conference

ETX / U_t_R 2026: Schedule

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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

CFP – Ecstatic Truth X: Animating Hope

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Ecstatic Truth X: Animating Hope: Utopias, Uncertainties, Simulation, and Documentary Possibility

In association with UNDER_the_RADAR Festival and University of Applied Arts, Vienna, we are calling for papers for our next symposium on April 27th and 28th, which will take place at the University for the Applied Arts in Vienna

Deadline for proposals is 14th Feb 2026
Submit proposals here via Oxford Abstracts:  https://tinyurl.com/3tm6dkc3.

Image by Holger Lang


Ecstatic Truth is an annual symposium on themes arising from documentary animation as framed by Werner Herzog’s notion of a stratum of truth that exceeds the merely factual. In the 1999 Minnesota Declaration, Herzog contrasted the norm-making force of facts with an ‘ecstatic truth’, a deeper illumination, arguing that artifice can be a legitimate pathway to truth.

Documentary animation is uniquely positioned to operate in that register. By design it can render what live-action cannot—memories and dreams, internal states and dispersed timescales—expanding the range and depth of what documentary can show us about the world. In other words, animation openly declares its artifice while still aiming at the real, turning representational constraint into epistemic advantage. Our contemporary situation complicates this task. As Yuval Noah Harari observes, we live in a world ‘deluged by irrelevant information’ and where censorship often means flooding publics with distraction rather than blocking data outright. Animated Documentary’s contribution, then, could be to gain power through clarity, not to mimic the torrent but to compose it—to convert data into meaning, and information into felt knowledge.

Our tenth-anniversary theme – Animating Hope – treats hope, through Ernst Bloch’s perspective; not as naïve uplift but as a resistant orientation toward the “not-yet,” a wager that transformation remains possible even when the present seems unlivable. In this spirit, we welcome work that engages speculative traditions where imagining other worlds is itself a critical method, Afrofuturism reimagines and reclaims past and present through a Black cultural lens to prototype liberatory futures; queer futurity, following José Esteban Muñoz, directs attention to what could be, rather than only what is—treating the horizon of possibility as a guide for both practice and understanding. Alongside situated work from Serbia and Ukraine and Gaza-based initiatives such as Letters to Gaza and animator Haneen’s workshops, bringing hope to communities in practical ways. We also recognise emergent symbolic practices—such as the Gen Z protesters adoption of the One Piece Jolly Roger, as visual tactics of solidarity and hope.

Under the sign of ecstatic truth, we therefore invite practice-based, theoretical, and historical contributions that test how animated documentary can make hope operational—stylistically, ethically, and politically. What techniques (abstraction, rotoscope, collage, data-driven or hand-drawn worlds) help transmute ‘information’ into clarity without forfeiting complexity? How might artists signal invention while safeguarding participants and contexts? In what ways do speculative prototypes—challenges to the rule of AI and technological presets—and the situated practices above—function as forms of research, resistance, and survival? And above all: how can documentary animation shine “hope in the darkest places,” converting the seen and the unseeable into the kind of truth that moves us to act?

References: 

Harari, Yuval Noah. (2018). 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Spiegel & Grau
Bloch, Ernst. (1995). The Principle of Hope. Cambridge, Mass. :MIT Press,

Themes

We invite practitioners and theorists working in non-fictional animation to consider the following questions:

Animating Hope: Utopias, Resistance, and Futures

  • How can animation embody hope as a form of resistance in times of political, social, or ecological crisis?
  • Is hope enough, or how might it be leveraged against overwhelming powers? (cf. Tolkien’s notion of fighting even when the ‘dragon’ is stronger).
  • What lessons can be drawn from past moments of collective hope, such as 1968, for today’s political and artistic futures?
  • How do Afrofuturism, queer futurity, and speculative practices (e.g., Octavia Butler, José Esteban Muñoz) expand the documentary imagination?

Methods, Media, and Resistance

  • What new methodologies can artists and scholars develop in the age of global capitalism to imagine and document alternative futures?
  • How might animation serve as a counter to despair, protest fatigue, and media-political control?
  • In what ways does the act of creating art itself constitute a conscious form of resistance?

Hope, Politics, and the Public Sphere

  • How does hope function as dialogue, as an antidote to blame culture, and as a means of standing against state or corporate control?
  • What role do economic structures play in shaping, restricting, or enabling documentary animation as a resistant practice?
  • How can language and translation (e.g., English as a dominant mode) shape or constrain documentary storytelling?

Technology, AI, and Documentary Uncertainty

  • How do deepfakes, AI, and algorithmic media complicate questions of authenticity, indexicality, and truth in documentary animation?
  • Can AI meaningfully contribute to documentary practices, or does it collapse difference and risk reducing meaning-making to economic pressures?
  • How do we negotiate between the personal, affective touch of human-made documentary and the commercial, automated logics of AI?

