Here is the entire line up of guests as well as an overview for anyone who might be joining our discussion late this month. You can access this past weeks discussion as well as months and years past by going to our archive at https://lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au/pipermail/empyre/ At the left a list of the months appears. Then the posts can be organized by date, author, etc.
Moderated by Renate Ferro (US) and Tim Murray with invited discussants Thomas LaMarre (CA), Lev Manovich (UK), Suzanne Buchan (UK), Paul Ward (UK), Eric Patrick (US), Richard Wright (UK), Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (US), Christopher Sullivan (US), and Melanie Beisswenger (SG) Theorizing Animation: Concept and Context http://www.subtle.net/empyre Animated worlds are proliferating globally. In consideration of what seems like an explosion of online and museum exhibitions celebrating animation, we would like to spend the month considering the intersection between art, animation, and theory. While some of our guests theorize cinematic interventions in animation (timely given the success of "Avatar") others create, curate, and ponder the experimental narratives and "animated paintings" that have captured the curiosity of the art world. What are the advantages of creating and thinking through animation? How do real worlds and virtual worlds overlap? What about the trend to feature animation in museum contexts, often at the expense of digitally interactive work which might be more expense to mount and opaque to witness? Can a critical distinction be made between blockbuster animation and boutique creations, often with more poignant narrative content? Earlier this fall, Tim marveled at the extent to which animation was featured in the Asia Art Biennial in Taiwan, with fascinating pieces by the Israeli filmmaker, Ari Folman and the Russian collective AES+F, as well as a separate show of Korean animation at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art. That is now followed by the "Animamix Biennial-Visual Attract and Attack" now ongoing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taiwan. The cross platform solo exhibitions also have caught the eye of much of the museum public. Tim and Renate visited Sadie Benning's (USA) essay on queer sexuality in "Pause Play" at the Whitney Museum in New York and look forward to William Kentridge's (South Africa) "Five Themes" exhibition, a survey of almost thirty-years of work including many animated films, that opened last season at the MOMA San Francisco and will be at MOMA New York at the end of this month. Kentridge's work explores themes of colonialism and apartheid often through lyrical and comedic lenses that sometimes poke fun at the artist himself. His work merges the real world into animation and back again. Just this week Cornell hosted an extravaganza of The Quay Brothers film work with an exhibition of their set design. It was exciting to hear them talk about their work in several on campus forums. This month we invite our guests and subscribers to engage critically with the development of animation. We will be inviting artists and theorists to consider the concepts and context of contemporary global animation. This months February edition of empyre Theorizing Animation: Content and Context is moderated by Renate Ferro (US) www.renateferro.net artist-conceptual/new media, Department of Art, Cornell University, and Tim Murray (US), Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell University. Week 1: Thomas Lamarre (CA) and Lev Manovich (UK) Thomas Lamarre is a professor in the Department of East Asian Studies and associate in Communications Studies at McGill University. He has written three books on the history of media and material culture in Japan. The first, Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription, centres on the formation of inter-imperial media networks linking 9th century Japan to kingdoms in Korea and China, showing how calligraphic styles and poetic exchanges served to ground a cosmopolitical order. The second, Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Junichirō on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics, looks at how cinema in 1910s and 1920s Japan radically transformed urban experiences of space and time, resulting in a new image of world and world history wherein Japan was reconfigured as the Oriental subject and object of empire. The third, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, explores how animation technologies spurred the formation of distinctive lineages of technological thought in Japan of the 1980s and 1990s. With funding from SSHRC, he is currently finishing a book entitled Otaku Movement: Capitalism and Fan Media (under contract with MIT) that explores fan activities, transformations in labour, and cultural activism in contemporary Japan. He is a participant in a CFI grant to construct at Moving Image Research Laboratory. Thomas Lamarre (Department of East Asian Studies, McGill University) is a specialist in Japanese history, literature, cinema and new media. His primary research interest is the historical transformations of technology and media and its impacts on the emergence of historically specific power formations, systems of exchange, and material cultures. Lev Manovich's <http://www.manovich.net> books include Software Takes Command (released under CC license, 2008), Soft Cinema: Navigating the Database (The MIT Press, 2005), and The Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001) which is hailed as "the most suggestive and broad ranging media history since Marshall McLuhan." He has written 90+ articles which have been reprinted over 300 times in 30+ countries. Manovich is a Professor in Visual Arts Department, University of California -San Diego, a Director of the Software Studies Initiative at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), and a Visiting Research