Animate Assembly: Animation and New Life

今天的动画已经扩散到3D模拟和计算模型领域，从经济建模和生态活动到建筑和城市设计，医学和外科，教育形式和军事训练计划。它已经成为艺术家、细胞生物学家、金融分析师和城市规划者的重要可视化工具。数字动画在个体身体的层面上干预生命过程，延长和摧毁生命，以及在行星现象的巨大规模上。动画的政治背景和后果已经发生了变化，数字动画现在被用于人权法庭、全球行动主义运动和对未来的设想。在这种情况下，生活在软件、基础设施和劳动力的庞大网络中被动画所包围，这就需要研究远远超出了过去更有限、更具体的动画，而过去的动画大多是在电影院或电视上展开的。数字动画的扩展关键作用需要重新考虑动画图像的政治和伦理含义，并重新设想将动画作为生活的组成部分意味着什么，以及这句话的所有本体论和经验共鸣：动画作为生活的一种形式，作为生活的建模，作为影响生活的决定的场所。研究网络将从三个角度探讨这些动画新部署的含义：动画、万物有灵论、动画。动漫，日语中动画的说法，是基于技术想象力。自从电影摄影机发明以来，图像在技术上就被动画化了。因此，迪斯尼的动画片、俄罗斯的“乘法”和现在全球消费的日本“动漫”都参与了一种“动态图像”类型的演变，这种类型由电影设备的各种组成部分（针屏、魔灯、西洋镜）组成。我们的方法超越了技术动画图像的媒体历史，并考虑到今天技术引导的想象力，因为它在东南亚的愿景和动画未来的理论化中脱颖而出。思考动漫也是在反思AR和VR等新的动画形式的出现和迅速统治，它们将动画体验融入娱乐和日常生活，并考虑动画的材料，特别是液晶，这是一种生命形式。2. 以万物有灵论为基础的动画在西方现代性的噩梦中反复出现，被称为万物有灵论。正如陶西格等学者所表明的那样，在现代人种学和人类学认定为“万物有灵论”的社会、文化和实践中，并不存在万物有灵论这样的东西。“万物有灵论”暗示了现代经验的边界，伴随着文化历史文物的迁移和拜物教。近年来，对泛灵论冲动的诊断已成为当代艺术展览实践中的一个关注点，并在活力物质或面向对象的本体论和思辨唯物主义的思想中得到了呼应。物体的动画和新生命困扰着我们对“活泼”的看法以及我们与生命/死亡的关系（神经科学）；它引起了人们对既有的二分法的重新思考，比如唯物主义和面向对象的本体和现实主义魔术。在古典哲学中，亚里士多德的论文《论灵魂》被翻译成拉丁语，意思是既不是技术上的冲动，也不是万物有灵论的冲动，而是形而上学的冲动，即赋予灵魂。对于亚里士多德来说，灵魂（心灵）的占有应该被理解为生物的本质，更应该被理解为人类的精髓。这种对动画的更广泛的理解打开了动画研究在当代技术和媒介环境中的跨和后人类话语。我们需要评估动画环境中动物的当前共鸣

Animation today has proliferated into fields of 3D simulation and computational models, in contexts ranging from economic modelling and ecological activism to architectural and city design, medicine and surgery, educational formats and military training programmes. It has become a significant visualization tool for artists, cellular biologists, financial analysts and urban planners alike. Digital animations intervene in life processes at both the level of individual bodies, to prolong and destroy life, and at the vast scale of planetary phenomena. The political contexts and consequences of animation have changed so, that digital animation is now deployed in human rights tribunals, global activism campaigns and speculative future visions. Under these conditions, life is enmeshed in animation in the vast network of software, infrastructure and labour, which require studies far beyond the more limited and specific animation of the past, much of which unfurled in cinemas or on TVs. The expanded critical role of digital animation requires a reconsideration of the political and ethical implications of the animated image and a reimagining of what it means to propose animation as constitutive of life, with all the ontological and experiential resonances of this phrase: animation as a form of life, as a modelling of life, as a site for life-impacting decisions.The research network will explore the implications of these new deployments of animation from 3 angles: Anime, Animism, Anima:1. Anime, the Japanese term for animation, is grounded in Techno-Imagination. Since the invention of the cinematograph, images have been animated technologically. Hence animated cartoons by Disney, Russian 'multiplication' and the now globally consumed Japanese 'anime', which all participate in the evolution of a genre of 'images set in motion' by various components of the cinematic apparatus (pinscreen, magic lanterns, zoetropes). Our approach reaches beyond a media history of technically animated images and includes consideration of today's technologically guided imagination as it comes to the fore in South East Asian visions and theorizations of animated futures. To think about anime is to reflect too on the emergence and rapid domination of new animated forms such as AR and VR, which integrate animated experience into entertainment and everyday life and to consider the materials of animation, notably liquid crystals,which are a type of lifeform. 2. Animation grounded in AnimismAnimation is encountered in the recurrent nightmare of Western Modernity named Animism. As scholars such as M. Taussig show, no such thing as Animism existed in the societies, cultures and practices decreed 'animist' by modern ethnography and anthropology. 'Animism' hints rather at a boundary of modern experience that accompanies the displacement and fetishisation of cultural-historical artefacts. Recently the diagnosis of an animist impulse has become a concern in contemporary art exhibition practices and finds echo in ideas of Vibrant Matter or Object Oriented Ontology and Speculative Materialism. Animation and new life of objects haunt our vision of 'the lively' and our relation to im/mortality (neuroscience); it induces a reconsideration of established dichotomies such as im/materialism and engenders debates around object-oriented ontology and Realist Magic.3. Animation's root in AnimaIn classical philosophy, Aristotle's treatise On the Soul, translated into Latin as De Anima implies neither a technological nor an animist impulse but a metaphysical one, that is, to ensoul. For Aristotle, the possession of a soul (psyche) is to be understood as the essence of living things and more so as the quintessence of human being. This strand of a wider understanding of Animation opens animation studies to discourses of the trans- and posthuman in contemporary technological and mediated environments. We need to assess the current resonances of anima in an animated environment