Ecstatic Truth in Dark Times

  • How can documentary animation shine “hope in the darkest places” (John Berger)?
  • What does it mean to create ecstatic truth in the face of apocalypse, collapse, or uncertainty?
  • How might acts of celebration, gathering, or even “partying in the face of the apocalypse” offer alternative modes of resistance, memory, or testimony?

Submission Details

We call for papers, presentations and responses on our themes of animating hope, 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/3tm6dkc3. You will be prompted to create a free account with Oxford Abstracts.

Your submission should include:

  • Title of your presentation
  • Abstract Please enter a brief summary of your proposed presentation with at least 2-3 references (max 500 words including bibliographic references)
  • Biography – a short bio of max 200 words, including 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.

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. 

This year, we are in collaboration with UNDER_the_RADAR Festival and University of Applied Arts, Vienna and are open to proposals for future collaboration with other organisations.

Contact: ecstatic.truth.symposium{at}gmail.com

Ecstatic Truth collective: 

Birgitta Hosea, Animation Research Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham;
Pedro Serrazina, Universidade Lusófona, Lisboa; 
Tereza Stehliková, University of Creative Communication (VŠKK), Prague; 
Natalie Woolf,  Universidade Lusófona, Lisboa.

Ecstatic Truth is supported by: 

AP3: Decolonising Animation

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The latest issue of Animation Practice, Process and Production on the theme of Decolonising Animation is now out through Intellect. Co-edited by Birgitta Hosea, Helen Starr, Pedro Serrazina, Natalie Woolf and Tereza Stehlikova with contributions from Diwas Bisht, Paula Callus, Mark Chavez, Ina Conradi, Tara Douglas, Nairy Eivazy, Liliana Conlisk Gallegos, Maybelle Peters, Susan Sloan, Helen Starr and Yijing Wang.

In their editorial article ‘Decolonizing Animation’, Birgitta Hosea and Helen Starr provide an introduction to key ideas from the decolonial thinkers who form the theoretical framework for this issue and how these ideas might enliven the thinking and making of animation.

This edition of the journal is based on the symposium Ecstatic Truth VII: Decolonising Animation, which was held at the University for the Creative Arts in Farnham in 2023. Thanks to all the contributors, the publications team at Intellect, my colleagues at UCA who supported the event and also to the executive editors of the AP3 journal. Cover art courtesy of Liliana Conlisk Gallegos.

To view a live streamed webcast from Thurs 18th May 2023 of all the original presentations at Ecstatic Truth VII: Decolonizing Animation – click here

CALL FOR PAPERS – Ecstatic Truth VIII

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Ecstatic Truth VIII: Animation and Documentary in Times of Artificial Intelligence
19th April 2024, Auditório José Araújo, Universidade Lusófona de Lisboa, Portugal

Close up of little Nemo and Mickey Mouse, walking side by side with Lara Croft in Lisbon City (image generated in collaboration with Deepai.com)

Submission deadline 23-02-2024
Outcome notification 08-03-2024
Submit proposals here: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/9932/submitter

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. 

An AI Call For Papers

The 8th edition of Ecstatic Truth will be dedicated to the impact of AI in image making, animation and documentary processes. 

To fully immerse us into the context, we worked with an AI interface to produce this year’s Call For Papers: we used a previous description of the Ecstatic Truth symposium framework and had it “improved” by AI; we gave AI the general topics that concern us and would like to address and, through an interesting “dialogue”, came to the following result. The text below is the result of that interaction, between the Ecstatic Truth team and AI. If this is the future, we may face it sooner rather than later:

A generic AI description of Ecstatic Truth:

“In an age where mere facts often give way to the accountant’s reality, the influence of artificial intelligence and manipulated imagery has opened new frontiers in the realm of image-making and documentary practices. As Werner Herzog insightfully stated, it is the ecstatic truth – a poetic reality – that can more faithfully capture the nuanced depths of human experiences. As we navigate this landscape marked by the proliferation of artificial intelligence and the deliberate manipulation of visual content, we find ourselves at the heart of a transformative era in documentary filmmaking. As a reaction to that, we instructed AI to write the following CFP and invite you to join us in Lisbon for a symposium focused on the theme of “Animation and Documentary Practices in times of Artificial Intelligence.”

Animation and Documentary in Times of Artificial Intelligence – CALL FOR PAPERS

“In a world where any image can be artificially generated, questions abound regarding the evolving role of the animator and the definition of the animated image in contemporary filmmaking. Furthermore, how do we navigate the discourse surrounding documentary, especially animation documentary, in the age of AI? Are we witnessing the gradual replacement of the animator by AI? Is AI-driven animation merely an escape from reality, or can it be harnessed to address pressing societal issues? How can animation, especially in the documentary context, grapple with the veracity of the image and the challenges posed by deepfake technology? How do we navigate notions of truth and authenticity in the digital age? 

