Rose Bond. Earths to Come. Interdisciplinary collaboration with composer inti figgis-vizueta and Roomful of Teeth, Barishnikov Arts Centre, 2022
Johannes DeYoung. Exploded Ensemble performing with The Endless Mile in A Road with Trees, an intermedia performance exhibition at WQED Studios. Procedurally animated video scroll and sound performance at WQED Studios, Pittsburgh, PA: photography by Kevin Lorenzi, 2023
Birgitta Hosea. dotdot dash. Live performance with InspiralLondon in a tunnel, Ebbsfleet, Kent. Photographed by Gemina Broadbridge. 2018
Miwa Matrayek.Infinitely Yours. Live performance with animation. Golden Nica for Computer Animation at Ars Electronica, 2020
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.
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.
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 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)
My installation, Holes, ran at ASIFAKEIL, Q21, Vienna from 1/12/21 – 20/2/22.
I gave a presentation about the installation at Belvedere 21 Museum of Contemporary Art for the Under_the_Radar festival in Vienna on 27th March 2022.
I’ll be giving an updated version of this talk at Animafest Scanner IX as part of the Zagreb Animation Festival on 7-8th June 2022.
Some stills from the film, that has sound design by Anat Ben-David:
The short film, Holes, that is shown in the installation has just started on the film festival circuit and has so far been shown at:
A version of Holes (the installation) is included in Fission: The New Wave of International Digital Art at Guizhou Provincial Museum from 29th April – 31st August 2022.
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.
Submission deadline: 30th June 2021 Symposium details: Sunday 12th September 2021, Ars Electronica, Linz, Austria (online) Submit proposals here:https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ea2021
In the age of pandemic, our previously normal experiences of human touch and intimate proximity have become mediated by the screen rather than felt directly. We can no longer hear live music and feel the sonic vibrations; see a painting’s texture in close proximity; become immersed in the events of live theatre or engage in debate: these events are now bounded by the flat rectangular screen and limited by the extent of the pixels in our screen’s resolution.
Under these conditions, how can animation, in combination with music or audio art, re-engage us with bodily sensations received through the senses?
Coming together as a series of online events, this year’s Expanded Animation (http:/ /www.expandedanimation.com)symposium at Ars Electronica continues a dialogue about relationships between the senses, in particular the auditory and the visual. What are the rules, principles, and processes that govern correlations between sound and animation? How might these embodied sensations be explored, unpacked and reassembled in our age of virtual communication intensified by COVID-19?
Keynote Speaker: Refik Anadol
Our Keynote Speaker is media artist, director and pioneer in the aesthetics of data and machine intelligence, Refik Anadol. His body of work locates creativity at the intersection of humans and machines. In taking the data that flows around us as the primary material and the neural network of a computerized mind as a collaborator, Anadol paints with a thinking brush, offering us radical visualizations of our digitized memories and expanding the possibilities of architecture, narrative, and the body in motion. Anadol’s site-specific AI datasculptures, liveaudio/visual performances, and immersive installations take many forms, while encouraging us to rethink our engagement with the physical world, its temporal and spatial dimensions, and the creative potential of machines.
Submission Guidelines
In response to these themes, we call for academics and artists to propose 20-minute papers that bring the disciplines of music, audio art and animation together from a variety of perspectives: from historical, theoretical or critical perspectives to new and surprising practice. If the paper is practice-based, it should include reflection and contextualisation in addition to presenting the practice.
The proposal should include an abstract of no more than 500 words (including references) and a short biography of no more than 200 words.
In the field ‘Title and Abstract’ please enter the text for both your abstract and your bio. Do not submit a web link instead of a bio. This information can also be attached as a PDF document.
List of Topics
Suggested topics include:
Hearing Colour Seeing Sound Can music become visual? How did pioneers of visual music such as Oskar Fischinger and Mary Ellen Bute translate melody, harmony and rhythm into the form of animation? And can moving drawings become music? How can historic and / or contemporary practice demonstrate synaesthetic syntax?
In front of your eyes and ears With a perceived disparity between the slow time taken to create animation and the instant time taken to perform music, how can animation be performed live? Can the audio and the visual be combined in improvised performance? How can live, hand scribing or music notation or coding or drawing be used to conjure spontaneous audio-visual performance? What is gained from real-time, instant creation in the present moment? What does it mean for ‘liveness’ to experience this at home through a screen rather than being fully present at the event?
Rhythmanalysis Repetition and difference is at the heart of rhythm, at the heart of the algorithm, at the heart of animation, at the heart of lived experience. Rhythm is everywhere. From the natural – visceral, internal rhythms of the body breathing and the heart pumping or the slow changing of the seasons; to the artificial – externally imposed rhythms ordering us through the ticktock of mechanical clock-time or the ebb and flow of economic cycles. How does rhythm connect audio and animation? What might animation learn from audio and music theory and vice versa?
A Return to the Material In an age of digital synthesis and screen-based connections is there a craving for a return to the material? Do we long for haptic feedback and analogue experience: the touch of guitar strings, the feel of charcoal smearing under the fingers, banging a drum, painting on film? Is this simply a form of nostalgia or might it be thought through in new ways? How can it be brought together in the audio-visual?
Organising Committee
The symposium is jointly organised 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
Dr Max Hattler, School of Creative Media, CityU, Hong Kong
Laura Lee, Audio Research Cluster, UCA
Dr Vicky Smith, Animation Research Centre, UCA
Dr Harry Whalley, Audio Research Cluster, UCA
Venue
The conference will be held online as part of Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. The media festival will take place on 8th-12th of September 2021 under the motto “A New Digital Deal – How the Digital World Could Work” (https://ars.electronica.art/newdigitaldeal/en/).
