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Artists, curators and writers come together to discuss experimental animation in an afternoon seminar coinciding with Edge of Frame Weekend.
This seminar will explore where experimental animation practice sits in relation to independent animation, visual art, histories and institutions. Rather than presenting papers, the seminar will ask artists, curators and academics to offer propositions and provocations, citing up to three works that illustrate their case.
Speakers include Maria Palacios Cruz, Dr Barnaby Dicker, Stuart Hilton, Dr Birgitta Hosea, Claire Mead, Adam Pugh, Vicky Smith, Paul Taberham and Alan Warburton.
The seminar is led by Gary Thomas, Animate Projects and Film Programme Manager, British Council.
Adam Pugh is a writer, curator and designer based in Norwich. Adam considers whether it is is possible for an artwork to exist entirely hermetically; to fully inhabit only its own language? Beyond representation, beyond material, never becoming a thing or needing to refer to things. adampugh.co.uk
Alan Warburton is an artist interested in the aesthetic and political affordances of computer-generated imagery (CGI) and the software used to create it. Alan asks how experimental animation, contemporary art and commercial animation differ in their apprehension of software? What strategies do they adopt to interpret software and software culture? alanwarburton.co.uk
Claire Mead is an art historian and recent graduate from the MA in Curating the Art Museum at the Courtauld Institute, where she researched ways of curating experimental animation within the art museum. Claire will consider how experimental animation can provide alternative ways of experiencing museum collections through reinterpretation and re-appropriation. clairemead.wordpress.com
Dr Barnaby Dicker is a lecturer in Illustration at Cardiff School of Art and Design at Cardiff Metropolitan University; his research revolves around conceptual and material innovations in and through graphic technologies and arts. Barnaby considers how through frame-by-frame processes, experimental animation is the privileged custodian of cinematographic flicker, and the opportunity this gives to re-assess our relationship to the heavy image flow of our multi-screen culture.
Dr Birgitta Hosea is a media artist and curator whose work explores presence, affect and digital materiality through post-animation. She is Head of Animation at the Royal College of Art. Birgitta will present the work of three contemporary Chinese artists pushing at the boundaries of animation. birgittahosea.co.uk
Katerina Athanasopoulou is a London-based artist filmmaker using digital animation to create work for cinema and gallery space. Katerina explores the ecstasy – and agony – in our relationship with CGI and our seduction into its convincingly familiar, yet made up world. kineticat.co.uk
Maria Palacios Cruz is Deputy Director of LUX and co-founder of The Visible Press, London. Maria considers works that defy and reject conventional animation techniques film and video technologies, challenging the relationship between animation and the moving image and their definitions. lux.org.uk / thevisiblepress.com
Paul Taberham is a teacher, scholar and occasional filmmaker. A paper tiger with radioactive teeth. His provocation will illustrate how visual music does not always depend on a wholesale rejection of naturalistic perceptions. The use of synchronisation, web-like geometric patterns and symmetry all appeal to familiar, native capacities. To a general audience, these techniques may facilitate greater appreciation.
Stuart Hilton is an animator, filmmaker and musician, and director with FAQ. Stuart considers the what and why of experimental animation practice: it’s aggressively uncompromising, difficult to fund. Difficult to watch. Difficult to explain. And how working at the margins of what might be called meaning can produce just the right kind of wrong. stuarthilton.com
Vicky Smith has been making and teaching experimental animation since 1990. Vicky considers the act of animating, the significance of the distinctive physical movements that animating entails, and the extension of this when animators enact the process of animated filmmaking to a live audience. beefbristol.org/staff/vicky-smith
The Edge of Frame Weekend is a celebration of experimental animation, with screenings and discussion taking place over three days at Whitechapel Gallery and Close-Up Cinema.
The event is curated by artist and animator Edwin Rostron, and Gary Thomas, Director of Animate Projects.
The Edge of Frame Weekend is part of the 2016 London International Animation Festival programme, and is supported by Arts Council England and Jerwood Charitable Foundation.