Professor at Goldsmith College (University of London), De Montfort University (UK) and College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (Sydney). He is much in demand to lecture around the world, having delivered 300+ lectures, seminars and workshops during the last 10 years. Week 2: Suzanne Buchan (UK), Paul Ward (UK) Suzanne Buchan is Professor of Animation Aesthetics and Director of the Animation Research Centre at the University for Creative Arts, England (www.ucreative.ac.uk/arc). She is the Editor of animation: an interdisciplinary journal (http://anm.sagepub.com/). Her interdisciplinary research focuses on aesthetics and theory of the manipulated moving mage in animation, digital culture, and experimental film. Publications include Trickraum : Spacetricks (Christoph Merian Publishers, 2005) that accompanied the eponymous exhibition, Animated 'Worlds' (John Libbey, 2005), and The Quay Brothers: Into the Metaphysical Playroom will be published this year by University of Minnesota Press. Paul Ward is a Principal Lecturer in the School of Media at the Arts University College at Bournemouth, UK. He teaches on the BA (Hons) Animation Production course and contributes to a cross-disciplinary MA course. His research interests are in the fields of animation and documentary film and television. Published work includes articles for the journals animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Animation Journal, and the Historical Journal for Film, Radio and Television, as well as numerous anthology essays. Paul is also the author of Documentary: The Margins of Reality (Wallflower Press, 2005) and TV Genres: Animation (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming; co-authored with Nichola Dobson). He serves on the Editorial Boards of animation: an interdisciplinary journal and Animation Studies and is a member of the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council Peer Review College with special interest in animation and documentary research proposals. Paul is the current President of the Society for Animation Studies." Week 3: Eric Patrick (US), Christopher Sullivan (US), Melanie Beisswenger (SG) Eric Patrick combines animation, live action, photographic effects, sound collage and performance to create experimental narratives. He has been the recipient of numerous awards both domestically and internationally including a Guggenheim fellowship, and awards from The Black Maria Film Festival, Semana de Cine Experimental de Madrid, South by Southwest Film Festival, The Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Festival de Cinema Independent de Barcelona. His films have screened extensively at festivals, museums, and on television throughout Europe, Australia, Asia and the Americas, including screenings at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris and The Rotterdam Film Festival. In addition to his film work, Eric has also worked extensively in commercial animation in both New York and Los Angeles. His animation for the Nickelodeon program Blues Clues has been nominated for multiple Emmys and received a Peabody award. He has additionally written articles on animated documentaries and ritual in animation. He is currently working on a film titled Retrocognition, and is an Assistant Professor in the Radio/TV/Film program at Northwestern University. Christopher Sullivan <http://mediaartists.org/content.php?sec=artist&sub=detail&artist_id=516> Is an animator, filmmaker and performance artist. He has been creating experimental film and theatre for over 20 years. He has shown his work in festivals, theatres and museums all over the Country and in Europe. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Rockefeller Media Arts Fellowship. Recently, he has been programming experimental films and animations in community settings such as libraries, elementary schools, and educational conferences, and puppet festivals. He lives in Chicago with his wife Susan Abelson, and their daughters Carmen and Silvia, and teaches Animation and Film at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Melanie Beisswenger joined the School of Art, Design and Media at Nanyang Technical University in July 2007 as Asst. Professor in the Digital Animation Programme, where she is teaching 3D Character Animation I and II and Animation Development and Preproduction. Melanie has a decade of production experience as artist and character animator on feature films and TV commercials. Credits include the Academy Award winning feature film "Happy Feet", the stereoscopic 3D feature film "Fly Me to the Moon" and the BioShock Game launch trailer among others.Melanie Beisswenger's research interests are digital animation, story telling, and 3D stereoscopy, and how technology and tools can be adapted to employ them intuitively within the creative process. Her current research work focus on the production pipeline and process of the animated short film creation in 3D and stereoscopic 3D. Week 4:Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (US) , Richard Wright (UK), Eileen Reynolds (SG) Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, PhD is an art writer and Adjunct Professor at The School of Visual Arts in New York City who teaches in the film, art history, and MFA Art Criticism and Writing departments. She has known The Brothers Quays since 1996 when she interviewed them for *Artforum* in conjunction with the premiere of *Institute Benjamenta*. Most recently she has followed the Quays foray into the exhibition space with their traveling exhibition DORMITORIUM (curated by Ed Waisnis), a rare selection of vitrines of original puppet theaters f such as *Street of Crocodiles* or *The Cabinet of Jan Svankmeyer.