04.10.2011
LUX, 18 Shacklewell Lane, London E8 2EZ

Six weeks, each Wednesday night
5 October through 9 November 2011
7 to 9pm

Course fees are £80/£65 concessions

The course is now fully booked, but please please email info@animateprojects.org to sign up for notification of future courses.

Forking Paths, Mirrored Chambers places animation within a broader artists’ moving image ecology, recognising that it is neither purely a discipline in its own right, nor merely a set of processes, but a transgressive force, a chimera; and that it is this hybridity that is its strength.

Locating the history of animation as the history of the twentieth century, the course loosely refers in its structure to revolutions in thought, namely Freud and the world of the interior; splitting the atom; man in space and the shock of the without; and the information age and the rise of the machine. Beyond a structural conceit, this prompts an interdisciplinary understanding of animation, which sites it as much as a cultural phenomenon as an artistic practice.

Each seminar will include extensive reference to films from the Animate Projects and LUX collections and elsewhere, with screenings and guest speakers, and recommendations for further viewing and reading. The evening will be emphatically discursive in tone, with attendees encouraged to become active participants.

The course is led by curator and writer Adam Pugh. Having worked at the National Media Museum, and as Director of Bradford Animation Festival, he set up the Norwich International Animation Festival in 2005, later transforming it into Aurora, the UK’s foremost festival for artists’ moving image, of which he was director until 2009. He was most recently research curator for Watch Me Move: The Animation Show at the Barbican Gallery. He has also delivered talks and curated programmes for various festivals and events worldwide, and in the last year has been on juries at Oberhausen, Fantoche and Courtisane film festivals.

The course is offered by Animate Projects in association with LUX.


Outline course structure

Week 1: Interiorities 1: Dream Grammar
Animation accesses a world of experience and emotion, transcending the literal to offer a poesis of vision which has more in common with painting or sculpture than mainstream film in its description of what it means to be human.

The unconscious mind is a significant and recurring subject in much animation practice. In this first session, we look at how artists use animation to activate memory and dream, from personal testimonies to the notion of a collective cultural subconscious, considering works that explicitly explore myth, allegory and fable.


Week 2: Interiorities 2: Beyond Representation
Able to dispense with the objective of the lens, animation is liberated from representation and slavish figurative depiction of ‘the real’ to present an altogether abstract vision, led not by story, script or fidelity of image but by light and time alone.

In this session we look at the sense of poetics in animation practice, and at how abstraction, in particular, summons the phenomenal. Charting a course from the ‘visual music’ of the 1920s and 30s to the direct filmmaking of Len Lye and the singular vision of Stan Brakhage, and beyond.


Week 3: Splitting the Atom
Given access to the ‘atomic’ structure of the moving image – the still frames that together conjure the illusion of movement – the artist holds the flow of time to ransom and exposes it as artifice.

This session looks at the manifold ways in which the timeline proposed by the moving image has been subverted, and to what end. Split, cut and reordered, expanded or contracted, the disruption of the otherwise invisible, ubiquitous 24 frames per second of ‘reality’ has remarkable, and often startling effects, and invariably offers a commentary on the passing of time itself.


Week 4: The Shock of the Without
By interacting with, and interrogating, time and space, artists often use animation processes to engage with notions of place. Whether creating a perceptual, phenomenal ‘sense of place’ or an impossible, alienating utopia, animation makes it possible to see the world from without, propose alternative models and refute or confirm those that exist.

From work that deals manifestly with place, we move to that whose concern is rather the form of space, and which deals with form, via a process of reduction, in an absolute sense.


Week 5: The Mind of the Machine
Long regarded as an ‘industrial’ artform, the history and practice of animation are tempered throughout by its symbiotic relationship with the machine. This week we look at this relationship via two distinct threads in animation practice, both of which offer some degree of reflexivity: the will to document, and the will to simulate.

If the mechanics of animation dictate that it cannot offer a ‘documentary’ in the conventional sense, it offers instead a rich and dense meta-document; an archive with the frame its system of classification. Whether re-edited from found footage, collaged from found material or constructed from source data, the taxonomic urge in animation practice acts, consciously or not, as cultural archaeologist, charting visual culture the technological processes involved and the flow of time itself.

From the urge to document, we turn to notions of synthesis and simulacra: driving forces throughout much of the history of animation, but ever more timely as the computer grows more powerful. The will to reproduce – and often eclipse – reality features heavily in much commercial feature film output, but also as a key critical concern of some artists. Whether appropriating the hyperreal CG animation of commercial feature film production or turning the visual language of contemporary networked existence back on itself, the power of animation to simulate and transform means that it is well placed to offer a critique of those processes.


Week 6: Future forms
What do the myriad technological advances and the triumph of the digital mean and make possible, and how can this be harnessed in a meaningful way?

With a brief backward glance at its own history, the last session of the course looks at where animation practice is going, and asks what it might need to address in an age in which its pervasiveness threatens to eclipse itself. With guest speaker Gary Thomas, Director, Animate Projects.