Seiyū

Characters in animation have had voices ever since Fleischer Studios released My Old Kentucky Home, the first talkie animation, in 1926. In Japan, actors who voice characters for anime are called seiyū. Their voices play a key, and necessary role in creating characters for this audio-visual medium.

In standard anime productions on TV, voice actors, by viewing the images, synchronise their voice acting with what the images depict. This method of voice recording is called afureko, a ‘Japanese English’ (wasei eigo) term meaning ‘after-recording’. Interestingly, voice recording occupies a different place in the production process depending on the country or region. For instance, in feature-length productions in the United States, the audio-recording process is conducted before visual production. Hence, this process is named ‘prescoring’.

Voice actors’ bodies, of course, are not shown to the audience in either prescore or afureko. However, the degree of discretion afforded to the voice actor differs between prescore and afureko. In prescore, since voice acting precedes visual direction, the voice offers the basis that animators rely on, and the reverse is so in afureko. Hence, the choice of prescore automatically means the prioritisation of voice acting over drawing, whereas choosing afureko means the prioritisation of drawing over voice acting. According to anime scholar and critic Ryōta Fujitsu, in afureko a director who creates storyboards determines the outline of a voice acting script for characters, and voice actors act following the script when recording; hereafter, this is called afureko script.[1] Because the afureko script is made from a storyboard drawn by a director, Fujitsu concludes that voice acting is “a work of assembling acting and expressing characters within a frame decided by others”.[2]

In my essay “Synchronising with Others: An Analysis of the Afureko Script”,[3] I analyse the afureko script in detail and show how it controls the voice acting. Here, I briefly summarise the points of that analysis. The comma ‘,’ in the afureko script indicates the timing of the character’s movements; that is, voice actors have to stop at the ‘,’ to synchronise with the character’s movement, and they cannot remove it nor change the location. The function of ‘,’ shows that voice actors must strictly follow the frame designed by the storyboards, at the minute or detailed level.

Because of the rigid frame imposed on voice acting, it has been said that the performance of voice actors is essentially different from that of actors in live theatre or non-animated cinema or TV dramas. Interestingly, such a bias existed even before the first TV anime series in the 30-minute weekly format, Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy, 1963–1966), was broadcast.

Japanese Dubbing for Animations and Telefilms Produced in the US

Since the mid-1950s, many animations and telefilms have been imported to Japan from the United States, arousing a high demand for Japanese dubbing services for the first time. In dubbing, the voice actors have to carefully follow the timing of the original performance in English (or whatever language) for precise synchronisation; as a result, dubbing is called atereko in Japanese English, which means to match (ateru in Japanese) the voice to images in recording. In a script for atereko, lines are written to physically, or visually, correspond to the timing of the original performance. Yaeko Nukata, who has been a translator and scriptwriter for dubbing since 1956, explains how such a script is made.

“When the actor speaks the line in a breath, I have to write it in the dubbing script as it is, no matter how long the line is. On the other hand, when the actor speaks slowly with many pauses, I have to reproduce precisely the timing including pauses, no matter how short the line is.

For example, the actor speaks, putting breaks as follows:

‘He is 　my son.  Whatever he is,    my son.’

あれは (He is)

せがれだ (my son)

できそこないでも (Whatever he is )

せがれなんだ (my son)

If the actor for dubbing breathes at the place where the line changes, the dubbing matches the length of the original sound”.[4] Thus, dubbing and afureko share a similar system that gives cues to the voice actor to synchronise with the original.

The Argument on the Dubbing as Actor’s Job

In the early 1960s, some theatre and cinema actors began to criticise the practice of dubbing because the voice actors were brutally forced to follow the original actor’s performance.

On 19 February 1962, in the Tokyo Shimbun, a famous actor in the theatre, Eijirō Tōno, published his article on this issue, titled “Please Pay the Allowance to the ‘Voice’ Actors who Engage in Dubbing: They Are Suffering from Adjusting to Others Acting”. Tōno claimed that voice actors engaged in dubbing were miserable ‘marionettes’ because they just added their own voice to another actor’s original acting; he justified this argument as follows:

“In general, the actor’s work is to create a character in a unique way. Each actor performs this work in his or her own way. It cannot be replaced by another actor. I cannot stand that the actor’s voice is utilised for other actors’ performance”.[5]

Tōno also asserted that “actors who engage in dubbing should be paid more because they are at risk that their acting ability may be disabled”.[6] According to Tōno, dubbing is nothing but “a harmful job” for the actor.[7] In response to Tōno’s article, an actor, Tōru Abe, a voice actor engaged in dubbing for foreign telemovie series, published an article in the Tokyo Shimbun, issued on 26 February, titled “Dubbing and Actors”, in which he stated that the most important thing was to convey the feelings and personality of the other person through the dubbing in Japanese[8] and concluded that dubbing is also one of the actors’ jobs.

Next, another stage actor, Daijirō Natsukawa, published an objection to Abe’s opinion, again in the Tokyo Shimbun, on 5 March. Natsukawa insisted that “dubbing should not be taken as acting, because dubbing is just a skill” and further stated that those who have experienced certain vocal training, such as落語家 rakugo-ka (traditional comical storyteller), newscaster, or tour guide training, are also suitable for dubbing.[9]

This controversy was caused by the fact that all performing arts and communication include vocal expressions; at the same time, however, it tells us that the state and nature of voice acting can vary according to changes in the media environment: with the advent of TV broadcasting, dubbing newly became a part of the field and craft of voice acting.

To ‘Act Anime Characters’: The Case of Ichirō Nagai

Among actors themselves, voice actors who engaged in afureko for anime received the same kind of evaluation as voice actors for dubbing. In afureko, even though the voice actor’s performance creates the vocal aspect of the character, voice actors need to synchronise with the animators who draw the visual aspects of characters, prior to voice acting. In addition, as noted, voice actors in afureko are visually absent–whereas, in contrast, from the traditional point of view, acting means embodying the whole character, using one’s body and face and showing them to the audience. In this light, voice actors for anime seemed to lack something important for acting and came to occupy a low position in the actorly hierarchy.

In 1981, 20 years after the argument on dubbing, a famous voice actor with a long career in anime, Ichirō Nagai, published an article on voice acting for anime, “Saibō de toraeta engi’” (“Acting by the Level of Cells”).[10] This article was a contribution to a fan book for the series Mobile Suit Gundam (1979), of which Nagai was the narrator. The basic assumption of the article is that acting for anime is not different from acting for theatre; therefore, Nagai does not use the expression ‘voice actor’ so often, but just simply ‘actor’. In addition, he analyses what and how anime actors think of the performance in afureko, referring to the criticism of dubbing by Tōno and Natsukawa but insisting on his own opinion.

According to Nagai, actors should “match their own cell’s vectors to the character’s vectors”.[11] In his context, ‘cell’ stands for a certain physical reality of the actor’s body, and ‘vector’, borrowed from physics, stands for the necessary measures to grasp characters. He states that voice actors need to understand the vector of characters’ emotions and that of their actions, motivated and realised by means of their feelings. In other words, voice actors must completely comprehend the vectors of the reasons, backgrounds, and environments that construct the character’s actions and turn these vectors into the actor’s own vectors.