* Last week she was with the Quays as they installed the exhibition at the invitation of The College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University where the Quay Brothers work was featured. Richard Wright is a visual artist working in animated media who made several pioneering computer animated films and interactive pieces. Heliocentrum (1995), an animation about Louis XIV, was described by writer Hari Kunzru as an amazingly effective way of showing how a sovereign manipulated power and The Bank of Time was nominated for a BAFTA in 2001. His last short film was "Foreplay" (2004), described as a porn film without the sex . Richard helped set up the MA in Digital Art and Animation at London Metropolitan University and was postproduction and animation tutor at the National Film and Television School for three years. He has a PhD in the aesthetics of digital film making and has published forty book chapters, articles and reviews. >From 2004 to 2009 he collaborated with Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji, initially as Mongrel. Their last project 'Tantalum Memorial' won the transmediale.09 award. Current projects include a public video work called decorative surveillance, researching a book about contemporary animation practice, the narrativising of new media and data visualisation as the successor to documentary film making. Beginning her art career working primarily in painting and photography, Eileen Reynolds went on to work in the film and television industry. In 2004, she was a Director of Photography for Millennium Parks Crown Fountains in downtown Chicago. Working for the artist Jamie Plensa gave her a new perspective on the size and scope of public art pieces and sparked her interest in collaborative work. In 2001, Eileen was invited by the National Film Board of Canada to conduct stop-motion animation workshops for the Humanities Festival in Chicago. Along with shooting various independent short films, she also had the opportunity to be director of photography for the Pow Wow, Gathering of Nations, a video series distributed by FOX TV. Eileen Reynolds Eileen Anastasia Reynolds is an experimental media artist working with painting, photography, and stop motion animation. She is interested in the visceral responses that stop motion animation creates, using tactility to explore levels of emotional impact. Her current work, is an experimental animated documentary that attempts to bridge illusion and reality while embracing the magical realism of stop motion. Her ultimate goal is to preserve the integrity of stop motion which, she feels, is the perfect mix of art; including but not limited to sculpture, painting, photography, lighting, performing, writing, and music. Eileen continues to exhibit her personal artwork, consisting of painting, photography, and stop-motion animation. As an Asst Prof at the School of Art, Design, and Media at Nanyang Technological University since 2005, she has taught stop motion animation, animation seminar, and animation history. Her research interests include bioethics and emerging technologies, which raise scientific, social, and ethical concerns. Her most recent project embarked on a journey with 33 EEE students from NTU who helped in the creation of an animated film series called "Synchronicity Series". They performed, choreographed and animated their bodies using the stop motion technique called pixilation. Moderators: Renate Ferro (US) and Tim Murray (US) Renate Ferro (US) www.renateferro.net is a new media artist working in emerging technology and culture. . She is the managing moderator for the new media listserv -EMPYRE-soft-skinned space. She teaches in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University. By aligning artistic, creative practice with critical approaches, her creative skins emerge in the forms of drawing and text to performance, installation, and net-based projects. Her most recent projects include: Fort/Da: From the Pleasure Principle to the Technological Drive, Panic Hits Home, and Mining Memory. She also runs a creative lab called The Tinker Factory www.tinkerfactory.net as part of her practice. Her work has been exhibited in the US and China. Tim Murray is the Curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, and co-moderator of the -empyre- new media listserv, and co-curator of CTHEORY MULTIMEDIA. He is is a Professor of Comparative Literature and English, Timothy Murray is Director of the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University. As a curator of new media art, and theorist of the digital humanities and arts, he sits on the National Steering Committee of HASTAC, and is currently working on a book, Immaterial Archives: Curatorial Instabilities @ New Media Art, which is a sequel to Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minnesota, 2008). His books include Zonas de Contacto: el arte en CD-Rom (Centro de la Imagen, 1999), Drama Trauma: Specters of Race and Sexuality in Performance, Video, Art (Routledge, 1997), Like a Film: Ideological Fantasy on Screen, Camera, and Canvas (Routledge, 1993), Theatrical Legitimation: Allegories of Genius In XVIIth-Century England and France (Oxford, 1987), ed. with Alan Smith, Repossessions: Psychoanalysis and the Phantasms of Early-Modern Culture (Minnesota, 1998), ed., Mimesis, Masochism & Mime: The Politics of Theatricality in Contemporary French Thought (Michigan, 1997). His research and teaching crosses the boundaries of new media, film and video, visual studies, twentieth-century Continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, performance, and English and French early modern studies. Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor Department of Art Cornell University, Tjaden Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: <r...@cornell.edu> Website: http://www.renateferro.net Co-moderator of _empyre soft skinned space http://www.subtle.net/empyre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre Art Editor, diacritics http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/ _______________________________________________ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
