Digital Media 3
Michael A Lowe
Pervasive Animation
I checked out the Tate Museum website and found a lot of interesting material in their archives. I watched some streaming video from an international conference called Pervasive Animation that was broadcast over the web live starting on March 4, 2007. The conference lasted three days and had all of the discussions archived for viewing on the website.
I watched a lot of different talks which were very informative on the subject of “animation” and the fact that animation is turning up all over the place now in many other mediums beside just film such as theater, dance, music, music video, television, computers, fine arts, painting, sculpture, art installations, architecture, science, medicine as well as in both commercial, non-commercial and artistic venues.
There were discussions about the need for a “new field” of study the speakers were calling “animation studies”. In other words the field of animation is now so large because of internet and digital advances and the ability of animation to be used in so many different areas that it now needs to be studied as its own art form.
The speakers were expressing concern that animation has an “unlimited potential to visually represent events that have little relation to our experience of the ‘real’ world and more and more influencing our perception and experience of the world we live in.”
The speakers came from a wide range of areas including both research and creative practices and felt that a much needed ongoing dialogue was needed to keep tabs on animation’s “potentially radical future development, and its ethical responsibilities for spatial politics in a moving image culture.”
The conference's contributors include Norman Klein, Michael Snow, Vivian Sobchack, Tom Gunning, Anthony McCall, George Griffin, Suzanne Buchan, Beatriz Colomina, Edwin Carels, Siegfried Zielinski, Lisa Cartwright, Johnny Hardstaff and Esther Leslie.
The opening panel discussion was followed by a presentation of Anthony McCall's celebrated 1973 'solid light' film event, Line Describing a Cone, which was not available to watch.