Introduction

Miriam Harris, Lilly Husbands and Paul Taberham

The explosion of discourse surrounding animation over the last several decades has made very clear the difficulty of defining animation in any satisfactorily comprehensive or cohesive way. This challenge is compounded when it comes to trying to pin down the heterodoxies of what is called experimental animation. Throughout its long history, experimental animation has been associated with a wide range of innovative forms and techniques such as painting or scratching directly onto celluloid, collage, stop-motion, hand drawing, analogue computer graphics and others. More recently artists have made use of 2D and 3D computer animation, spatial projection and interactive installation to create works that disrupt conventions and expand the potentialities of moving image art. Experimental animation is predominantly aligned with non-industrial production contexts that foreground the role of the individual artist, and it can also be identified by particular modes of circulation and distribution.

When discussed in largely aesthetic terms, experimental animation is often characterised by what it is not. ‘Non-objective’, ‘non-narrative’, ‘non-linear’, ‘non-normative’ and ‘unconventional’ are some of the words central to a vocabulary that is used to describe this multifarious art form. And although in some ways negation feels like a frustratingly indirect and imprecise way of defining it, avoiding a circumscriptive definition is a way of allowing for the wide range of aesthetic and conceptual approaches, styles, techniques, materials and media that have been identified as experimental animation since the beginning of the twentieth century. This definitional flexibility is part of what has enabled the category to persist into the twenty-first century. As a method of art making, animation harbours an immense capacity for formal experimentation and creative expression, and the various artists and works that are examined in this book are testaments to this freedom and the complex heterogeneity that results from it.

Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital proposes some ways of distinguishing and defining both historical and contemporary experimental animation (see Paul Taberham’s chapter in particular); however, the collection’s approach is not intended to be delimiting. In the contemporary context especially, identifying experimental animation as a coherent category entails the semi-contradictory task of signalling the art form as distinct whilst also acknowledging its interconnectedness with and inseparability from other forms of moving image art and animation. One of the primary aims of Experimental Animation: From Analogue to Digital is to investigate some of the aesthetic and cultural territories that experimental animation occupies in the current multimedia landscape. Across the chapters, authors adopt diverse methods to explore various instantiations of experimental animation, from more traditional forms such as abstract visual music, hand drawn and collage animation to 3D animation, web-based projects, multi-channel installations and data visualisation. The collection’s 14 interviews with contemporary experimental animators who are situated in different parts of the globe provide revealing details about their individual artistic processes, offering insights as to the forces at work that differentiate experimental animation from mainstream modes and even other forms of experimental filmmaking.

What’s in a name?

To use the term ‘experimental’ in the collection’s title is to take on a descriptor that is by no means universally adopted amongst practitioners working with animation outside of the commercial animation industry, nor is it invariably acknowledged as a distinct category of moving image art. We as editors have chosen it in preference to ‘avant-garde’, ‘independent’, ‘alternative’, ‘artist’ or any number of freshly coined terms because it directly acknowledges the significance of the seminal, and for many years the only book-length work devoted exclusively to the subject, Robert Russett and Cecile Starr’s Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art. This 1976/1988 text was instrumental in establishing a foundation for the understanding and appreciation of experimental animation as a multifaceted art form that includes a range of media, formal techniques, figurative features and approaches to narrative.1 Russett and Starr (1988) explained that despite its ‘obvious limitations’, the term ‘experimental’ was chosen to indicate ‘individual techniques, personal dedication, and artistic daring’ (9). As a term, it was ‘broad and elastic enough to embrace the extraordinary range of cinematic works’ (ibid.) that they saw belonging to the category.

