(Hi, Matt! I had to go to Rodeofilms to confirm I know you.)
I've been thinking animation needs to be reconceived, along with writing. The
word animation suggests giving life, an idea with origins in film, where
shooting immobile objects or images frame by frame made them appear to be
alive. But film also has this history of intersecting with writing and with
text (your billboards, Bill Brown's, so many others'). In addition, digital
"new media" introduce moving imagery in ways that have a great deal to do with
the experience of reading in an electronic environment. So, suppose we
consider animation's relationship with title cards, for example, or with
voiceover - the vocalization of a temporally-based inscription of a thought
that might have gone into written form. The history of electronic writing
suggests ways in which new media has transformed what was in film called
(drawn) animation, only the source of interest moves into matters of design,
layout, font, page, and reader, rather than iconic graphic
representations modelled on photographic media. To me Lev Manovich completely
overlooks the significance of writing's graphic history to film's history, and
this is particularly costly to the temperament of an animator, who can hardly
compete with the computer programmer Manovich understands. If we stay within
the realm of 16 mm film, but we use digital tools, we're already in a digital
medium when we use a software interface. At any rate, what strikes me as
experimental in "animation" today would be a reconstitution of text and the
word, placing emphasis on recording a document, chronicle, journal, diary,
confession . . by means of visible language.
Examples of that? I like THERE THERE SQUARE by Jacqueline Goss.
Bernie
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