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: