essay

On Animatics

First published by Art Monthly, May 2020

In a recent episode of the cult science fiction cartoon show Rick and Morty, the titular characters – an anarchic scientist and his hapless grandson – journey to the distant planet of ‘Forbodulon Prime’ to mine a valuable geological resource. Bluntly referred to as ‘death crystals’, these rare prismatic forms are capable of representing multiple futures on each of their varied planes at once, predictively screening the variety of fates that their owners might meet through a dizzying cinematics of disaster. While such fantastical insights offer playful narrative opportunities to the show’s writers, the episode’s comedic ingenuity relies largely on the gruesome visual humour of its animated depiction of simultaneity. When Morty grasps a crystal, we are shown the multiple vectors of his life’s misadventures converging in a single multifaceted vision: an oracular interface in which he is concurrently splashed by toxic gloop, gnawed by giant spiders and pulled apart by bipedal beasts, prophecies that distort the clarity of his one true desire: to die peacefully in the arms of a teenage love interest.

These absurd scenes both figure and frame images of life and death as novel products of an animated process and, in doing so, demonstrate something of animation’s particularity as a ‘super-medium’, that is, according to the media theorist Deborah Levitt, a medium composed of diverse interdependent variants. In this instance, hand-drawn images, software packages and post-production editing suites coalesce into an assemblage that produces its own opportunities for thinking both with and through animation, and, by extension, allows animation to automatedly think itself through its own auto-generative abilities.

Mirroring something of the portentous character of Morty’s multifaceted crystal, then, could we understand the emergent nature of the animated image through the anticipated futures that are seemingly embedded within the interlaced circuitries and overlapping interfaces of its own distinct technological heterogeneity? How might such diverse prospective applications complicate assumed hermetic taxonomies of ‘life’ and ‘image’ at a moment when human cognition is being extended and redefined by its co-dependency on algorithmic simulation and machine learning, from developments in high-frequency trading (HFT) to advances in biotechnology?

A number of compelling theoretical projects have recently attempted to locate the interrelation of animation (cartoons, CGI etc.) and animacy (the semantic or conceptual consideration of sentience) at the heart of partisan approaches to digital labour relations, queer communality and new materialisms. Evan Calder Williams has written convincingly on the enrapturing potency of what he terms ‘shard cinema’, a digitally animated special effect present in much mainstream film that dazzles viewers with its suspension of bodies and debris in novel choreographies and arrested temporalities – a big-budget, computationally demanding process that begs us to redefine the forms of lived labour and resource depletion utilised in its production. For Jack Halberstam, the hyper-cute animations of Aardman and the Disney-acquired studio Pixar have imagined subversive forms of non-normative, often monstrous sociality through such inter-species fantasies as Chicken Run, 2000, Monsters Inc, 2001 and Finding Nemo, 2003, that contest the terminal teleology of a patriarchal capitalism rooted in myopic notions of reproductive ‘success’, exploring instead forms of communality-in-failure that turn ‘animation itself into a feature of kinetic political action rather than just an elaborate form of puppetry’. Further, Mel Y Chen has drawn resonantly on such post-anthropocene features as Studio Ghibli’s 2008 film Ponyo – an interspecies fantasy directed by Hayao Miyazaki in which a magical goldfish-like creature longs to transform into a human girl – to impressively deconstruct the enmeshed linguistic, material and affective agents that influence the experiences of sexed, gendered and racialised bodies in their varying proximities to industrial toxicity and climate catastrophe, with a particular focus on the languages of contagion that endow such instances as the deeply paranoid ‘lead panic’ surrounding Chinese toys imported to the US in 2007, or the Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010, with their own agential natures.

