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.
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)
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.
Here is the text of a presentation I gave at the Expanded Animation symposium about the judging process for the Computer Animation category at Prix Ars Electronica this year.
Initial discussions
Introducing the jury
I’m here on behalf of the 2019 Prix Ars Electronica Computer Animation jury – Ferdi Alici, Ina Conradi, Nobuaki Doi, Birgitta Hosea, Alex Verhaest.
We come from Turkey, Singapore, Japan, UK and Belgium. Our joint expertise ranges from artist, animator, curator to animation theorist and most of us are involved in a mixture of all of those activities.
I thought I’d start off by talking about how the judging process works. It was actually very difficult.
The judging process
There were (I believe) 828 entries in the Computer Animation category this year including 5 nominations by each of the jury members. The type of work varied enormously from very slick CGI productions by professional top-end agencies to less polished works from students and emerging artists. It was thrilling to watch the variety on offer and we really felt like we were getting a snapshot of what is cutting edge in computer animation in 2019.
The process of selection takes several stages. Before the judging starts in Linz, each juror watches films at home in order to get familiar with the entries. After the initial preselection, there are three full days of further discussion and voting by the jury. The idea is to first narrow down the entries under consideration and then to select the final fifteen. Sometimes there was a consensus of opinions while we were doing this and we were in total agreement and at other times we had quite heated disagreements. When this happened, decisions were taken by majority vote. At all times, the jury was very mindful of the impact and exposure that winning an award can have on the recipient’s profile and future career. It could change someone’s life. Because of this, we tried to recognise independent artists and small studios over major industry players.
Coming up with judging criteria
At all times we felt a very strong sense of responsibility about who would be chosen and why. We wanted to be very fair. Although you could argue that all animation, however it is made, is computer animation these days, we particularly wanted to make a strong statement about what we thought the Computer Animation category at Ars Electronica in its 40th anniversary should represent. We realised that computer animation encompasses many different forms. It is no longer simply a category for short films. It can be installation, It can be VR, AR, MR. It might be sculpture. it might be on the web. It might be software or a game or a visualisation of data.
We mainly watched the entries on screen, but we also spent time experiencing immersive works from inside VR headsets. Since computer animation can take so many different forms, we were very concerned that our selection would represent the variety of different approaches that animation can take. That was something we talked about a lot. We thought a lot about how people are playing games, how people are communicating through animation, how animation can visualise ecological issues, gender issues, all kind of different social and political themes. And how this can be communicated to the viewer.
In our judgements we really wanted to reward works that weren’t just dealing with aesthetics or form, or clever new techniques. We wanted to see ideas, thinking and investigation, so we selected works that demonstrated individual authorship, independence of vision and thoughtfulness. Even more than technical prowess, we valued meaning, daring and emotional risk.
We had to make some very difficult choices. For example, there were some very accomplished traditionally made animations that we rated highly as animated films, but we did not think they fitted a category called ‘Computer Animation’. There were some technically brilliant examples of animation techniques that we greatly admired, but lacked content and we just did not feel moved by. And there were also examples of very innovative and engaging cutting edge short films that we just could not consider as being examples of animation.
Trends we saw this year
As I said earlier, seeing the range of selections is like watching a software fashion show. Technical trends that we observed included processes such as algorithmic generation; point clouds that present a machine view of the world; artful photographic manipulation with Touch Designer; impossible Octane objects that show cartoon reality in CGI rather than the known laws of the physical universe; stylish graphic combinations of 3d mo-cap and 2D rendering; machinima animations that use existing game engines and various inventive methods to render live data. Common themes in terms of content that emerged from the works included personal issues – such as gender, sexuality, relationships, social inclusion, body image and mental health – as well as wider social and geo-political issues – such as migration, the impact of mass communication networks, ecological devastation and impending extinction.
The VR entries become more sophisticated year upon year. We noted how this year’s entries really play with point of view, misdirection, voyeurism and empathy to enhance storytelling and emotional affect. In addition, some of the entries played particular attention to the viewers experience in the world outside the headset by creating sensory experiences in the physical environments in which the VR was encountered that complemented the effect of the work.
Further thoughts/conclusion
Before introducing you to the winner and the two special mentions, I just wanted to end on a few concluding thoughts:
As animators we can conjure powerful visions through our fingertips and we must take responsibility for the messages we portray. We should be careful to avoid becoming totally absorbed by the technology and to remember that we are communicating ideas to an audience, not just showcasing the latest clever techniques. As a jury, we hope to continue to see animation that does more than technically innovate, but has the vision and bravery to engage with the complexity of topical issues in contemporary society and the sensitivity to portray intimate, personal, human experience.
Juergen Hagler presents the Expanded Animation book.
Mental illness is too often a shameful and misunderstood topic that people do not want to talk about in public. It can be hard to understand if you have not personally experienced it. Although we were not without cynicism for the cliché of VR as an empathy machine, as several jury members had personal knowledge of friends or family with a bipolar disorder, we found it moving to be taken through the experiences of the filmmaker’s brother and sister and to hear them talk about it through first-hand accounts left as messages on her voicemail. Scenarios such as being trapped in a small room and then flying through the ceiling to touch the stars served as a metaphor for the rush of mania after a depressive episode. Above all, we applauded the work’s ambition to use expanded animation technology to seek understanding for a debilitating condition.
With a clever script that mixes chat messaging with programming language in a nostalgic retro gaming aesthetic, Strings addresses online gaming and the loneliness of remote communication. Chasing ghostly algorithms within a discarded game, the narrator searches through data banks for traces of a lost cyber, femme fatale who has once caressed him pixel by pixel, but can no longer be found. The jury was enamoured with the highly poetic treatment of this story of lost love and the loneliness of social media. They also found the idea of a lost world of forgotten games to be moving and thought provoking.
Inspired by her love for the famous soccer player Renaldo, in this installation the artist Cindy Coutant has created a virtual character with whom she can have a deep personal relationship. Undershoot pays tribute to the deeply personal need to connect through all of the senses – sound, touch, and smell – with the image on the screen and real person. The animation is emotionally charged and enhanced by the physical installation. The jury was moved by the honesty of the piece. Undershoot provokes the social, cultural, and ethical standards of the current technology, screen-based and social media infatuation. We are in constant communication with everything around us through machines. As such, it is a tribute to lost emotional connection, intimacy, and materiality.
Juergen Hagler presents the Expanded Animation book.
Expanded Animation 