‘Experimental’ appeals for several other reasons as well. Firstly, it emphasises an acknowledgement of the form’s historical alignment with avant-garde and experimental cinema and signals these disparate works as part of an evolving lineage of experimental moving image practice. Many experimental animators see their work in relation to this history, even as they engage with new technologies and diverse artistic and cultural influences. Other artists who may not strictly identify themselves as experimental animators may nevertheless be ascribed such a categorisation by curators, critics and scholars. This, in turn, points to the significant roles that historiography, curation and criticism continue to play in shaping the ways experimental animation circulates in the world and is conceived of as an art form. Indeed, for many years, experimental animation was subsumed historiographically and critically into related (and themselves interconnected) fields of practice such as experimental cinema and artists’ film and video. While it is not necessary (or practicable) to draw firm distinctions between experimental filmmaking and experimental animation, this collection acknowledges subtle differences between the two approaches in terms of the materiality of studio arts practices and their attendant skillsets, as well as the particular emphasis on process in fine-arts-based work. It also recognises the importance of foregrounding examinations of the specific conceptual and formal concerns of animation inasmuch as they differ from live-action (e.g., regarding qualities of abstraction, graphicness, visualisation, formal experimentation, among others).

Another reason we use the term ‘experimental’ is because, although the encapsulating terms ‘artists’ moving image’ or ‘moving image art’ would technically cover both the analogue and digital works that are covered in this collection, they de-emphasise animation as a specific technique (and ‘artists’ animation’ seems particularly redundant). In addition, ‘experimental’ and its connotations of countercultural ideology are also not out of place, with many works maintaining the critical, anti-hegemonic ethos of the avant-garde (as well as its marginalised status). Furthermore, as many of the artist interviews presented in this collection demonstrate, ‘experimental’ communicates the importance of creative processes that involve exploration, play and discovery and that allow for the embrace of the unexpected and non-prescriptive. Finally, when ‘experimental’ is considered according to its etymology, it is shown to be a particularly apt and illuminating descriptor of these particular kinds of animated works. The word ‘experiment’ shares a Latinate root with ‘experience’. This etymological connection points to the role experience plays in distinguishing what makes experimental animation ‘non-normative’ and ‘unconventional’. It highlights the significance of the ways that artists use various formal techniques to explore creative possibilities that often destabilise habitual perception and cognition, often challenging viewers to make sense of experiences that are uniquely made possible by the special illusionistic capacities of animation as a technique (Husbands 2014, 7).

From its earliest days the term ‘experimental animation’ implied an ungovernable multiplicity of forms, media and approaches, and this has only become more complex since the emergence of digital technologies and the Internet. Russett and Starr’s formative book did not attempt to offer a comprehensive theorisation of the art form but rather concentrated on the backgrounds, techniques and practices of individual artists. Because it was the only text devoted to the subject for so many years, the book nevertheless established a canon of experimental animators and a loose set of characteristics by which experimental animation would come to be known. The first edition of Experimental Animation omitted numerous alternative forms of experimental animation (including hand drawn and puppet animation) and focused solely on early European and North American contexts. The authors acknowledged these limitations in their preface and introduction, including an essay in the 1988 edition of the book that called attention to the evolution and development of experimental animation, and which briefly mentioned the many (predominantly) American artists who were working with animation in the 1970s and 1980s.2 Russett and Starr called for more scholarly work to be done on the various overlooked areas of the art form. However, decades later this developmental period of experimental animation’s history remains under-investigated.

The book was somewhat oddly timed because the late 1960s and 1970s saw the expansion and diversification of many forms of moving image art that defied notions of medium specificity. In many ways, experimental animation was at the forefront of these changes. Russett and Starr acknowledged this with the inclusion of pioneering computer animators such as Lillian Schwartz, John Whitney and Larry Cuba, as well as artists like Ed Emshwiller and Reynold Weidenaar, who were experimenting with image processing and analogue computer animation/video synthesiser techniques like Scanimate that blurred the boundaries between animation and forms of video art. Experimental animators had begun exploring expanded forms of cinema as early as the 1950s, with artists like Robert Breer introducing flipbooks and mutoscopes into the art gallery (Uroskie 2014), as well as Stan VanDerBeek’s multimedia project the Movie-Drome in the 1960s (Sutton 2015). Many artists working with animation in the latter quarter of the twentieth century were interested in a different set of artistic criteria than many of their forebears, engaging with influences drawn from a variety of popular and fine art practices including Pop art, psychedelia, underground comix, cartoons, graffiti art and album cover art. During this period, experimental animation’s formal and aesthetic innovations increasingly fed into the visual language of popular media by way of commercialised forms like film and television title sequences, animated idents, advertisements, music videos and motion graphics (Betancourt 2013; Husbands 2019; Spigel 2008).