Nagai explains an advisable way to read the script, as follows.

“The actors need to pick up the vectors of the conditions necessary for the characters from the script as much as possible. Otherwise, the character’s actions performed by the actors are not precise. When the actors insufficiently and incorrectly prepare the conditions of action at the cell level, they do not fit the characters. The actor’s talents depend on the ability to pick up the vectors”.[12]

Moreover, Nagai states that actors in afureko simulate their character’s behaviours, and that as a result, the actors can embody the character’s movements even if they themselves do not move in front of the microphone. He explains his own experience in afureko.

“In other words, I was actually just watching the character’s movements on the screen and lip-syncing, but I tried to imagine myself acting the character’s movements more consciously and more strongly. This process was repeated again. I was able to consciously create feelings that occurred in my own cells. At that time, my work did well. The lines of the character were lively spoken”.[13]

In the context of Nagai’s acting theory, I now focus on a phrase acted by Nagai in Episode 33—“Kāsan ga inai” (“Mother has disappeared”)—of the show Haha wo tazunete sanzenri (1976). In this anime work, Nagai plays Peppino, the leader of a travelling puppet troupe. When Peppino arrives at an inn in a small town, he speaks the line.

ペッピーノ「やれやれ(yare yare)、これで手足がのばせる」

Peppino: ‘Well done (yare yare), I can relax’.[14]

In this cut, Peppino’s line, “やれやれ” (yare yare), is articulated not only by the onomatopoeic word yare yare but by a sigh integrated with it; this not only conveys that Peppino has finally arrived at the inn following a long journey but also that he is experiencing the hardships and sorrows of a travelling artist. Of course, this breathing can be performed quite precisely relying on the timing of the comma, discussed above. Moreover, Nagai manipulates his breath while remaining in the frame imposed by the storyboard, adds various nuances into his voice, and conveys the character’s innermost feelings, literally breathing life into the character.

Peppino’s sigh also reflects Nagai’s action to physically grasp the actions of the characters, and is an example of Nagai’s acting theory and practice. In addition to his own acting experience, Nagai was theoretically armed with an academic article by the athletic scholar Atsushi Katsube, based on which he argues against the suspicion of voice acting shared by many actors in theatre,[15] founded on the view, hinted at above, that voice acting is inauthentic and voice actors cannot act by their own 息 (iki, “breath”).

Interestingly, Nagai also asserts that “the actor’s own 息” considered an essential factor in stage acting. He says that “if you really act by your own息, it does not mean to ‘become a character”’.[16] Besides, he points out that “in the atereco for anime (note 1: this reference shows how dubbing for American programmes and afureko for anime were both lumped together as voice actor’s jobs), lip-synching is a direction made by a director. The lip-synching, as an instruction, is much more accurate and useful than an incompetent director”.[17] Nagai insists that “the visual aspects of characters certainly exist before [their] voice. However, they are just shadows without their voice. Please turn off the volume of your TV set. Then, characters on the screen are no longer ‘human”’.[18] From Nagai’s understanding of voice acting for afureko in anime, we can infer that the voice is as important as the picture for bringing characters a lively or compelling existence on the screen.

Nagai clarified that both voice and visual aspects are necessary to bring characters to life in the narrative world, and strongly affirmed the meaning and value of contributions by voice actors engaged in the afureko. His assertion is proof that voice actors even at that relatively early stage clearly identified and recognised the voice actor’s job as an essential factor in the new rising audio-visual medium of anime. Nagai’s article, “Acting at the Level of Cells”, was written for fans of Mobile Suit Gundam and for young people who wanted to be voice actors in anime; especially in this context, Nagai’s confidence and pride as a voice actor eloquently indicate that anime already stood in Japanese society as an expressive, mature medium comparable to theatre and cinema.

Minori Ishida

[1] Fujitsu, 2018: 100–3. Fujitsu, Ryōta. “Seiyū ron: Tsūshiteki, jisshōteki ichi kōsatsu”. In Anime kenkyū nyūmon ōyōhen: Anime wo kiwameru 11 no kotsu. Edited by Masahiro Koyama and Akiko Sugawa, 93–117. Tokyo: Gendai Shokan, 2018.

[2] Fujitsu, 2018: 103.

[3] Ishida, 2020.

Ishida, Minori. “Voice actors synchronised with other human agents: An analysis of the afureko script”. In Archiving movements: short essays on anime and visual media materials vol. 2. Edited by Ishida, Minori and Kim Joon Yang, 33–40. Niigata: The Archive Center for Anime Studies at Niigata University, 2020.

[4] Nukata 1989: 40; all translations from Japanese by the present author.

Nukata, Yaeko. Atereko arekore: Terebi eiga honyaku no sekai. Tokyo: Chūokōron Sha, 1989.

[5] Tōno, 1962. Tōno, Eijirō. “Seiyū ni kiken teate wo: Tanin no engi ni awasu kurushimi”. Tokyo Shimbun. 19 February 1962.

[6] Tōno, ibid.

[7] Tōno, ibid.

[8] Abe, Tōru. “Atereko to haiyū: katawa ni naru towa omowa nai”. Tokyo Shimbun. 26 February 1962.

[9] Natsukawa, 1962. Natsukawa, Daijirō. “Biginesu to warikire: Atereko wa tokushuna gijutu”. Tokyo Shimbun, 5 March 1962.

[10] Nagai, Ichirō. “Saibō de toraeta engi”. Gundam Century: Sora kakeru senshitachi Fukkoku ban: 88–96. Tokyo: Jusōsya, 1981=2001.

[11] Nagai, 1981=2001: 94.

[12] Nagai, ibid. 92.

[13] Nagai, ibid. 93.

[14] The afureko script for ‘Episode 33,’ 1976: 14.

This afureko script is part of the Watanabe Collection at the Archive Center for Anime Studies at Niigaa University, which includes several kinds of intermediate materials produced and used to make soundtracks for anime works.

[15] Nagai, 1981=2001: 94.

[16] Nagai, ibid. 94.

[17] Nagai, ibid. 94.

[18] Nagai, ibid. 90.

Dr. Ishida Minori is Associate Professor at Niigata University and Co-director of the Archive Center for Anime Studies in Niigata University. Her research field is visual and audio cultures focusing on voice and gender in anime. She has published Anime to seiyū no media shi: naze josei ga shōnen o enjirunoka [Media History of Anime and Voice actors: Why Voice Actresses Play Roles of Boy?] (Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2020) and Hisoyaka na kyoiku:“Yaoi -Boys Love”zenshi [Secret Education: Prehistory of Yaoi and Boys’ Love] (Kyoto: Rakuhoku Shuppann) for which she received the  Abe Prize from Niigata University in 2009; besides contributing articles around ‘Deviating Voices’ or ‘Sounds and Sighs: “Voice Porn” for Women’.

On Shinkai Makoto, Spiritual Imagination and Animation Ecologies

In response to the Assembly’s ongoing investigations on ‘life’ and animism in current animation practices, I would like to put together some preliminary speculations around animation, ecocriticism and Japan’s indigenous tradition of spiritual beliefs that came to my mind after watching Shinkai Makoto’s latest animated feature Weathering with You (Tenki no ko, 2019), a film released last year amidst national and international acclaim. Two aspects of this film stroke me particularly: first, its focus on environmental crisis seen through the eyes of two teenagers; second, its deployment of spiritual beliefs, related to both Shintō and Buddhism, as central elements in the unfolding of the narrative.

