertainty
Birgitta Hosea, Tereza Violet Stehlikova, Pedro Serrazina, Natalie Woolf, Holger Lang
UNDER_the_RADAR screenings:
@ Angewandte Auditorium, Vordere Zollamtsstrasse 7, 1030 Vienna
18:00 Competition 2
19:30 Competition 3
Wednesday, 29.04.2026
Ecstatic Truth X: Animating Hope – Workshop
@ Animation Studio OKP, Ferstel-Trakt, Dachgeschoss (DG) – Attic, University of the Applied Arts Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka Platz 2, A 1010 Vienna
9.30 – 13.00 WORKSHOP:
Co-Designing Participatory Animation: Exploring Collaborative Approaches to Animation Making
Nairy Eivazy/Natalie Woolf
This workshop examines how animation’s narrative, visual strategies, and unique language can function as a collaborative framework for bringing diverse voices together. Centering collaboration within the animation-making process, it explores participatory approaches that invite public engagement into creative and hands-on production. Working in small groups, participants will collectively develop methods through mapping, discussion, and prototyping, fostering shared authorship, dialogue, and meaningful exchange across diverse backgrounds. The co-designed methods will then be tested and activated through the collective creation of short stop-motion animation prototypes.
13.30 – 14.00 Workshop roundtable discussion
UNDER_the_RADAR events:
@ Animation Studio OKP, Ferstel-Trakt, Dachgeschoss (DG) – Attic, University of the Applied Arts Vienna, Oskar Kokoschka Platz 2, A 1010 Vienna
18:00 Competition 4
19:00 Competition 5
20:00 (approx.) Awards Ceremony – with jury members Tereza Stehlíková, Andrijana Ružić and Barbara Luisi
20:30 (approx.) Drink and Celebrate
Expanded Animation 