animation conference

ET X: Animating Hope

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An overview of Ecstatic Truth X: Animating Hope which was part of the UNDER_the_RADAR 2026 festival in Vienna.

Day 1: 26.04.26 Opening events

Events started in Q21 Museum Quarter with UNDER_the_RADAR’s exhibition launch for Juergen Hagler and co’s interactive project in the ASIFAKEIL gallery that responded to the movements of passers by. There was also screenings and presentations in Raum D.

Day 2: 27.04.26 Keynote 1: Juergen Hagler

The symposium took place at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. In his keynote, Hagler presented a critical overview of the development of AI animation and outlined the details of his team’s ethical use of AI to animate the archives of Austrian artist Clemens Brosch for a forthcoming centenary exhibition. Whilst acknowledging the limitations of AI, he argued for the hope that it can be a useful tool in the hand of trained experts, but should not be used to offload the process of creativity to or as a substitute for learning and deep engagement with the disciplines of animation, storytelling and visual communication. 

PANEL 1 Ecstatic Truth: Uncertainty, Speculation and the Not-Yet

In the first panel, Bahar Kiamoghaddam, Isaac Parkinson, X. (aka Xavier Gorgol) and Andrijana Ružić gave presentations that wove together themes of animation’s potential for active hope, for what can we believe in at this post digital moment when there is no longer faith in the indexical truth of photography as evidence. What is the truth? Manipulated animated images can be used to falsify the representation of current events (BK), but they can also be used to present different forms of reality, other forms of ‘ecstatic truth’ as Werner Herzog termed it. So animation can be based on clearly authored and positioned witness statements; it can distill complex arguments into powerful memes or create computational assemblages of multimodal forms of data, such as Forensic Architecture, who use the tools of animation to argue for interpretations of events based on diagrammatic representations pieced together with mass collective testimonies formed out of cross referenced personal archives on social media and publicly available open source information that provide evidence and material support for campaigning investigations (IP). Animation can also be used to re-narrate and re-assemble traumatic events, providing the opportunity for close examination and propositions for alternative endings (BK). This might involve the re-animation of personal archives of images and objects to change the story and come to terms with the past. Animation can go beyond the indexical to present many subjective ways of being in the world such as queer, gender nonconforming and intersex epistemologies and, thus, act as a form of resistance to prejudiced ways of thinking (X). This brings to mind the ethics of philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who argued for authentic encounter with the Other. An example of this is the work of William Kentridge whose charcoal smudges give a space to the ghosts of past injustice. Kentridge’s embodied studio practice becomes a moment of thick time in which the process of drawing and animating becomes a process of contemplation and sense making, a safe space for uncertainty, failure and the ‘less good idea’, a praxis of hope in which insight emerges from the activity of making. Kentridge’s collective projects in his Centre for the Less Good Idea in Johannesburg were also considered as a hopeful symbol of collective creativity (AR). Finally, we were reminded of Herzog in his new book saying that the truth may be fragile but we must never stop searching for it (TS). 

Keynote 2: Pedro Serrazina

In his retrospective screening at RAUM D, Pedro Serrazina presented his interest in space and the built environment, raising issues about gentrification and how animation might unify and connect people. His installation, ‘Shadows of Ourselves’ re-storied the venue into a space of wonder through abstract patterns of light and shade, because ‘when we forget empathy and acceptance of the other, we become shadows of ourselves’. 

Day 3: 28.04.26 Keynote 3: Gabrielle Jutz

Gabrielle Jutz’s keynote ‘How to Film a Forest in the Anthropocene’ contrasted two approaches to animated documentary and a dilemma – is the filmmaker’s own personal viewpoint the only strategy or could it ever possible to capture some kind of posthuman viewpoint in which nature is in the forefront and the anthropocentric human bias removed. 