Shintō–or Japan’s indigenous tradition of animistic beliefs and cosmological imagination–has been most often associated with Japanese animation,[1] not least because of the international success of Studio Ghibli and its environmentalist founding member Miyazaki Hayao, whom Shinkai is often referred to as a natural successor. Yet, while Miyazaki excelled in making hand-drawn animation in an era mostly characterised by analogue production, limited international distribution and local ecological struggles, Shinkai is fundamentally a digital native director, who has excelled in crafting anime through digital tools in an era of multimedia production and global distribution.[2] In addition, environmentalism has also changed, shifting from a matter of local concerns to a diverse political movement globally united by the incumbent risks of climate change. As such, Weathering with You is a reminder not only of the great transformations that occurred to anime in the past few years, but also those that interested its diverse audience groups and the very world around them.

This film, therefore, seems particularly suitable to consider continuities and changes in recent anime practices, and see how it positions itself in relation to the spiritual and worldly connections that it explicitly evokes. In other words, if animation is about perceiving life in technically animated images, what does this film tell us about our own life at the time of human-made ecological crises? What then is the relationship between animate and inanimate, immaterial and material ecologies in contemporary anime practices?

As a way to articulate an answer, a bit of background will be of help.

Anime’s Material Ecologies

As it is known, Japanese commercial animation had an impulse in the post-war years of Japan’s rapid industrial growth, when the proliferation of innumerable new commodities bore the promise of a peaceful, affluent and convenient lifestyle. Like some of the commodities that were entering the market, anime was literally made out of plastic, in and out of the screen. Not only its drawing and shooting required plastic materials such as polyester acetates and vinyl painting, but its off-screen commercialisation–necessary to pay back its labour-intensive production cycle–made also extensive use of plastic in the form of collectable toys and licensed goods.

Animation and plastic shared another similarity, their intrinsic capacity for self-transformation. Sergei Eisenstein, for example, highlighted the plasticity and plasmaticness of Disney’s pre-war cartoons, in which characters constantly stretched, shrank, inflated, flattened and twisted as if they were “mocking at their own form”.[3] Not differently from the demiurgic qualities often attributed to animation techniques, which different audiences perceived as imparting “life” to imaginary beings,[4] the proliferating forms of plastic also gave man a measure of his mastery over matter, since–as Barthes famously put it–“the very itinerary of plastic gives him the euphoria of a prestigious free-wheeling through Nature”.[5] Yet, as animated characters stretched and transformed while never losing their semblance, so plastic objects persisted well beyond the exhaustion of their use value.[6] In the 1960s and 70s, in particular, the polluting effects of plastics and chemical components became dramatically evident in Japan, as serious accidents and diseases caused by air and water pollution started to appear regularly across the country.[7] Positivist notions of progress soon became intertwined with less optimistic anxieties about the harmful environmental effects of disposable plastic cultures, overdevelopment and toxic waste dumping.

As the first Japanese environmental movements started to assemble around local anti-pollution struggles, a new environmental consciousness also streamed into anime. Ecological themes featured regularly in popular series such as Black Jack and Doraemon, while SF speculated on the catastrophic effects of ecological disasters, as in the anime TV series Space Warrior Baldios (Uchū Senshi Barudiosu, 1980), which ends with the total annihilation of life on Earth due to radioactive contamination and the melting of the polar ice caps. Yet, anime remained ambivalently embedded in complex plastic ecologies of tools, television sets and extended economies of licensed goods and toys. This was also true for those who, like director Miyazaki Hayao, had strenuously resisted the over commercialisation of animated works. In an interview originally published between 1994 and 1995, for example, he commented in this way on his conflicted feelings: “We think that cel animation is better than computer graphics, yet at the same time we face the problem of industrial waste, so we ask whether it makes sense to continue producing films with cels. But we end up leaving things ambivalent”.[8] Some 25 years later, at a time in which both anime and ecological crises have assumed planetary dimensions, we might follow up on Miyazaki’s earlier concern and ask how computer graphics is actually dealing with the environmental problem.

Here is when the work of Shinkai Makoto comes to mind. First, because of his important role as an innovator, able to reinvent hand-drawn anime as a fully digital endeavour. And second, because of the open references, in his latest film and some of his other works, to Japanese spiritual and cosmological beliefs, which promise to open up a different way for imagining the relations between human, animal and spiritual beings.

Anime’s Spiritual Ecologies

As we have seen, a vibrant vitalism in moving characters has been repeatedly associated to early animation, so that different commentators have found in it the reflection of a sort of “animistic worldview, a world in which everything is endowed with life force or spirit, and maybe even soul”.[9] Although anime has been historically characterised by a substantial reliance on law frame-rates–or techniques of limited-animation that tended to place less emphasis on characters’ movement–some spiritual qualities have been nonetheless attributed to Japanese commercial animation since the first anime series Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu, 1963) aired on Japanese TV screens in 1963.[10] For anthropologist Anne Allison, Shintō’s spiritual beliefs are key to understand such way of experiencing animated characters in Japan.[11] In her study on Japanese media and interactive toys, for example, she coined the expression ‘techno-animism’ to refer to the unconscious beliefs underpinning the ‘polymorphous’ proliferation of spirits, creatures and machines blurring the human and non-human divide in fortunate media series such as Pokémon.

In recent years, the international success of works by Studio Ghibli and Miyazaki Hayao has also prompted associations between anime and animism. Miyazaki’s films evoke a sort of animism by staging, on the background of severe ecological crises, uncanny encounters with non-human creatures whose design very often resists any straightforward tendency towards anthropomorphism (for example, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, 1984). Visually, the aesthetic feel of his films relies on artful and elaborate background paintings upon which are layered accurately animated but simply designed characters. According to Lamarre, this marked difference between characters and backgrounds produces a relative sense of depth, in which a luscious nature emerges as a central frame of reference without ever losing its dynamism thanks to an effective use of compositing.[12] For these reasons, many commentators have seen in Miyazaki’s films a re-animation of Shintō’s immanence and vitalism through “experiences of wonder and intimate connectedness in nature”.[13]

When exploring the relationship between animation and spiritualism, however, easy references to both Shintō and anime require careful consideration. For a long time, the legacies of Japan’s indigenous spiritualism have represented a taboo for critical scholars, particularly because of Shintō’s historical embeddedness in the political manoeuvres that, in pre-war Japan, harnessed its mythologies and principles in support of nationalist state ideology. During the post-war, a new popular discourse around animism and Shintō spirituality emerged in Japan through the work of intellectuals, journalists, artists, manga and anime creators that looked at it as a critique of the authoritarianism of wartime State Shintō.[14] Still, as Rambelli observed, this diverse discourse could not avoid resorting to more or less explicit forms of national exceptionalism –for example, by reviving pre-war “debates on modernity (as westernisation) and the need to overcome it” [15] while idealising a pristine Japanese past allegedly characterised by peace and harmony with nature. Ambiguously positioned between wartime authoritarianism and post-war discourses of national uniqueness–nihonjinron, or “theories on the Japanese”[16]–Shintō remained an uncomfortable object of study, often treated suspiciously and somehow reduced to a passive and necessary expression of cultural politics.