In her 2019 book The Animatic Apparatus, Levitt even goes so far as to claim that animation has become the principal medium of our age. She cogently describes the evolution of imaging technologies in their transition from the 20th to the 21st century as a passage from the ‘cinematic’ to the ‘animatic’, a trajectory in which the analogue has given way to the digital and shifted the function of the image itself from one of ‘representation’ to ‘production’, in turn provoking some necessary reconsiderations of the interdependency of image and vitality in the formation of new life worlds. ‘Today, the horizon of possibilities of simulation in both art and science – from cartoons and the animatic effects of CGI to the various dreamt and incarnate potentials of biological reproduction – are shifting the reigning paradigm of life in significant ways,’ she suggests, ‘moving away from questions about ontology, category and being to ones of appearance, metamorphosis and affect.’

For Levitt, echoing postulations by Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag et al, the cinematic as an operation of light upon celluloid has an indexical relationship to death. Life appears to haunt its images as an expression of what has passed. It captures the human as a series of temporal occurrences and imprisons them within frames that open this stasis to new forms of analysis, the bio-political implications of which are well-documented through the work of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard Muybridge (whose lives both span, surprisingly, the years 1830 to 1904) whose scientific-cinematographic experiments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries would allow insights into the previously imperceptible motion of humans, animals and machines. These techniques would notoriously be extended by engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor into a practice of ‘scientific management’ which sought to isolate instances of expressivity in the behaviour of industrial workers, eradicating them in favour of standardised and efficient kinetic routines. In 2014, curator Anselm Franke characterised this process in his brief essay ‘A Critique of Animation’ as a theatre of ‘training and rehearsing, simulating and modelling’ that was emblematic of the ‘penetration’ of life by capital, thus emphasising both the forensic and extractive possibilities of an industrial cinematography that would later find popular expression in the ‘motion capture’ special effects of hyperreal digital movies.

Conversely for Levitt, the animatic has no biological index as such, and begins less with the photographic capture of a body before a lens than with the ‘animation’ of its subjects into being through a process of manufacture akin to an ‘endowing with life’. Its bodily referent would perhaps more appropriately be the distributed machinic assemblage of artists, scientists, writers and producers who work collectively to realise pictures in motion that might echo, enhance or append existing bodies, or, in the instance of developments in the life sciences, call entirely new ones into being. This presents a novel situation in which the products of commercial animation appear to segue with advances in bio-cybernetics as part of a ‘techno-political continuum’ that blurs the relationship between the production of images and the production of life. The metamorphic and mutational fantasies of cartoons are no longer simply metaphorical, but appear to have been drawn into an uneasy proximity with the corporeal bodies that they have commonly sought to distort, disassemble and reconfigure.

Levitt populates her prognosis with many examples of this confluence, from the field of neuro-cinematics, in which patients are collectively subjected to FMRI scans while watching dramatic sequences of popular film so that collective neurological responses to structured narratives might be factored in to the construction of commercials, to the popularity of the CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technique, an example of the production of life beginning not with a ‘massy anatomical organism, but with biological bits, material or informatics, that may be exchanged and combined’. But the penetration of the animatic into the infrastructural maintenance of life – from entertainment, through healthcare, to governance – is also present at the most prosaic levels, contributing to an emergent animatic totality of sorts.

Thinking presently, we could add ‘deep fake’ techniques of deceptive image manipulation to Levitt’s list, including its huge impact on the production of bespoke pornographies and post-truth journalism, let alone its uncanny cinematic canonisation as an act of digital de-aging in Martin Scorsese’s 2019 epic The Irishman. We could also remind ourselves of Omari Akil’s disturbing 2016 post for Medium, ‘Warning: Pokémon GO is a Death Sentence if you are a Black Man’, in which the author illustrates how a mobile application that encouraged its users to follow anime-style avatars in the pursuit of virtual pets placed in commercially strategic locations didn’t anticipate the epidermal biases that striate public space. More recently, we could include the British government’s patently disingenuous public-service announcement Don’t Feed The Beast, 2019, which employed a cutesy cyborgian gremlin to encourage online vigilance against disinformation, a deceitful utilisation of the assumed innocence of the cartoon as a technique of state-sponsored ‘reality management’.