Further changes in animation production practices during this period such as the rise in the number of animation programmes at universities, the founding of the International Animated Film Association (ASIFA) in 1960 and the increase in animation festivals around the world (Annecy (1960), Zagreb (1972), Ottawa (1976), Hiroshima (1985) and the non-ASIFA affiliated Cambridge Animation Festival (1981)) resulted in more independent, ‘creator-driven’ works being produced that were not strictly adherent to the traditions of either experimental or cartoon animation (Bendazzi 2016; Furniss 2016). The proliferation of independent short form narrative animations during this period further served to expand existing categories and to blur boundaries between experimental animation and other independent forms. In the United States, programmes like the Children’s Television Workshop’s (CTW) ‘Sesame Street’ (1968–present) and cable television channels like MTV (1981–present) exposed audiences to alternative and experimental animation techniques. In Britain, the Animate! Channel 4 collaborations spearheaded in 1990 by Clare Kitson and Paul Madden funded and disseminated experimental forms of animation to a wide audience on television (Cook and Thomas 2006; Kitson 2008). The proliferation of animation across diverse cultural sectors over the next few decades (leading to what Suzanne Buchan (2013) has called the ‘pervasiveness of animation’ in contemporary moving image culture) contributed to an ever-increasing instability of formal categories within experimental cinema, animation and contemporary art more broadly.

The expansion of the field of animation studies since the 1990s has increasingly included closer examinations of more experimental forms of animation. Journals such as Animation Journal, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, AP3, Leonardo, Screen, Cinema Journal, Millennium Film Journal, Moving Image Review & Art Journal (MIRAJ), The Underground Film Journal, INCITE Journal of Experimental Media and others regularly feature articles on experimental animation that draw from a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. Over the years, numerous monographs have been published on visual music (Brougher and Mattis 2005; Mollaghan 2015) and various individual experimental animators (Buchan 2010; Dobson 2006; Dobson 2017; Keefer and Guldemond 2012; Hames, 2008; Horrocks 2010), and the more recent collections Animated ‘Worlds’ (2006) and Pervasive Animation (2013) (both edited by Suzanne Buchan) and The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of Cinema (2005) (edited by Chris Gehman and Steve Reinke) feature discussions of experimental animations within their broader discursive scopes.

Buchan has rightly claimed that a range of conceptual frameworks is needed to address the extraordinary heterogeneity of animation as an art form and medium. As she suggests, ‘an effective approach to this complexity is to use pluralist and interdisciplinary methods’ (Buchan 2013, 2). Whilst these are entirely appropriate approaches that fully serve animation’s multiplicity, this insistence on plurality has perhaps discouraged discussions of the continuities between experimental forms of animation and experimental animation as a critical mass. However, the number of arts university programmes, festivals and curated screenings devoted to experimental animation, as well as recent publications like Vicky Smith and Nicky Hamlyn’s edited collection Experimental and Expanded Animation points to a continued relevance of and interest in the form. We are encouraged by the persistence of a desire to group artists and animated works under such a category, however porous. In drawing together essays and interviews exclusively devoted to experimental animation into one volume, this collection aims to contribute to the carving out of a critical space for examining the art form in all its diversity.