A recent call to reassess Shintō from an ontological, rather than ideological perspective, has come from debates on new animism emerged at the crossroad of anthropology and science and technology studies. As Casper Jensen and Anders Blok suggest, for example, Shintō has always been a historically variable placeholder for a multitude of practices and interests.[17] In other words, the idea of a pristine Shintō with no relations with–say–Buddhist iconography, commercial cultures, the nation state and political ideology is only bound to recede into a deceptive myth of origin. While taking its historical legacies seriously, Jensen and Blok invite to reconceive Shintō as an open-ended and diverse formation, recuperating from its cosmological imagination “different modes of human-nonhuman cohabitation” that could infuse “new energy into the analysis of non-modernities outside the Euro-American orbit”.[18]

Of course, if an ontological recuperation of Shintō practices and cosmologies is indeed desirable, the same is true for what concerns animation. In other words, in order to be fully effective, the project of broadening the imaginative spaces of non-Western modernities has to remain attentive not only to the diversity of Shintō practices and experiences, but also to the very diversity of Japanese animation techniques in which Shintō principles have often been claimed to find instantiation. In fact, a major risk implicit in this recuperation of Shintō would be to mechanically see it in every expression of Japanese animation, on the ground of the received association of life with animated movement. However, if we are interested in how Shintō practices and beliefs are always already embedded in broader material and spiritual assemblages, what is to be avoided is to conflate Shintō and anime together, as if they were flowing effortlessly from the same “ cultural worldview”[19]–a cultural worldview consonant with stereotypical ideas of some intrinsic ‘Japanese’ harmony with nature.[20]

In the context of this reflection, Shinkai Makoto’s latest film comes as a particularly interesting testing ground, as it deliberately stages a syncretic mix of Shintō and Buddhist beliefs in open relation to severe environmental disasters.

Weathering with You

Weathering with You narrates the romance and tumultuous coming of age of two teenagers in an era of dramatic natural disasters. Morishima Hodaka is a runaway child that reaches Tokyo from the countryside, while Amano Hina lives alone with her younger brother since the death of their mother. In a Tokyo afflicted by sudden climatic variations, Hina discovers to be a ‘girl of the weather’, a shaman whose prayers have the power to temporarily clear the sky from persistent heavy rains and exceptional weather conditions.

Hina’s power is intimately connected with a spiritual world of syncretic Shintō-Buddhist beliefs. The rooftop of the abandoned high rise building where Hina’s power manifest for the first time is indeed marked by two well-known religious symbols: a Torii portal usually found in Shintō shrines to demarcate the transition from human to sacred environments; and the aubergine and cucumber used during the celebration of the Obon festival to welcome the spirits of ancestors as they come back to visit their worldly families. If these syncretic elements anticipate the spiritual background of the story, they do not have necessarily benign connotations. As we later learn from the tale of an old  Shintō priest, Hina’s power is actually a curse: girls of the weather traditionally appear during times of natural climatic disasters. As such, they are bound to be sacrificed so as to appease the spirits of the weather.

As the events precipitate and the prophecy is about to come true, Hina ascends to the top of a huge cumulonimbus cloud towering over Tokyo, where the spiritual and the natural unite in the same hybrid ecosystem. Against all the odds, Hodaka manages to rescue her from the sky before her body is dissolved into the watery environment. In this way, the course of events prescribed by tradition is overturned, and the two loving teenagers are reunited in the same earthly existence. The consequences of their actions, however, will have extreme consequences for the rest of the city. With no human sacrifice, rains keep falling over Tokyo, submerging part of its surface and dramatically changing the life of all its inhabitants.

If this dramatic conclusion avoids an otherwise banal happy ending, it simultaneously makes one wonder what kind of “cosmopolitics”[21] is such a film proposing. If we want to answer, Lamarre suggests, “We need to look closer at animation as such, at techniques of the moving image, for it is here that life comes into play within animation”.[22] In other words, if we are keen on pursuing an analysis of animation and animism, we should consider how the film’s simple narrative is materially enacted through particular animation techniques.

As I anticipated, Shinkai is part of a new generation of Japanese animators who started to work directly with digital software and devices, making anime a new site of aesthetic transformations and experimentations. Shinkai is especially credited for producing emotion-oriented effects through a synesthetic combination of aural sources, oversaturated colours and digital lighting that punctuates the inner feelings of his characters. More generally, his style is characterised by an extreme use of photorealism, with everyday objects and natural environments often painted over real photographs and shot from a great variety of focal lenses, from detailed close ups to breath-taking wide angles.

This level of detail, combined with digital compositing smoothing the integration of animated characters and backgrounds, is not comparable to non-digital TV anime and its well-known tendency of compressing foreground and background elements on the same plane, what Lamarre has called “flat compositing”.[23] In fact, it could be argued that Shinkai’s photorealistic settings bring to the extreme the sense of depth that we have already encountered in discussing Miyazaki’s artistic backgrounds, albeit with a relevant difference. In Shinkai’s work, we find much less emphasis on open compositing techniques that, by accentuating dynamism and difference between layers, allowed Miyazaki to resist the tendency, latent in his picturesque backgrounds, of fixing and reifying the natural world. On the contrary, Shinkai’s static shots of digitally painted pictures are always at risk of objectifying and aestheticizing everyday life through the photorealistic rendering of common objects, architectures and infrastructures. If these visual representations function as non-verbal, emotion inducing signposts for places and seasons, they simultaneously elevate as the main frame of reference the uniqueness of the Japanese experience of modernity, rather than opening it up to multivocal and contested experiences.

Seen from this perspective, Weathering with You seems particularly challenging for a view of animism as an alternative to both Japanese cultural exceptionalism and the divide between nature and culture dominant in Western thought. Indeed, the film seems rather interested in reinstating a nature-culture dualism by separating the man-made urban environment of Tokyo from the spiritual ecosystem on top of the cumulonimbus cloud. While there is definitely ontological continuity between these two ecosystems, boundary-crossing is ultimately undesirable for both humans and non-humans: on the top of the cloud, Hina’s body is almost turned into water, while the fishlike spirits that happen to fall from the sky dissolve immediately after touching the ground. In other words, the film does not provide any explicit solution to mediate between the different human and non-human ecosystems, and the fate of the world is ultimately reduced to a matter of individual choice. As in other films by Shinkai, the focus is entirely inward-looking and solipsistic; all that matters is the romance between the two main characters, all the more so if its endurance can be measured against a sublime environmental crisis. Indeed, through digital filters and lighting effects, atmospheric phenomena such as falling rain or water reflections become part of the dreamy aesthetics Shinkai’s films have become famous for. In this way, however, the incumbent issue of the ecological crisis is aesthetically and politically emptied out and displaced.