For Levitt, then, the animatic apparatus provides an ‘organising mechanics’ for contemporary cultural life because it is produced and maintained within the nascent intimacies of a spectator-screen nexus, and it provides a useful diagnostic backdrop for considering the role that animation has played in the practice of a number of artists whose recent works have critically foregrounded the primacy of animation in the exploration of the production of life, from techniques of critical self-inscription to performative and diagnostic interfacings with the political and biological contingencies of post-crash economics.

‘These cityscapes are made up of various layers. If life was a movie, transition would be seamless, like a train shooting along in the landscape,’ suggests the narrator of Hungarian artist Petra Szemán’s Monomyth Gaiden: Departure, 2018, ‘in actuality, it resembles more the sliding layers of the animation stand, the multiple planes occasionally moving out of sync.’ Szemán’s short moving-image works – candy-coloured essay films which overlay on-location footage of her travels through Japan with animated avatars – are deceptively complex meditations on the virtualisation of her technologically mediated biographical identities and their inseparable co-dependency with animation processes as both influence and practice. Performing something of the oscillating enthusiasms of a ‘fandom as method’ (recently postulated by Catherine Grant and Kate Random Love in their book of the same title), Szemán writes and produces quasi-diaristic films that pen her image into sites of pop-cultural pilgrimage, namely the geographical locations that have inspired some of her favourite Japanese cartoons. In both the Monomyth Gaiden, 2018–19, trilogy and the three-screen I Keep Forgetting I’ve Been To Tokyo: Gaiden, 2017, we see a hand-drawn and animated semblance of the artist sitting on the steps of Buddhist temples, waiting on desolate station platforms or, most commonly, contemplatively riding regional train services. These sites not only offer spaces of reflection on the transcultural and transmedial exchanges between European and Asian culture that Szemán continuously annotates and revises through her narration, but also locate the infrastructure of rail travel as an integral component of a modernist optics that would come to influence the way that animation itself compensated somewhat for its perspectival limitations.

In his exemplary work The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation, 2009, Thomas Lamarre draws on the work of historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch to stress that human perception developed a ‘ballistic’ quality as forms of high-speed public travel turned the passenger into a ‘projectile’ in a modern milieu defined by speed. Incapable of making sense of a blurred foreground, passengers would divert their attention either onto a distant, displaced landscape framed panoramically by the train’s window or into the private worlds of books. For Lamarre, the English term for Japan’s high-speed Shinkansen ‘bullet’ train lends this observation a serendipitous resonance, as does the apocryphal but widely believed story that the chapter length of popular manga comic books enjoyed by many commuters are written to reflect the duration between stops on the subway, compounding a relation between train travel and sequential art forms.

The kinds of commercial two-dimensional cartoons that influence Szemán’s reflective films are characteristically limited in their depiction of ‘movement into depth’, their verisimilitude dependent on the layering techniques of the animation stand and multi-planar camera that allow a combination of painted backdrops and transparencies to pass before the lens, simulating lateral motion and allowing for constrained zooms into the composited image. Lyrically recreating something of this layering technique while discussing the interleaving of real travel and virtual, pop-cultural experience, Szemán weaves images with anecdote in a distinctly animatic autobiographical process that situates and describes the experiences of a perceiving body caught between kinetic apparatuses: ‘Life is generated in the gaps,’ she says, ‘at the nexus of the screen and user, where your fingers meet the glass of the train window.’

