The Persistence of Animation

Pens and Pencils: Baroque Poetics and Silent Animation

Abstract: This paper stages the relevance of the pen of the baroque poet to the transmuting pencils, chalks and inks of the early silent animators (Émile Cohl, Winsor McCay, Otto Messmer). The conceptual and spatial mobility of baroque poetics is reprised by early animation in terms of its energetic and unfolding transformations. The artifice of baroque poetics is a productive framework by which to approach early animation, as is its desire for contact with the participant, which can be extended to the sensual privileging of texture, surface, rhythm and line in silent animation.

Biographical Statement: My research agenda pursues media archaeology to re-invigorate the sensuous scholarship of film, media and animation. This paper builds upon my dissertation, Cinema’s Baroque Flesh, which was concerned with baroque experiences of art and film. My work appears in The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (2008), Playing with Memory: The Films of Guy Maddin (forthcoming), Lounge Critic: The Couch Theorist’s Companion (2004), Senses of Cinema, Screening the Past, ARTLINK and Metro. I teach in Screen Studies at Melbourne University and I am an Assistant Curator with ACMI, where I am collaborating on a new permanent exhibition dedicated to the moving image.

Animating, Ani-Morphing and Un-Ani-Morphing of the Evolutionary Process in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos

Abstract: The paper examines an animated segment from the 1980 documentary show Cosmos, hosted by renowned astronomer and astrophysicist Carl Sagan. The segment visualized the evolutionary process using ground-breaking (for their time) morphing effects. The paper demonstrates how the segment’s use of morphing effects link it to the artistic roots of animation, found in ani-morphs (as defined by Norman M. Klein) and “Lightening Sketch” stage performances. Like the early animators and stage-performers, the segment’s animation and Sagan’s narration served to both mystify and then de-mystify the animation process, in order to do the same for the evolutionary process.

Biographical Statement: I am a PhD Student at the Communication Studies Department, Hebrew University (Jerusalem) researching animation as a text. My research aim is to build an overall theoretical framework for animation, finding an academic definition for “animation” as a separate and unique textual category, and putting together an analysis method for texts in this category. An aspect examined in my research is the historical and technological development of animation, and how the familiar concept of animation evolved. The proposed paper, which links early 20th century animation practices with the production of a 1980 computer-animated segment, demonstrates the evolution of animation as a concept.