More than on an animistic cosmology, Weathering with You seems rather to hinge on an excess of liberalism. This is made clear, for example, by Hodaka and Hina’s individual freedom to act in defence of their own self-interest against principles oriented towards a common good. There is an uncanny parallelism between the fractal existence of the characters in the film and those living precarious lives in contemporary Tokyo,[24] where everything, including one’s very body and soul, potentially becomes a means of economic exchange. This is what happens in the film, where Hina is almost about to get a job in the sex industry before finding out about her spiritual powers, which she then uses–thanks to an internet platform–to sell weather clearing services to paying customers.

What animates the filmic ecosystem of Tokyo is a network of physical and digital infrastructures for the fast circulation of commodities, services and global brands. Here, photorealism plays a more explicit objectifying function, as it permits, by means of explicit product placement, the inclusion of an extremely high number of real brands in the diegetic world of the film. The explosion of this commercial ecology–from the lived environment to the screen, and back again–is further enhanced by what digital animation production allows in terms of modularity. Lissy Jose has convincingly shown how Shinkai often recurs to various editing techniques that “accelerate the narrative pace while preserving the contemplative qualities of his films”.[25] The result is a composition of fast-paced but still contemplative episodic segments that work well with different delivery platforms, from full-length theatrical releases to fragmented viewings on portable devices. In Weathering with You, this modularity is given a further commercial twist as some of the film’s scenes have been reedited and repurposed on different media as short commercial advertisements: for mobile phone companies (Soft Bank), instant noodles (Nissin), a job search platform for the rising gig economy (Baitoru), and more. After two decades of structural attacks on workers rights,[26] the ‘freedom’ of striking the best product placement and licensing deals seems to have emerged in Japan as a natural value for a new generation of creative workers that, like Shinkai, have fought their way in the industry through tough competition, exhausting work shifts and flexible freelance contracts.[27]

As the film exploits these commercial opportunities while celebrating the value of individual choice, the Japanese national myth of a cohesive and homogeneous society collapses in the face of an ecological crisis that no one seems to be able, or willing, to fix. While the film succeeds in undermining the hierarchical pull of traditional authorities–including religion, which can only propose Hina’ sacrifice as a viable solution–it fails in substituting it with anything other the young, entrepreneurial and self-centred subjectivities of the two main characters. As animism and the environmental crisis are only deployed as aesthetic and narrative devices, the only ecology we are left with is one of brands and goods crossing over physical and digital forms of engagement.

(Tentative) Conclusion

In the context of current discussions on new animism and ecocriticism, Weathering with You is a reminder that different aesthetics and techniques afford different relationships between animation and animism, spiritual and worldly ecologies. In studies of Japanese animation, the received association of animism with animated movement has often given a certain currency to the culturalist idea that Shintō principles could be somehow found in anime. In this respect, the juxtaposition of spiritualism and animation techniques in Shinkai’s latest film allows to readdress this claim by reconceiving, on the one hand, Shintō as “a multivalent formation in ontological, political as well as affective terms”[28] and, on the other, anime as a diverse technoaesthetic and technosocial undertaking.[29]

As Lamarre once wrote “Animation entertains distinctions without calling for a foundational bifurcation of nature. Even if it proposes contrasts between human and animal, between organic and inorganic, or between organism and mechanism, it tends to generate entities falling between, defying the onset of strict opposition”.[30] Shinkai’s film does certainly do this, at least to a certain extent. For example, it still entertains the idea of some possible interactions between humans and spirits, and refuses anthropomorphism in depicting otherworldly creatures. Yet, other aesthetic choices tend to foreclose, rather than open up, this promising vision of a common and dynamic field of existence for living creatures, gods and inanimate objects in the context of an incumbent ecological crisis.

In particular, Shinkai’s photorealist aesthetic is used to add dreamy qualities to real objects, places and atmospheric conditions, imbuing them with spiritual and emotional resonances that are reportedly internalised by the viewers. While digital filters heighten these affective responses, they simultaneously objectify them as commodities available for human consumption. This reification is at once metaphorical and material, since the modular advertisements derived from the film relay its effects transmedially, contributing to a faster circulation of commodities in the non-diegetic world. From the promise of an animist worldview able to reconnect the viewers with a human-made ecological crisis, we are left with a real, too real material ecology of capitals and goods in circulation.

And yet, fictional or not, the spectre of the crisis persists, haunting the characters of the films as well as the very lives of its audience. Early this summer, with striking similarity with the final images of the film, the southern Japanese island of Kyūshū was afflicted by record-breaking heavy rain that caused flooding and landslides, submerging millions of buildings and killing more than 70 people. We might think, like the characters in the film, that no connection exists between spiritual and worldly ecologies, between our individual lives and these tragic environmental disasters. Or we might take this as a wakeup call, a shocking reminder that–unlike what happens in the film–some connections might actually exist between our lives and the forms of circulation that we enact, between animation techniques and “the divergent, layered, and conjoined projects that make up worlds”.[31]

Dario Lolli

[1] Bigelow, 2009, among others. Bigelow, Susan J. “Technologies of perception: Miyazaki in theory and practice”. Animation 4(1) (2009). SAGE Publications, Sage UK: London, England: 55–75. DOI: 10.1177/1746847708099740.

[2] Weathering with You, for example, is distributed internationally by Netflix.

[3] Eisenstein, 1988: 5. Eisenstein, Sergei. On Disney. Edited by Jay Leyda, translated by Alan Upchurch. London: Methuen, 1988.

[4] Jenkins, 2014. Jenkins, Eric S. Special Affects: Cinema, Animation and the Translation of Consumer Culture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.

[5] Barthes, 1972: 97. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1972.

[6] Gabrys et al, 2013: 5. Gabrys, Jennifer, Gay Hawkins and Mike Michael (eds). Accumulation: The Material Politics of Plastic. Abingdon (UK) and New York: Routledge, 2013.

[7] Hase, 1981. Hase, Toshio. “Japan’s Growing Environmental Movement”. Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 23(2) (1981). Routledge: 14–36. DOI: 10.1080/00139157.1981.9933109.

[8] Miyazaki, 2014: 426. Miyazaki, Hayao. Starting Point: 1979–1996. San Francisco: Viz Media, 2014.

[9] Lamarre, 2013: 117–8. Lamarre, Thomas. “Coming to Life: Cartoon Animals and Natural Philosophy”. In Pervasive Animation. Edited by Suzanne Buchan, 117–42. New York & London: Routledge, 2013.

[10] Steinberg, 2012. Steinberg, Marc. Anime’s Media Mix: Franchising Toys and Characters in Japan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012.

[11] Allison, 2006. Allison, Anne. Millennial Monsters: Japanese Toys and the Global Imagination. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.

[12] Lamarre, 2009: 104–5. Lamarre, Thomas. Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

[13] Jensen and Blok, 2013: 101.

Jensen, Casper Bruun, and Blok Anders. “Techno-animism in Japan: Shinto cosmograms, actor-network theory, and the enabling powers of non-human agencies”. Theory, Culture & Society 30(2) (2013). SAGE Publications Ltd: 84–115. DOI: 10.1177/0263276412456564.

[14] Rambelli, 2019. Rambelli, Fabio. “Introduction: The Invisible Empire: Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan”. In Spirits and Animism in Contemporary Japan: The Invisible Empire, 1–16. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.

[15] Rambelli, ibid. 8.