This symposium, guided by an intersectional perspective, seeks to explore the profound impact of AI and digital manipulation on our understanding of the human experience and the possibilities for alternate realities. Just as colonialism disrupted local and indigenous knowledge systems, AI challenges our perceptions of reality and truth. How can we articulate and navigate the complexities of AI’s influence on our visual culture and society? Can animation, in its various forms, liberate us from the distorted realities created by artificial intelligence? We invite and encourage discussions on form, strategy, and the ethical considerations surrounding AI-generated imagery in our quest to explore “Animation in times of Artificial Intelligence.” 

Call for Papers

The “Animation and Documentary in Times of Artificial Intelligence Symposium” invites scholars, filmmakers, animators, and artists to submit papers and proposals that delve into the multifaceted realm of animation in the age of artificial intelligence. We welcome contributions that explore but are not limited to the following themes:

  • The evolving role of the animator in the context of AI.
  • The definition and significance of the animated image in contemporary filmmaking.
  • Documentary practices and animation in the era of AI.
  • The ethical implications of AI-driven animation and deepfake technology.
  • Narratives and storytelling in AI-generated animation.
  • The challenges and opportunities presented by AI in animation production.
  • The impact of AI on the veracity of the image in documentary practices.
  • Discussions on the intersection of truth, authenticity, and AI in the digital age.
  • Case studies, artistic projects, and innovative approaches related to animation and AI.

Submission Guidelines

Authors are invited to submit their paper abstracts (up to 300 words) along with a brief bio (up to 150 words) via our online submission platform. Deadline for abstract submission is 23 February, 2024.

Important Dates

  • Abstract Submission Deadline: 23-02-2024
  • Notification of Acceptance: 08-03-2024
  • Symposium Date: 19-04-2024

Join us in Lisbon for a symposium that promises to explore the frontiers of animation, documentary, and artificial intelligence. We look forward to engaging in vibrant discussions, sharing insights, and advancing our understanding of “Animation in Times of Artificial Intelligence.”

This comprehensive call for papers [has been created by AI and hopefully it should highlight] the 

symposium’s theme, key topics of interest, submission guidelines, and important dates, offering a clear and engaging invitation to potential contributors.

Is there anything else I can help you with today?”

—

Submission Details

We call for papers, presentations and responses on our themes of artificial intelligence, in all its different manifestations, in relation to non-fiction manipulated moving image and animated documentary, in their most expanded forms.

Submission should be completed via Oxford Abstracts, at this link: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/9932/submitter

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.

Synaesthetic Syntax IV: The Ghost vs the Machine

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The last of our series of 4 symposiums investigating the sensory dimensions of expanded animation took place at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria on 10th September 2023. Jointly organised and hosted by Juergen Hagler and Birgitta Hosea, the speakers were: Camille Baker, Darren Woodland, Tome Sone, Louis-Philippe Demers & Bill Vorn, Friedrich Kirschner, Julian Salhofer & Leoni Voegelin, Max Hattler, Johannes DeYoung, Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet Sola and Keynote Speaker Ghislaine Boddington.

All the presentations are archived and can be viewed here:

Panel 1: The Haptic Body in Action

Panel 2: Agency in Performance

Panel 3: Liveness and Procedural Animation

A very big thanks to Ars Electronica and the staff and students of the University of Upper Austria, Hagenburg for all their support and hosting this event for the last 4 years. We are planning a publication to bring together selected presentations from the events.

Ecstatic Truth VII: Decolonising Animation

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To view a live streamed webcast from Thurs 18th May of all presentations – click here

Birgitta Hosea, Pedro Serrazina, Helen Starr, Tereza Stehlikova and Natalie Woolf are currently editing a guest edition of the the Animation Practice, Process and Production journal (AP3) for IntellectBooks with written versions of the papers given at this symposium.

09:30 – 19:00 (GMT), 18 May 2023 

 UCA Farnham Campus, Room RG21, Falkner Road, Farnham, Surrey, GU9 7DS

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. 

For more info about the schedule and to book: https://www.uca.ac.uk/events/research/ecstatictruthvii/

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.


Call for papers – Ecstatic Truth VII: Decolonising Animation

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EXTENDED Submission 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).

Ecstatic Truth VI: To Attend

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International symposium in which expanded animation and experimental moving image intersect with documentary, 22nd April 2022, University of Creative Communication, Prague, Czech Republic 

Symposium programme

View the presentations here:

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

Call for Papers: Ecstatic Truth VI

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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.

The deadline for proposals for papers is 10th January 2022. For more information, go here: https://tangibleterritory.art/2021/11/14/ecstatic-truth-vi-to-attend.

Synaesthetic Syntax II: Seeing Sound / Hearing Vision

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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.

For more information go to https://expandedanimation.com/#12-09-2021

All talks are archived on the Expanded Animation You Tube channel.

Birgitta Hosea/Juergen Hagler, co-organisers