Accessibility, circulation and distribution

As Erika Balsom (2017) has noted with regard to film and video art more broadly, distribution channels deeply influence how we encounter, conceive of and write the history of these art forms. She argues that ‘distribution participates in the generation of value and canon formation, as particular works may be widely available to be seen and written about, while others remain inaccessible’ (8). With the exception of a few organisations exclusively devoted to (mostly abstract) experimental animation such as the Center for Visual Music (CVM) and the Iota Center, experimental animations have historically been collected and distributed by the same organisations that distribute, promote and preserve experimental cinema and artists’ moving images. Experimental animations can be found scattered across various university, museum and personal archives, ­co-ops and artist collectives around the world such as the UK’s LUX and Animate Projects, Canyon Cinema, the Academy Film Archive, The New York Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Anthology Film Archives, and the Video Data Bank in the United States, Light Cone, Cinédoc and Paris Films Coop in France, Austria’s sixpackfilm, Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre (CFMDC), the National Film Board of Canada (NFB) and many others.

The traditional rental model adopted by many of these organisations and cooperatives has had to adapt to changes brought about by digitisation and the easy circulation of both sanctioned and bootlegged versions of works online. Over the years many of these organisations have produced various VHS, DVDs and, more recently, video on demand (VOD) services featuring classic and contemporary experimental animations. In addition, experimental animations have at points been distributed by specialist DVD labels such as Other Cinema, Index, Re:Voir, Kinetica Video Library (part of the Iota Center) as well as grant-based or individually funded limited edition DVDs. The exposure that this kind of distribution generates plays a role in which artists receive critical attention and affects the ways in which experimental animation is categorised as a moving image art form.

Awareness of traditional works of experimental animation has grown considerably over the last two decades, and we are currently witnessing a proliferation of new works that draw from a variety of older and newer media, styles and techniques. Access to historical experimental animated work continues to increase as websites like UbuWeb are expanded and artists upload their older works to their websites and other online platforms (in some cases these works have been restored and digitised using arts and cultural grants). Since the mid-2000s especially, experimental animation has thrived thanks to online platforms like YouTube, Vimeo and Tumblr, where search terms and tags enable artists from around the world to categorise their work for themselves. Both inside and outside of the classroom, more young artists than ever before are being exposed to traditional and contemporary examples of experimental animation. There has been a significant growth in the number of festivals, screenings and gallery and museum exhibitions devoted to forms of experimental animation, steadily shifting its cultural weight and presence.3 Short, single-channel works continue to be shown in curated screenings and specialist film and animation festivals while others manifest as multi-channelled gallery installations, loops, site-­specific projections, live performances, gifs, Virtual and Augmented Reality and video games. These newer forms further stretch the boundaries of what might be seen to constitute contemporary experimental animation (or at least to form part of its legacy). To further complicate matters, some multi-channel experimental animated works created for installation exist simultaneously in expanded and single-channel versions.

The roles of the curator, festival coordinator and artist collective remain vital in terms of identifying and cataloguing significant new experimental animations as well as discovering and recirculating overlooked or forgotten works. Some significant ongoing curated screenings and festivals include Edwin Rostron’s Edge of Frame screenings in London; Alexander Stewart and Lilli Carré’s curated Eyeworks Festival in Chicago and Los Angeles; Giant Incandescent Radiating Animation Festival (GIRAF) in Calgary; Punto y Raya Festival in Madrid and Barcelona; Ars Electronica in Linz; Georama festival in Tokyo; Animasivo Festival in Mexico; the Wrocław Media Art Biennale in Poland, among others.4 Online and real world collectives like Peter Burr’s Cartune Xprez (2006–2013), Casey Jane Ellison’s Aboveground Animation, Edwin Rostron’s Edge of Frame, Late Night Work Club, Ghosting.TV, Seattle Experimental Animation Team (SEAT), Latin America’s Moebius Animación and others offer places for artists to connect, exhibit work and for viewers to discover new and older works of experimental animation. The international reach of experimental animation – supported by the technological dissemination of works – is, however, also entirely reflective of the form’s global expressions and international filmmaking contexts.