[16] Jensen and Blok, 2013: 93.

[17] Jensen and Blok, ibid.

[18] Jensen and Blok, ibid. 92.

[19] Jensen and Blok, ibid. 104.

[20] Asquith and Kalland, 1997. Asquith, Pamela J, and Arne Kalland. Japanese Images of Nature: Cultural Perspectives. Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press, 1997.

[21] Stengers, 2005. Stengers, Isabelle. “The Cosmopolitical Proposal”. In Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Edited by Bruno Latour, and Peter Weibel, 994–1003. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.

[22] Lamarre 2013: 120.

[23] Lamarre, 2009: 126.

[24] Allison, 2013. Allison, Anne. Precarious Japan. Durham: Duke University, 2013.

[25] Jose, 2015: 13. Jose, Lissy. “The Multiplicity of Screens and its Impact on Filmic Narration: A Study on the Feature Films of Makoto Shinkai”. Singularities: An Transdisciplinary Biannual Research Journal 2(1) (2015): 11–6.

[26] Ito, 2005. Ito, Makoto. “Assessing Neoliberalism in Japan”. In Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. Edited by Alfredo Saad-Filho & Deborah Johnston, 244–50. London; Ann Arbor, MI: Pluto Press, 2005.

[27] Mori, 2011; Yamamoto, 2014. Mori, Yoshitaka. “The Pitfall Facing the Cool Japan Project: The Transnational Development of the Anime Industry under the Condition of Post-Fordism*”. International Journal of Japanese Sociology 20(1) (2011): 30–42; Yamamoto, Kenta. The Agglomeration of the Animation Industry in East Asia. International Perspectives in Geography, AJC Library 4. Tokyo, New York, London: Springer, 2014.

[28] Jensen and Blok, 2013: 96.

[29] Lamarre, 2018. Lamarre, Thomas. The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media. Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

[30] Lamarre, 2013: 132.

[31] Tsing, 2017: 22. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.

Dario Lolli (PhD, University of London) is Assistant Professor in Japanese and Visual Culture at Durham University (UK). Prior to that, he was postdoctoral fellow at Keiō University (Tokyo), where he worked on a Japan Foundation-sponsored project on the morphology of the Japanese licensing industry. His in-progress monograph, Dispositives of Extension, investigates the ecologies of affect, creativity and value established by anime franchises as they move across territories, technologies and contexts of use. He is a permanent member of the Archive Center for Animation Studies in Niigata, Japan, and has published for the Cambridge Companion to Manga and Anime, Convergence and Media Culture & Society.

Anna Vasof’s “Non Stop Stop-Motion”

“Non Stop Stop Motion” is a filmless animation technique developed by architect and media artist Anna Vasof (born in 1985) during her studies in Transmedia Arts at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. In 2020 she finished her PhD in Practice. Among the results of her artistic research are a film, Non Stop Stop Motion,[1] and an exhibition of works under the same title. At the center of the artist’s work are her attempts—and failures—to understand the core mechanisms behind the production of movement out of a series of still images; the film Non Stop Stop Motion unfolds this endeavor in fourteen chapters, from “Misunderstanding” to “Everything is an Excuse.” The accompanying exhibition[2] presented the machines and contraptions that issued from her experiments.

Based on the idea that the illusion of movement results from the projection of discontinuous, intermittently visible still images, her “Non Stop Stop Motion” works translate intermittency, this most basic cinematic mechanism, into performances and installations. Many of Vasof’s pieces can be regarded as attempts to lay bare the usually invisible workings of the cinematic apparatus—but without using a (conventional) cinematic apparatus at all. An excellent example of this unraveling of the magic of animated pictures is Vasof’s interactive installation Self-Portrait (2017).[3] The piece is made out of simple everyday objects: a metal bucket, a small wooden ball, an LED lamp, magnifiers, rope and seven paper cups. When a visitor moves the rope up and down and the lamp starts swinging, the installation turns into an audiovisual machine animating a figure of the upper body of a young woman with closed eyes wearing a headscarf. This figure has been cut out from the bottoms of the paper cups, each cut-out representing a slightly different stage of movement. Thanks to the magnifiers attached to the paper cups, when the lamp starts swinging the very small image of the figure’s upper body is projected (in a much-enlarged scale) on to the wall, moving backwards and forwards as if it were trapped in an endless loop of bowing. Additionally, and with fantastic precision, exactly at the moment the woman’s head hits a thin line we hear a loud bang, the result of the clapper striking the bottom of the metal bucket. Finally, no matter how important it was for Vasof to find the appropriate mechanism for Self-Portrait, the piece cannot be reduced to its technical aspects. As its title suggests, the artist is also interested in narrative, in this case, the universal story of female struggle.

If we consider the numerous, centuries-long attempts to make images move and look for historical affiliations or resonances between these ventures and Self-Portrait, it is neither the Lumière’s cinematograph nor the popular optical toys of the nineteenth century, but the magic lantern, first described by the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huyghens in 1659,[4] that seems to be the template for Vasof’s installation. The magic lantern is an early type of image projector that used pictures on transparent slides, one or more lenses, and a light source. As Laurent Mannoni explains, “[t]he image was generally ‘fixed,’ but could also be animated if the slide included a mechanism which allowed the subject to be moved. All that was necessary was to place the slide upside-down in the ‘slide carrier,’ in front of light focused from a candle or oil lamp.”[5]

Vasof’s wondrous contraption clearly references the concept of the magic lantern as Self-Portrait is a live performance in which magnified images—made without recourse to a camera—are projected on to a white surface. However, Vasof’s continuation of the “old” into the “new” also contains considerable modifications. Instead of slides she uses cardboard cut-outs (the underside of the paper cups); a simple lamp serves as a light source; and sound comes directly from the apparatus itself when the clapper hits the bucket.[6] Unlike the magic lantern shows, often involving travelling showmen—so-called “lanternists”—going from town to town putting on entertaining performances, the interactive setting of Self-Portrait demands that viewers themselves set the apparatus in motion with a touch of their hand. As the audience is not merely watching from a distance, but becomes instead part of the machine’s functioning, Self-Portrait’s apparatus is one that more properly fits under the category of—to use Wanda Strauven’s terms—the “player mode” of moving images, as opposed to the original magic lantern’s “viewer mode.”[7]

A comparison of proto-cinema (magic lantern) and contemporary expanded animation (Self-Portrait) necessarily entails further differences, most remarkably the interplay between light source and image carrier. In the original magic lantern, the slides were mobile and the light source fixed; in Self-Portrait however, the light source moves, but the images stand still. While the magic lantern during its long history aimed at constant improvement (for example, more complex design, a larger number of lenses, various cinematic techniques including fades and dissolves), Vasof’s endeavor moves in the opposite direction by emphasizing limitations to work, favoring DIY-practices and “cheap” materials. As a hacked magic lantern, Self-Portrait not only demonstrates how obsolete apparatuses can be reinvented through modification, but also represents a poetic and critical work with a degree of socio-political weight.

Gabriele Jutz

[1] https://vimeo.com/annavasof (Non Stop Stop Motion)

[2] Zentrum Fokus Forschung, Vienna, October 27–29, 2020.

