Animated Film
De erg
Teachers: Monsieur Pimpant, Alexander Schellow
From drawing in sand to working with microbes (e.g. on analog film) to visualizing a ghostly pattern or programming and interacting with an AI... animation engages with the process of creating narrative through movement and temporality - not least in cooperation/co-practice with more-than-human agencies, whether considered material, living or otherwise.
Here, students are strongly encouraged to collaborate and share their knowledge and insights in team processes, to come with their own motivations and goals, and to experiment and play with many techniques. In this sense, it's a specific concept of "technique" or "technology" that we consider particularly relevant. Derived from the Greek techné = "art, trade, craft" and logia, "word, doctrine, study", this term, in its most elementary sense, designates a set of processes, tools, methods and skills that have been developed and systematized to some extent to enable the realization of a specific object. This object can be a thing, as well as a non-material effect - such as the knowledge produced during a scientific experiment or philosophical reflection. As the philosopher Boyan Manchev has suggested, the Greek concept of techné, understood as the process of des/organization, today allows a much more complex and stimulating understanding of "technology" - as a term which, in its reading of the canonical and institutionally underpinned "how-to", has been the object, for good reason, of fundamental critique in art education and practice since the 1960s. By "technology", then, we mean knowledge of the procedures and processes that structure and frame - inside and outside human agency - the field of possibilities: how we relate to ourselves and our environments. Confrontation with other, more-than-human forms of knowledge and relationships leads both to a productive destabilization of one's own position and to a heightened awareness of what one's own practice and the technologies it requires might be.
It's also in this sense that we believe an animation department can take on an important position, particularly in the context of the current development of tools for producing de facto factitious realities that are increasingly accessible and increasingly sophisticated. In addition to co-developing, making and sharing these tools, we see a growing need for their critical reflection, and first and foremost for the observation, tracing, awareness and recognition of the issues that follow the rhizomatic growth and complexification of these animation practices.
The question of "medium"/"material" is a particular one as far as animation is concerned. While, as our expanded notion of animation above shows, the field is certainly defined by a non-definition (or even non-definability) of its material, from another perspective we can say that animation occurs where a material itself is exercised - not just as a false movement, at least not primarily, but in an emphatic sense within its own agency and logic, rather than us practicing with a material.
This is what, in our opinion, predisposes animation to experimentation with more-than-human questions of agency - such as its aesthetic, technical, ethical, political and other implications. It's important to mention that this doesn't reduce the potential variety of what can be material in animation. On the contrary, it seems to open up infinitely, as we mentioned above: from AI programming to experimental physics, microbiological research, work on body perception, environmental systems, mnemonic practices and, why not, all manner of cinematic realizations, whether 2D or 3D, analog or digital, drawn, recorded or otherwise generated.
Clearly, our material space of exchange in teaching/learning varies according to the different materialities - given that it is a space whose definition cannot pre-exist the dynamics of existing and related practices, reflections and actions. In this sense, it's not the answer to the question "What is an artistic animation material?", but the question itself that can become the essential driving force behind a specific commitment.