Increasingly, the animated works of Glasgow-based artist Hardeep Pandhal have come to include both visual and lexical allusions to the technical processes underlying their own creation, incorporating animatic motifs into an acerbic decolonial vocabulary that disrupts cultural assumptions concerning the performance of heritage – in particular, those enacted by the expectant institutional framings of his own work. ‘When I walk past / hold onto your bags tightly / on any public service don’t sit next to me,’ he raps at the opening of Konfessions Of A Klabautermann, 2018, ‘building up the key frames / oral history / blame the BAME on history / dislocate your masculinity.’ In digital animation, ‘keyframes’ provide the temporal markers that designate the beginning and end of a visual transition, they make possible a mutation of the image from one form to another. Traditional cell animation would require these images to be connected by meticulously drawn ‘interframes’ that give the illusion of movement when played at a speed of 12 or 24 frames per second, but with software packages such as Adobe’s After Effects these transitions are automatically generated. Pandhal’s films are full of these constantly transitioning images – from the decapitated head of Sikh martyr Baba Deep Singh to the ambiguous emblems of empire, including Union Jacks and jackboots – reducing the iconographic markers of cultural fixity to quivering, indeterminate graphemes prone to purposeful misreadings and bastardised re-enunciations.

In his recent film Happy Thuggish Paki, 2020, shown as part of the solo exhibition ‘Confessions of A Thug: Pakiveli’ at Tramway in Glasgow this January, the artist talks candidly about the Wacom tablet used to translate his drawings and texts into moving images. Considering the hardware’s pen, he talks about the adjustable ‘gap’ between the cursor on-screen and the stylus in-hand being designated within the software as the ‘parallax’, a term that denotes a perceptual effect whereby objects under consideration take on a different character or appearance when viewed from different perspectives. Within the context of Pandhal’s film, the parallax offers a principle of animated impermanence or metamorphic strain to which his autobiographical writings and deftly penned images might be subjected: ‘mise-en-abyme / see myself on every green screen / like refracted memories / through a prism prison scene.’

For the cultural theorist Sianne Ngai, reflecting on the much-debated visual crudity and assumed racial stereotypes of 1990s stop-motion comedy show The PJs, 1999–2001, animation has the potential to render the space between ‘rigidity’ and ‘elasticity’ productive, allowing for a reclamation of the ‘grotesque and/or ugly, as a powerful aesthetic of exaggeration, crudeness and distortion’. Pandhal’s convulsing images, in combination with his consistent mutilations of language, seem to repeatedly provoke the pliability of their meanings into a vocabulary that is disarmingly idiosyncratic and ultimately characterised by a distinctly ‘animated’ ability to loop any neatly conclusive ‘progressive’ interpretation back into a confrontation with the persistent racial and cultural frictions that underpin them.

While Szemán and Pandhal’s uses of animation extrapolate a politics that is to some extent rooted in a re-articulation of the artists’ biography via the animated image, recent works by Adam Lewis-Jacob and David Steans confront and utilise cartoon-like archival image repositories to very different stylistic and political ends. Screened as part of the New Work series at LUX in London and now available to watch online, Lewis-Jacob’s Wildcat, 2018, is an experimental documentary on the work of Donald Rooum (1928–2019), a cartoonist and long-serving contributor to the anarchist newspaper Freedom. Rooum’s eponymous ‘wild cat’ is the recurring protagonist of a three-panel comic strip that began life in 1980, a ‘revolting pussycat’ and interlocutor for the author’s explorations of social justice and pursuit of an effective and ethically resilient anarchist politics (‘We know that absolute freedom would destroy society,’ suggests a wine-quaffing bourgeois in the film’s opening comic panel. ‘We know nothing of the never was,’ retorts the cat).

Employing a pared-down technique comprising two or three alternating frames, Lewis-Jacob animates a version of the wild cat in order to ‘re-animate’ the strip’s ideas, allowing the confrontational feline to apparently stroll through the vast annals of Rooum’s output, testing it for its contemporary resonances and points of traction. These sequences are intercut with compellingly understated and receptive interviews with the cartoonist, who outlines his modest yet principled intentions for the strip: it ‘should be funny’, ‘have something to do with world politics’ and ‘have a plot’.