[3] https://vimeo.com/annavasof (Self-Portrait)

[4] Laurent Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow. Archaeology of the Cinema. (Exeter: University of Exeter Press 2000), 33.

[5] Ibid, 33–34.

[6] One should add that magic lantern shows were usually accompanied by sound (music, singing or storytelling), but the sound source was external to the apparatus.

[7] Wanda Strauven, “The Observer’s Dilemma. To Touch or Not to Touch”, In: Media Archaeology. Approaches, Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka. (Chicago: University of California Press, 2011), 148–163.

Gabriele Jutz is a professor of Film and Media Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. She has published numerous articles on the history, theory, aesthetics of film – in particular on the cinematic avant-garde, expanded cinema, experimental film sound, art and the moving image and experimental animation. Publications include RESET THE APPARATUS! A Survey of the Photographic and the Filmic in Contemporary Art (co-editors Edgar Lissel and Nina Jukić, De Gruyter 2019) or “Cinematography’s Blind Spots. Artistic Exploitations of the Film Frame.” In Cinematic Intermediality: Theory and Practice, edited by Kim Knowles and Marion Schmid, 136–49. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2021.

Colourful, vibrant images glide across my computer screen, one display superseding the next. I navigate through the various windows open on my desktop – click from programme to programme, from app to app, from site to site, from hyperlink to hyperlink. As I do this, ever new windows and tabs pop open and I try to close them, in as much as I still have any sort of overview of these animated displays; displays that more and more lead their own singular life, slip away or withdraw from my control, or better still, themselves exert control over me.

My fingers click, tip, swipe and scroll mechanically – and with every movement and motion performed by my fingers on the touchpad, I unconsciously or consciously become consumer and simultaneous producer of contents. I produce, consume – consume, produce.

Displays and images everywhere.

Everyone and everything is displayed in images, functioning nowadays only according to a logic of image – an entire, all-encompassing technologized spectacle. The image space has become the everyday space of action of “the digitization of our existence.” [i] Inside and outside, private and public, dissolve or rather merge into oneness. Low resolution “poor images”, that is viral images as defined by the German film maker, artist and writer Hito Steyerl, fill and dominate our virtual everyday. Characteristic for those “poor images” is their low resolution, their high compression, as well as the fact that they are poor in content, both in terms of colour and image. To be precise, these are the images which have become the symptomatic product of our very real, all penetrating visual culture today. Those “poor images” together with our performatively–lively handling of them, are in some ways the mirror image of an “affective condition of the crowd” [ii] because, as Steyerl continues, they provide an insight into our collective neuroses, our paranoia and anxieties. In the destabilising of life forms in Postfordism as described by Paolo Virno, the Italian philosopher of the recent Post-Operaist movement, “poor images” sooner or later get all of us. I produce them and let them circulate, visual ideas become viral.[iii] As if lifted out of time, and time itself being suspended, these animated circulations function in their very own particular time or even non-time.

My gaze drifts across the computer-display. I leisurely click my way through various windows and tabs, navigate through the displays – whereby it is more those displays guiding and leading me. In the age of digital technologies, social media and ever renewed YouTube, meme and internet-aesthetics, I produce illusions of an image without depth and images of an illusion, illusions that themselves have nothing but an image as origin. Fundamentally, I set out not from a reality that is to be represented but rather I mimic prefabricated images. In this sense, there is no ‘original’ to which I refer. The differentiation between reality and representation is no longer possible – not for me nor for others. In its place substitute what the French media theoretician and philosopher Jean Baudrillard, in a postmodern society governed by visual mass media, named, in 1981,  “hyperreality” – whereby it is no longer a question of imitation, but rather the substitution of reality by signs. No longer do we experience this by means of traditional mass media, but rather we perform ourselves from within our current prosumer-behaviour – as Networked Displays. 

What role does art play in a present in which the production, circulation and not least the consumption of an apparently infinite flood of images dominate – images that are not solely acting as “discreet objects” but instead are travelling through global networks and as such participate equally in socio-political debates and processes of economic value creation.[iv] We live as medial networked individuals in a post-digital image logic, or more precisely, we deal with a new image-logic of networked displays, a logic that manifests as an aesthetic and relational dispositif. The new status of mass circulation and of the transformability of images  – that is, their potential to be simultaneously present everywhere, available for processing and contextualising – engenders a new value for and through the images – a certain “force of image.”[v] This force of images is confined not only to the digital, but rather recursively impinges on the analogue, which in turn influences post-digital visual life.

What does it mean to think, see, and feel – hence to live – through the post-digital?

Just as I stroll through display-situations in art spaces, too, I navigate through networked displays on my computer.

Display is defined here as an artistic mode of presentation, one in which what is shown makes an appearance in the form of presenting; and whereby the display’s aesthetic function itself is simultaneously exhibited. Such an artistic form of presenting generates a transparently two-fold display-situation: exhibited is both, whatever the display presents as well as the form and mode in which whatever is presented (that is, the display’s effects) is exhibited. In this way a (social) situation, exceeding a purely artistic context, can be constructed.

In a post-digital relational image-logic of networked displays, which includes imagining the very presence of the digital even beyond digital media,[vi] there is a recognition of the tendency towards interlinking the three dimensions of production, circulation, and consumption of images more and more closely; sometimes they cannot even be separated at all anymore. With and in the various apps of social media, everywhere and at any time I am able to produce, see, manipulate, aestheticize, appropriate, frame, evaluate, comment upon, multiply and tag images. Those digital, image-based and not exclusively art-specific platforms for pictorial presentation perform as networked displays, and they position themselves – in a recursive movement – against analogue space: I conceive these networked displays as a dynamically animated format of presentation, for actively co-steering the circulative force of the image; although it is in the end only myself who is animated and steered by networked displays. According to the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, a definite pressure of synchronisation occurs within the existing capitalistic mentality – corresponding to “modes of life and thought”.[vii] I, or more precisely what I assume to be my self, will be/ is animated.

It may be the case that the specificity of this new logic of the image can be outlined in relation to another art historical and techno-political transformation.

Insofar as the German philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin declares that exhibition value replaces cult value, given the emergence of photography and film in the age of technological reproducibility, the following can be observed for the artwork in today’s digital age: exhibition value has become the definitive value of art. To put it more sharply, we can almost speak of a new cult value of images, a fetish of exhibition value, in which the artwork is instrumentalised as speculative art-commodity-value – cult here obviously not in the sense of a divine presence in icons, rather as quasi-ritualistic manual and manipulative interweaving  of production, circulation and consumption of art via networked displays. Networked displays represent infrastructure for the circulation of image value or exhibition value. They make possible a circulation value – the actual surplus value of the image in a networked display.

Marie-France Rafael

[i] Claire Bishop, “Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media”, Artforum, Vol. 51, No. 2 (September 2012): 434–41, here 434.

[ii] See Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image”. e-flux journal #10 (November 2009), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/10/61362/in-defense-of-the-poor-image/#:~:text=In%20Defense%20of%20the%20Poor%20Image,is%20bad%2C%20its%20resolution%20substandard.&text=The%20poor%20image%20tends%20towards,idea%20in%20its%20very%20becoming, (last accessed 15 August 2020).

