I’m in London on 2019/10/25 to give a talk to the Animate Assembly (Goldsmiths/Birkbeck) on “The Animation Enclosure: VR Visual Novels and the Space Around the Face.”
The following day I will be introducing a screening at the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image of Goshima Kazuhiro’s 2006 film Different Cities, along with a session by Joon Yang Kim on intermediate anime archival materials. My theme for the group’s emerging animation glossary is below.
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Enclosure
Animation keeps spreading, and before you know it, you are surrounded. Since at least the turn of the century, scholars have pointed to animation’s shift from a discreet sibling of live action film to a ubiquitous means of moving imagery in an ever-wider variety of media environments. Suzanne Buchan called this a state of “pervasive animation” in her 2013 edited volume of the same name. Increasingly, however, animation isn’t just out there in the world, but responsive to the spatial position and perspective of each individual viewer. The three-dimensional rendered worlds of virtual reality and augmented reality surround users with animated forms pegged to their spatial orientation, adapting in real time to every slight turn of the head. Internet of Things devices, AI assistants, and other sensor-based media technologies similarly track a person’s movement and behavior through space and trigger context-sensitive actions in response. What these forms of spatial mediation produce isn’t just an animated environment, but an animation enclosure. Rather than see animation as a means of breathing independent life into objects, the enclosure perspective points instead to how animation is deployed as an environmental capsule for modulating the perceptual horizons and emotional responses of the human centered within. Animation becomes a way to wrap a person inside their own custom reality. No longer safely contained within 2D screens, animation can now creep up from behind, lurking in the distance or coming right up into the intimate space directly surrounding the body. Animation enclosure opens up a direct, real-time link between a person’s moment-to-moment perception and mechanisms of private data collection and processing often happening off-site somewhere in a corporate ‘cloud.’ The surrounding environment becomes animated through algorithmic circuits, encircling a person’s perception of the world.