It is hard to watch Wild Cat without being reminded of the prevalence of politically charged cartoons that have functioned as rallying points for populist cultural movements since 2016. In his ‘Establishment Conservative’s Guide to the Alt-Right’ published by right-wing rag Breitbart, now-disgraced journalist-cum-troll Milo Yiannopoulos included as an illustration an erotically charged meme which stated that ‘Donald Trump Will Make Anime Real’, hence fabricating a libidinal link between Trump’s proposed pragmatism and the implausible, onanistic horizons of certain cartoon shows. The less said about the reactionary recuperation of Matt Fury’s satirical comic book character Pepe the Frog the better, but both cases certainly illustrate a macabre propagandistic sub-current of Levitt’s theory, betraying an instrumentalisation of cartoons that is as consequential today as it was when Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin debated the mass-cultural implications of Walt Disney’s pantomimic violence in the 1930s, a conversation explored wonderfully in 2002 by Esther Leslie in her comprehensive book Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde. In contrast to such rabble-rousing insensitivity and meat-headed humour, Rooum’s strips are intelligent and sensitive to the pressing issues of social organisation and adequate gender representation within emergent collectivities. Lewis-Jacob’s boisterous cat appears to annotate such material, prodding and accentuating its sentiments in the manner of a living aide-memoire, emphasising its continued salience and urgency.

While Wildcat performs a kind of poetic intergenerational correspondence through the act of a younger artist personally reanimating the work of a progenitor, David Steans’s film Animation Monster, 2020, rejects such intimacies in favour of a different kind of dialogue, one rooted in the serendipitous possibilities of an animated short being outsourced to a commercial production company. Steans is a multidisciplinary artist whose works tend to test the parameters of genre – especially genre-based writing – within the presupposed disciplinary confines of contemporary art practice. His rap mixtape Gout City, 2016, released successively under the pseudonymic monikers ‘Joanna’, ‘Ghoul Baby’ and ‘Human Skeleton’showcased a macabre image-world that was lyrically attuned to the profound abjection of British austerity, evoking the cyclical drudgery of failed job applications and crumbling municipalities through the textural repulsion of cartoon-like images: overflowing wheelie bins and swarms of rats.

Animation Monster is the product of a correspondence between Steans and a London-based animation studio whose name would provide the film’s title. Usually commissioned for the production of informational films for business, Animation Monster utilises a library of simple, easily-animated library images that might be refashioned according to a client’s needs into motion graphics, animated logos or explainer videos. In this instance, Steans provided the company with a series of deliberately awkward scenarios without dictating how such scenes should be visualised, in effect displacing a huge component of the film’s production on to the incongruous combination of cheerful stock imagery and macabre thematics.

Stock imagery has a peculiar ability to jar and disrupt, especially through its automated recombination. In a 2017 post on Medium alarmingly entitled ‘Something is Wrong on the Internet’, artist James Bridle would observe a disquieting trend in the algorithmic processes undergirding children’s programming on YouTube, a situation in which unknown creators would exploit the platform’s keyword mediating ability to deliver unvetted videos of randomly generated and often deeply inappropriate content into the sidebars for watching youngsters, generating monetary revenue through automated queuing as the random content would autoplay once the original children’s programme had ended.

The result of Steans’s process is the sinister story of an animator who works himself to death in an office bestrewn with cobwebs, a narrative made all the more weird by its tonally upbeat music, simplistic character models and recurring depictions of ghoulish company employees who share some formal qualities with the material described by Bridle. ‘I’d imagined, and tried to script, a sort of gradual emaciation that befalls the animators, as they literally work themselves to skeletonisation,’ Steans told me via email, evoking the contentious crunch-time expected of many digital labourers, ‘they rendered that as certain animators just having skeleton arms, the abruptness of which I really liked.’ The ambiguity of such editorial decisions places a certain kind of uncanniness at the heart of Animation Monster in which agency and critique are hard to pinpoint, wavering somewhere between the client, the animator and the limited toolbox of a finite image repertoire. The effect is an apposite opacity that poignantly occludes the issues of authorial presence, employee anonymity and editorial intent that would seem to delineate the current state of commercial animation production.