PANEL 2 Changing perspectives: On Hope and Recovery

In Panel 2, Osi Wald, Virgilio Vasconcelos and Rares Augustin Craiut presented perspectives on the use of animation for shifting paradigms. OW showed animated loops of protest and quiet domestic moments created as a methodology for survival, persistence and resistance in a time of war. In an interesting discussion, the loop was variously considered as the therapeutic holding onto a comforting moment or perhaps a permanent imprisonment  within a situation that never changes and you can’t break out of or perhaps even, when conceived of as a spiral or in three dimensions, it could be viewed from different angles. Does technology trap us into particular modes of thinking or worldviews? Can the core methods of animation resist this? In traditional frame-by-frame animation, we continually flip between views of the past and the present in order to make the future. VV connected this with the anthropophagia art movement of 1920s Brazil. In an attempt to decolonise their artworks, Brazilian artists of this period looked to the autophagy rituals of their ancestors as a metaphor. Condemned as cannibalism by the colonisers, these were not about eating other humans for food but a ritual to digest and assimilate the powers of noble enemies, a process of synthesis and reflection. These artists considered themselves to be collectively digesting and synthesising the art forms of their colonisers. Gen-AI was proposed as a form of commodified cannibalism in which the ideas of others are extracted and sold. Continuing the theme of digestion, we were all invited by RAC to eat chocolate as a form of sensory participation in his story from a childhood in communist Romania. With reference to Suzanne Buchan on pervasive animation, through the symbolic action of eating chocolate, animation was proposed as a form of material transformation and sensory, affective encounter. 

Keynote 4: Tereza Violet Stehlikova

In her presentation, ‘Radical Hope – Art and the Space of the Not-Yet’, Tereza Violet Stehlikova drew 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. 

Panel 3: Ecstatic Truth @ 10 years discussion with Birgitta Hosea, Tereza Violet Stehlikova, Pedro Serrazina, Natalie Woolf, Holger Lang

At the intersection of experimental practices in expanded animation and post documentary, for over 10 years we have organised symposia with multiple approaches and perspectives. Our concern has never been to restrict, to categorise or to propose narrow definitions of animated documentary, but to open it out by considering the many intersecting issues on the fringes of this concept. Using Werner Herzog’s notion of ecstatic truth as a stratum of truth that exceeds the merely factual, we have sought to promote discussion of innovative approaches to animation that are socially engaged and based in lived, embodied experience. As a small, voluntary, international collective, we have been able to be agile in our choice of themes and ours were the first symposia in animation studies on niche topics such as colonialism, absurdity, embodiment, AI, decoloniality and practice-based research. The discussion concluded with a call for new collaborators to join us and invigorate future versions of Ecstatic Truth.

Our final thought was that hope can be practised: it is both a verb as well as a noun.

Day 4: 29.04.26

The final day featured a workshop, ‘Co-Designing Participatory Animation: Exploring Collaborative Approaches to Animation Making’ by Nairy Eivazy and 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.

The workshop is led by Nairy Eivazy and Natalie Woolf, members of Animating Together, a FilmEU dynamic cluster that explores the transformative potential of collective storytelling through participatory animation.https://www.filmeu.eu/research/dynamic-clusters/animating-together FilmEU is a European university alliance that brings together leading institutions across Europe to collaborate on education, research, and innovation in film and media arts.

This was all complemented by screenings at the UNDER_the_RADAR festival

Ecstatic Truth X was organised by Birgitta Hosea, Tereza Violet Stehlikova, Pedro Serrazina and Natalie Woolf in collaboration with Holger Lang and the UNDER_the_RADAR festival. The team are all grateful to Nikolaus Jantsch from University of the Applied Arts Vienna for generously hosting our events.

Pictures by Birgitta Hosea, Tereza Violet Stehlikova, Pedro Serrazina, Holger Lang and Juergen Hagler

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
This presentation explores how animation serves as a tool for resistance in contemporary Iran through two speeds: “fast” and “slow.” In moments of digital isolation, animation functions as a rapid-response language, turning fragmented, low-quality smuggled data into clear visual testimony. In contrast, stop-motion workshops with the Iranian diaspora represent a “slow” methodology; a frame-by-frame process of reclaiming agency. By analyzing these two modes, the talk demonstrates how animation allows for the reclamation of a future and the persistence of hope during periods of intense repression.

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

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. Synaesthetic Syntax IV: The Ghost vs the Machine

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Infinitely Yours,  Miwa Matreyek, Golden Nica winner, Prix Ars Electronica 2020

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.

Submission is via Oxford Abstracts at this link: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/5966/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.

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.

Synaesthetic Syntax: Gestures of Resistance

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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)

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.