A global phenomenon

English-language accounts and analyses of experimental animation have reflected somewhat of an imbalanced history in terms of the dominance of Western European and North American animators in the twentieth century. This is in part due to the historical and cultural contexts out of which specific practices arose (e.g., European modernism and the diasporic shifts that took place during and after the Second World War). However, artists in many other parts of the world have produced animated works that can be seen to contribute to a wider conception of the expressive potential of experimental animation as an art form (this is not to ignore or conflate certain culturally specific influences and practices but to highlight the commonalities and cross-fertilisations that have taken place in particular over recent decades). For example, Eastern Europe forged rich animation cultures of experimentation and subversion from the 1930s to the 1980s – films by Franciszka and Stefan Themerson, Julian Antonisz, Daniel Szczechura and Jan Švankmajer are examples – and this continues in the work of experimental animators such as Krakow-based Marta Pajek, despite changes in funding structures in the formerly communist countries. In Japan, the rise of experimental film and anime is evidenced in the work of artists such as Takashi Ito, Keiichi Tanaami, Osamu Tezuka, Yōji Kuri, Yoriko Mizushiri, Atsushi Wada, Tabaimo and others. Experimental animation enjoys a lively presence in Latin America – Luis Bras, Bibiana Rojas, Julian Gallese, Víctor Iturralde Rúa, Tania de León and Juan Camilo González are examples – and in the Pacific, Lisa Reihana and Veronica Vaevae have created experimental animations that incorporate references to Len Lye, from a feminist, Maori and Cook Island perspective.

In this anthology, we have attempted to address this imbalance by acknowledging the work of a range of animators from different parts of the globe, rather than just concentrating on the terrain of Europe and the United States. The animator interviews within this compilation take the reader into the heart of experimental creative practices from Poland to Japan, China to New Zealand, Brazil to South Africa, while also focusing a keen eye on animators operating in the zones that have been more typically accorded academic attention. For several decades, experimental film and animation festivals have enabled animators from diverse geographies to mix and mingle, as have artist residencies, and gallery opportunities. The proliferation of digital media, together with the ubiquitous nature of the Internet, facilitates more than ever the viewing and transmission of creative work between different corners of the world. The question may be asked as to whether experimental animation possesses distinctive features that collapse national boundaries, or whether the provenance of the work markedly affects the creator’s outlook and outcome.

Perhaps the answer to such a question lies in a combination of influences. Len Lye, for instance, absorbed different aesthetic modes based on his place of residence and areas of interest, from the pattern and symbolism of indigenous Oceanic cultures to the modernist abstract artists that he encountered in New York. Yet his creative expression was filtered through a perspective that bears commonalities with other experimental animation practitioners: A seeking of alternatives to linear narratives, the combining of media in non-traditional ways, and a use of reflexivity that exposes materiality and a sense of process. This kind of multifaceted exploration infiltrates the work of all the animators interviewed in this book. For example, US animator Jodie Mack welcomes ‘the blurring of any and all lines between genres’, Brazilian animator Diego Akel notes that he is ‘constantly experimenting with different art media’, and New Zealand animator Gregory Bennett seeks to preserve ‘a creative spontaneity in the making process while acknowledging the medium itself rather than effacing the base digital aesthetic behind the lure of the photoreal’.

Although signatures exist in their animations that tie them to specific social and political geographies, a pot-pourri of influences can be perceived in the work of the experimental animators interviewed for this anthology. One of the reasons perhaps for such variety is the locational mobility chosen by many of these artists. For instance, Russian animator Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva currently lives in Rotterdam, and Max Hattler grew up in Germany, completed his Masters in London at the Royal College of Art and is currently an Assistant Professor at the City University of Hong Kong. Maya Yonesho grew up in Japan, lives in Stuttgart, but also lectures at Kyoto Seika University. Robert Sowa is Head of The Animation Film Studio at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and was taught by renowned Polish experimental animator Jerzy Kucia. Several aspects of Sowa’s work – the use of stop-motion puppets and poetic narratives – can be equated with Eastern European experimental animators who worked behind the Iron Curtain, such as Jan Švankmajer. But Sowa is of a generation who has been able to travel without impediment and has ready access to the Internet, and he also cites Len Lye and Australian filmmaker Paul Cox as influences. Certain sensibilities associated with Eastern European animation can be identified in the animations and installations of Beijing-based Tianran Duan, who lectures at Renmin University, completed his MFA in the animation and digital arts programme at USC, and cites Polish animator Piotr Kamler as a profound influence.

