Animare: To Give Life To

Abstract

Animator Norman McLaren described animation as “not the art of drawings that move, but rather the art of movements that are drawn.” Dancing stylistically between abstract and narratve forms, his creative output pulsed with the lifeblood of change and time, in sound and image. Giotto’s Lamentation uses rhythmic figure repetitions to animate the static surface of the painted image, and in doing so, presupposes animation centuries before technology could provide a mechanical artform more suitable to the presention of this moving image content. Walt Disney imagineered a network of virtual worlds, built to scale and tangibly accessible to its users, providing them with unrestricted access unshielded by the glass wall of the TV screen or the PC monitor. In his analysis of of film form, Eisenstein’s film sense relates image structure to the musical staff and choreographical notation in a multi-tracked rubric prophetically similar to the most modern of video and musical graphical user interfaces. These multimodal manifestations of life-giving art forms would seem to have prognosicated the very technologies which should have propogated them, and in doing so, have fertilised a creative landscape expectantly ripe with the synaesthetic fruit of animation.

Accepted for presentation at the Sixth Third International Conference of the Image to be held at the Higher School Humanities and Journalism in Poznan, Poland, 14-16 September, 2012.

http://ontheimage.com/conference-2012/