Preface written by: Anna Furse. Foreword written by: Bonnie Marranca
Part of the Drawing In series, edited by Russell Marshall, Marsha Meskimmon and Phil Sawdon.
The first book to be published on performance drawing, Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945establishes a vibrant art movement that has been progressively burgeoning since 1945 and contextualises today’s contemporary approaches while questioning what is drawing and what is performance. Each chapter focuses on a different perspective of performance drawing. Embracing the different voices and various lenses, the authors combine individual yet critical methodologies. While embedded in ephemerality and immediacy, the themes encompass body and energy; time and motion; light and space; imagined and observed, demonstrating how drawing can act as a performative tool. The dynamic interaction leads to a collective understanding of the term performance drawing and addresses the key developments and future directions of this applied drawing process.
The book includes a consideration of drawing with a number of technologies; of live animation; of the lightning sketch stage act and recontextualises a number of expanded cinema works as acts of drawing.
Endorsements:
“Performance Drawing represents a highly developed record of practice-based research, tracing the developments in contemporary drawing, building on precedents that have led to emerging trends. It analyzes the radical departure from the acceptance of drawing as a canonical medium based on mark-making on two-dimensional surfaces, into real space towards performance, light projections, film and the use of new technologies. The texts brilliantly place all these developments into a clearly articulated context.” – Therese Bolliger, artist, Canada
“While narrative forms of drawing have found favor through numerous exhibitions and publications world-wide, drawing as an inherently process-driven performative event is still lacking accessible comprehensive theoretical research. Bridging two centuries of contemporary practice, Performance Drawing will fill a huge gap for artists, teachers, scholars and art publics.” – François Morelli, Concordia University, Canada
“A valuable historical primer that examines key examples of performance drawing from the last half-century and challenges established definitions and categorisations. The authors draw a picture of the changing boundaries between art forms, showing how the blurred lines between artistic disciplines are the product of an active performative process. In addition to practitioners, this should be read by anyone interested in emerging art practices.” – Malcom Cook, Associate Professor in Film, University of Southampton
On Thursday 2 July at 6pm, artists Jessica Ashman, Anna Bunting-Branch, Birgitta Hosea and Michelle Kranot will present their work and discuss the opportunities and challenges of working with live performance and technology. All four work with animation in their practice and are going beyond the single screen to create immersive worlds where performance is integrated into their work. More info here: https://animateprojects.org/accelerate-sessions-female-figures
Faced with the infinite possibilities of faking through digital production, might there be a craving to return to that which is material and sensible: work that is improvised, spontaneous and can be experienced fully with all the senses? A move away from simulated, synthetic perfection to the handcrafted and the imperfect, which evidences the trace of human touch and intimate presence?
This year the Expanded Animation events at Ars Electronica extend into a dialogue about relationships between the senses, in particular the auditory and the visual. What are the rules, principles, and processes that govern correlations between sound and animation? How might these be explored, unpacked and reassembled?
Keynote Speaker
Our Keynote Speaker is media artist, Rose Bond, who produces work at the juncture of cinema, animation and experiential design. She will be presenting her latest animated collaboration with the Oregon Symphony Orchestra on a live performance of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia.
Submission Guidelines
In response to these themes, we call for academics and artists to propose 20-minute papers that bring the disciplines of music, audio art and animation together from a variety of perspectives: from historical or theoretical analysis to new and surprising practice.
The proposal should include an abstract of no more than 500 words (including references) and a short biography of no more than 200 words.
All selected speakers will be given a free pass to the 2020 Ars Electronica Festival.
List of Topics
Suggested topics include:
Hearing Colour Seeing Sound
Can music become visual? How did pioneers of visual music such as Oskar Fischinger and Mary Ellen Bute translate melody, harmony and rhythm into the form of animation? And can moving drawings become music? Is Oramics, Daphne Oram’s drawn sound machine, a form of animation? How can historic and / or contemporary practice demonstrate synaesthetic syntax?
In front of your eyes and ears
With a perceived disparity between the slow time taken to create animation and the instant time taken to perform music, how can animation be performed live? Can the audio and the visual be combined in improvised performance? How can live, hand scribing or music notation or coding or drawing be used to conjure spontaneous audio-visual performance? What is gained from real-time, instant creation in the present moment?
Rhythmanalysis
Repetition and difference is at the heart of rhythm, at the heart of the algorithm, at the heart of animation, at the heart of lived experience. Rhythm is everywhere. From the natural – visceral, internal rhythms of the body breathing and the heart pumping or the slow changing of the seasons; to the artificial – externally imposed rhythms ordering us through the ticktock of mechanical clock-time or the ebb and flow of economic cycles. How does rhythm connect audio and animation? What might animation learn from audio and music theory and vice versa?
A Return to the Material
In an age of digital synthesis is there a craving for a return to the material? Do we long for haptic feedback and analogue experience: the touch of guitar strings, the feel of charcoal smearing under the fingers, banging a drum, painting on film? Is this simply a form of nostalgia or might it be thought through in new ways? How can it be brought together in the audio-visual?
Movement and Gesture
Whether performing an instrument or making marks for drawing, the gestural is a core part of human expression. How can kinaesthetic gesture be explored to create new kinds of audio-visual experiences?
Expanded Animation 