Some of the animators explore more modernist, universalist concerns, some have brought a politicised attention to social and cultural issues, whereas others have intertwined the two spheres. Larry Cuba’s pioneering digital abstractions are resolutely linked with abstract painting and sculpture; a relationship shared with experimental animators he admires such as Norman McLaren, Jordan Belson and John Whitney. Georges Schwizgebel similarly describes his work as ‘animated painting that deals with poetry’. William Kentridge, Martha Colburn and Rose Bond work with fine art media that includes drawing, printmaking and painting, but a number of their animated sequences traverse areas with strong social content: racism in South Africa, the US invasion of Iraq, climate change and the changing face of urban centres. Rose Bond brings the last category to life by projecting animated drawings from inside architectural spaces, detailing the historical and social layers residing in that particular space.

Experimental animation: From analogue to digital

The scholarly articles in this collection are divided into four separate subsections. The first is called ‘Definitions, histories and legacies’ and it deals with broader themes in relation to experimental animation, such as defining the field, proposing categories and examining the influence of experimental animation on commercial practice. It begins with Paul Taberham’s ‘It is alive if you are: Defining experimental animation’, which outlines some of the major historical figures in the field. It also offers a working definition of experimental animation by detailing some of its central tenets, such as the free exposure of the materials used to make the film, the discernible presence of the artist, the centrality of surface detail and the tendency to evoke ideas rather than explicitly state them.

Aimee Mollaghan’s ‘A consideration of the absolute in visual music animation’ connects the Romantic ideals of eighteenth and nineteenth century music to visual music of the early twentieth century, suggesting that both were characterised in their respective periods as a supreme universal language. Non-figurative in nature and operating without any overt narrative, the absolute film as defined in Mollaghan’s chapter is divided into two separate but overlapping concepts: Formal absolutism, in which meaning was created through visual form rather than extra-visual elements such as story or character; and spiritual absolutism, in which the film operates as an agent of spiritual transcendence.

Michel Betancourt’s ‘Experimental animation and motion graphics’ illustrates the way in which the aesthetics of visual music intercepted the commercial realm by way of motion picture title sequences. A direct link is forged between experimental animators like John Whitney and contemporaneous graphic designers such as Saul Bass. Betancourt suggests that this connection between visual music and title sequences continues up to the present day, in a more familiar and sanitised form.

The second subsection is entitled ‘From analogue to digital’ and it focuses on the materials used in experimental animation in relation to their historical, aesthetic, ideological and social contexts. It begins with Dan and Lienors Torre’s ‘Materiality, experimental process and animated identity’ which focuses on experimental animation’s engagement with unconventional production techniques and physical materials. These include found objects, three-dimensional puppets, paper cut-outs, sand, clay and oil paint. Torre and Torre argue that while technologies have developed dramatically in recent years, it is the use of low-tech materials that have helped to characterise experimental animation, differentiating it from the dominant commercial animation productions and giving rise to unique forms and receptions.

Tess Takahashi’s ‘“Meticulously, Recklessly, Worked Upon”: Direct animation, the auratic and the index’ discusses the resurgence in popularity of direct animation from the 1990s onwards. She suggests that the proliferation of the digital image has caused a crisis in which the old medium of film is being encroached upon by a new representational technology. In opting for celluloid over the digital image, Takahashi suggests that more than being shaped purely by formal or decorative concerns, direct animation artists wish to express a physical presence in their work and avoid resorting to automated digital images that risk obscuring artistic intention.

In ‘Digital experimentation: Extending animation’s expressive vocabulary’, Miriam Harris offers a counter-argument to the assumption that digital animation is cold, mechanical, lacking a human touch and should be more closely associated with spectacle than creative innovation. She explores emotionally resonant experimental digital animations which feature conceptual depth and imagination, and proposes that digital animation extends the vocabulary and expressive power of experimental work.