While Steans actively infiltrates a process of animatic manufacture to explore the poetic resonances and temporalities of production, two recent projects by Adham Faramawy and Ami Clarke have built complex animatic interfaces that are receptive to both the personal and economic fluctuations of a ‘pharmacopornographic’ era in which rogue biochemical agents unprecedentedly effect the production and maintenance of life. Both works present composite images that differ formally from the cartoon-like animations discussed so far, but nonetheless allude to important considerations of the animatic subsumption of emergent life worlds.

Premiered at Tate Britain last September, Faramawy’s Skin Flick, 2019, is perhaps the most ambitious and personally revealing of the artist’s strange films, a signature fusion of comedic trans-humanist product placement, Cronenbergian body-reconfiguration and heartfelt testimony. The film shows a writhing cohort of male models anointing themselves with mysterious gelatinous ointments as the artist, in the guise of a fantastical horned entity, relays the story of their own attempts to counteract discomfort with their own body through the use of ‘black Pharma’ anti-ageing drugs purchased online, a narrative which reveals the profound and unexpected changes that recast the body as the subject of hormonal play, a ‘self-prescribed HRT plan’. These images are permeated by animated effects that either smear the artist’s likeness into new tumescent configurations or contaminate it with sprouting mycelia and creeping moulds. As Faramawy describes the effects of their experiments, the distinction between animated effect and bodily register is blurred, illustrating something of the porous boundary between ‘intimate space’ and ‘media space’ that catalysed Levitt’s thinking and led her to question ‘where images end and bodies begin, where truth or the real might reside, or on what side of this vestigial division between spectator and screen we find ‘life”’.

Faramawy illustrates a condition in which the products of biochemical capitalism have complicated any expectation we might have of the ‘natural’ production of bodies, a situation in which chemical constituents segue with technologies of image-production. The economic effects of this bio-political transformation have been recently mapped in an impressively diagnostic way by artist Ami Clarke, whose exhibition ‘The Underlying’ at London’s Arebyte Gallery in 2019 presented a daunting image of market responses to the shifting perceptions of Bisphenol A’s (BPA) exponential presence in global water supplies and foodstuffs. A product of polycarbonate plastic production, BPA’s structural similarity to oestrogen risks unpredictable effects on human cellular and reproductive health through molecular absorption. Clarke’s film Lag Lag Lag and VR work Derivative, both 2019, fuse the financial analytics toolset of live sentiment analysis of online news feeds covering BPA with fluctuations in pollution data, the ‘health’ of the FTSE 100 and a dauntingly totemic 3D model of the chemical structure of Bisphenol A. The result is a brilliantly paranoid-critical interface that animates the co-dependencies of human and non-human cognition as they co-evolve within the animatic apparatus.

For Levitt, animation is fundamentally a form of world-making, bringing forth new worlds and new forms of life. At the time of writing, scientists at the Allen Discovery Centre of Tufts University, Medford, Massachusetts have successfully developed the first ‘living’, programmable robots out of genetic material taken from African clawed frogs. These unprecedented life forms were the product of an algorithmic process that ‘animated’ their evolutionary development through simulation, providing a sophisticated template from which the lab work of biological construction could begin. More pertinently, downloadable animated live-schematisations of the global spread of coronavirus are providing novel opportunities for the theft of personal data through embedded spyware.

‘As worlds and forms of life are co-constitutive and emergent, we can’t know in advance exactly what form of life a world will produce and vice versa,’ Levitt writes, ‘what we have to work with is the process of generation, and what we value in it.’ For Szemán, Pandhal, Lewis-Jacob, Steans, Faramawy and Clarke, the turbulent present is perhaps most appositely articulated in the immediacies and intimacies of the animated interface; more specifically, in the choices, judgements and emphases they make within the increasingly complex animatic nexus of life and image.