Birgitta Hosea’s ‘Beyond a digital écriture féminine: Cyberfeminism and experimental computer animation’ examines female artists who contributed to the earliest forms of computer animation and cyberfeminist discourses from the turn of the millennium. She also considers the possibilities of what a feminist approach to experimental computer animation might be. Observing that the majority of female animation students prefer to employ handmade aesthetics over more technical processes such as CGI, Hosea ends with a call for action, suggesting that there needs to be more research into why women are underrepresented in the tech sector, and how this can be counteracted.

The third subsection focuses on individual artists, playing a part in remedying the scarcity of in-depth, close analyses that experimental animation often demands. In ‘A hermeneutic of polyvalence: Deciphering narrative in Lewis Klahr’s The Pettifogger’, Lilly Husbands focuses on Lewis Klahr’s enigmatic and polyvalent feature-length collage animation The Pettifogger, and the cryptic way in which it engages with narrative. Husbands suggests that the nebulous qualities of Klahr’s film should be embraced as part of the experience, and that the goal is not to decode a linear narrative, but rather to respond imaginatively to recurring patterns and expressive tropes featured therein.

In ‘How to be human: The animations of Jim Trainor’, Steve Reinke recounts the way in which his relationship with the work of Jim Trainor deepened, the more closely he engaged with it. While it initially seemed simple and humorous with a mischievous approach to morality and transgression, Reinke claims that on closer scrutiny, Trainor’s films offer a radical new approach to making and engaging with cartoons. Moreover, they may also illustrate new ways of being in the world. Reinke unpacks six of Trainor’s films, coaxing out interpretations that are hidden beneath the surface.

The final subsection is called ‘Science and the cosmos’, and it focuses on scientific and cosmological concerns which sometimes motivate the work of experimental animators. Janine Randerson’s ‘Animating the cosmological horizon: Between art and science’ examines a body of techniques used by artists for engaging with cosmological representation. The first section focuses on Jordan Belson’s astronomical imagery, and the latter part positions contemporary artists Joyce Hinterding and David Haines, along with artists Sarah and Joseph Belknap as inheritors of Belson’s cosmological visual language. In addition, Randerson discusses her own artistic connection to Belson through her video installation artworks that animate remote satellite images.

Aylish Wood’s ‘Where do shapes come from?’ explores the concept of digital materiality, and the way in which algorithms are used by artists. This is discussed in relation to Semiconductor’s Where Shapes Come From. Wood illustrates how the material arrangements of data alters our experience of information, and also how algorithms are active in cultural politics.

Sean Cubitt’s ‘NASA’s Voyager fly-by animations’ offers an eco-poetic reading of James Blinn’s NASA animations of the Voyager space mission, tracing some of the missing theological genealogies of modern science. He suggests that Blinn’s animations continue to reverberate as some of experimental animation’s most moving expressions of what lies beyond the human.

Taken as a whole, this collection is designed to offer an overview of current thinking about experimental animation from a diverse range of scholars and artists. We hope it serves as an inspirational springboard for those who love to create, think or write about this elusive art form.

Notes

1 The 1977 edition of Russett and Starr’s book was titled Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology.

2 To further complicate matters, in his 2009 book Russett called experimental computer animation ‘hyperanimation’, despite citing such work as a direct descendent of earlier experimental animation practices.

3 A growing minority of experimental animations circulate in the art world where they are exhibited and sold through galleries as single and limited editions. See for instance Chicago-based Western Exhibitions and the website Artsy.net, which offers links between collectors and art works.

4 Others include Herb Schellenberger’s series of screenings Independent Frames: American Experimental Animation in the 1970s + 1980s at the Tate Modern in 2017; Northwest Animation Festival in Portland, Oregon, Ann Arbor Film Festival, the London International Animation Festival (LIAF) and GLAS Animation Festival in Berkeley.

References

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