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] David Joselit, After Art (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013), pp. 93–4; see also Hito Steyerl, “In Defense of the Poor Image”, 2009.

[v] See David Joselit, After Art, p. 16 and p. 53.

[vi] See Felix Stalder, Kultur der Digitalität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2016), p. 20.

[vii] See Bernard Stiegler, “Dans la vacance, on cherche à retrouver la consistence dans son existence”, Philosophie magazine (20.09.2012), https://www.philomag.com/les-idees/bernard-stiegler-dans-la-vacance-on-cherche-a-retrouver-la-consistance-dans-son-existence (last accessed 17 August 2021). For the English translation see Sam Kinsley, “Bernard Stiegler on holidays and the need to ‘deprogram’”, http://www.samkinsley.com/2014/07/28/translation-bernard-stiegler-on-holidays-and-the-need-to-deprogram/ (last accessed 17 August 2021).

Marie-France Rafael works at the Department of Fine Arts at the ZHdK as a Tenure Track Professor and is a researcher in the theoretical field of contemporary art. Her research focuses on the history of exhibiting as well as the artistic strategies of presenting art as a means of reflection and communication that aesthetically negotiates everyday culture, politics, and economics in a particular way.  

Among other projects, she curated the exhibition “Imaginary Displays” (2018) at BNKR in Munich and was part of the curatorial team for the Video Art at Midnight Festival (2018). 

Her publications include the monograph Reisen ins Imaginativ. Artistic Displays and Situations (Cologne: Walther König, 2017). Other publications include Ari Benjamin Meyers. Music on Display (Cologne: Walther König, 2016) and Pierre Huyghe. On Site (Cologne: Walther König, 2013). 

ANJA KIRSCHNER is an artist living and working in Berlin and London. In her films and video installations she attends to the phantasmatic and material aspects of media practices and their role in the production of knowledges and bodies. She was the winner of the Jarman Award (2011) and has exhibited widely internationally. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London, working on immersion from queer feminist and decolonial perspectives.  

Selected exhibitions include: Secession, Vienna; Benaki Museum, Athens; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe; Artists Space, New York; Extra City, Antwerp; Transmission Gallery, Glasgow; ICA, Chisenhale Gallery, Tate Modern and Tate Britain, London. Her work has also been screened at the Oberhausen International Short Film Festival, the 66th Berlinale, the 60th BFI London Film Festival, the Glasgow Film Festival ’15 and the 57th Thessaloniki International Film Festival, amongst others, and is in the LUX and BFI Artists’ Moving Image collections. 

 https://www.anjakirschner.com 

Human Perception and The Animated World

Animation carries a range of connotations in contemporary ocularcentric culture. The term is getting more difficult to define, as animation becomes more deeply interwoven into our ubiquitous computational information society. The accumulating number of moving images that pervade our screens impact on how we understand and experience the world, not just optically but multisensorially too. The question addressed here is how we perceive moving images in terms of “somatosensation”.[1] This topic has long been discussed in the fields of science (biology, psychology, and neuroscience) as well as the humanities (art, philosophy, anthropology and sociology). One of the prime focuses is on the information processing of digital computational images, relating it to technical and organic cognitive systems used in neuropsychological approaches, something I have discussed elsewhere.[2] In this paper, I have one additional consideration to make in this context, the question of how ‘our body’ perceives the animated world from the phenomenological approach. The aim of this paper is to unpack the complex production process of ‘visual fields’ of human perception and to consider its relationship with ‘the visual world’ we live in from both neuropsychological and phenomenological approaches. To help address this issue, I particularly try to shed light on the role of the producers of visual representations, such as draughtsman, painter, and animator’s production processes of the drawing objects.

It is, therefore, helpful to begin by revisiting one of the fundamental mechanisms of human perception: the relationship between retinal vision and the process of drawing objects. Heinrich Wolfflin articulated the characteristics of the linear and the painterly in drawings. For him, a draughtsman produces a form which is “essentially objective in outlook” in relation to the objects. Conversely, an artist creates a form which is “more subjective in attitude, bases the representation on the picture, in which the visual appearance of things looks real to the eye, and which has often retained so little resemblance to our conception of the real form of things”.[3] He, therefore, clearly categorises drawings in two ways: the draughtsman’s linear form and artist’s painterly form: the linear form lies in the pictorial form (the representation and object are identical) and the painterly form (the drawing no longer coincides to the geometric lines of objects) which is largely based on subjective sensitivities.

Wolfflin further considers that the “line has an element of physical grasping”, which implies that “the eye performs the operation of the hand which feels along the body, and the modelling which repeats reality in the gradation of light also appeals to sense of touch”.[4] Eventually, Wolfflin conceives that, as art developed, the appearance and tactility become less important and the shift from linear form to the painterly form led to “a triumph of seeming over being”.[5] Wolfflin’s distinction between the two types of drawing is admirable, but there might need to be further consideration. It is clear that the creation of drawings can be influenced by the drawer’s subjective knowledge and experience, but this does not mean that tactility through the hand (and so the body) will be diminished in painterly form. Rather, there might be a shift from the quality of tactility which evokes direct-physical touch (‘grasping’ in physiological state), to tactility which involves ‘mental’ touch. Furthermore, the mental touch in tactility can also be found in linear form.

As Pallasmaa argues

“When sketching an imagined space, or an object being designed, the hand is in a direct and delicate collaboration and interplay with mental imagery. The image arises simultaneously with an internal mental image and the sketch mediated by the hand. It is impossible to know which appeared first, the line on the paper or the thought, or a consciousness of an intention. In a way the image seems to draw itself through the human hand”.[6]

Hence, the tactility (physical grasping and mental touch) plays in both linear and painterly forms and, as Pallasmaa remarks, the lines are not just representation of the object, but also representation of thought, imaginary and tactility, producing though the human hand. The lines can, therefore, be said to be an abstracted form of our mind.

Tim Ingold brings this into another observation of the lines – the abstract line. Drawing on Kandinsky’s claim on ‘the spiritual in art’, Ingold demonstrates that “the abstraction does not mean draining a work of content”.[7] Kandinsky considers the abstraction means taking away all the external elements of things (outer appearances) so as to unfold their ‘inner necessity’.[8] For Kandinsky, this process brings about a way in which “the life force that animates them and that, since it animates us too, allows us to join with them and experience their affects and pulsations from within”.[9]

This idea can be supported by an episode of Hayao Miyazaki’s drawing. Miyazaki is an internationally well-known animator. Studio Ghibli’s producer, Toshio Suzuki, demonstrates Miyazaki’s distinctive skill as an animator, of which we can find evidence in the drawings of Totoro.[10] The most important character of Totoro is its organic feeling. The feeling of Miyazaki wanted to create was expressed by drawing “Totoro’s tum” which should be “naturally” or “organically”[11] bent by pushing. The feeling of touch should be real in the full sense of the experience. He uses only simple lines and contour to create Totoro. Suzuki asserts that many complex lines and detailed information do not work, rather destroy Totoro’s “inner necessity”.[12]

https://twitter.com/i/status/1223507353569333248 [a short video clip]

But how can ‘the inner necessity’ animate the drawing and us? How can our affective feelings be evoked by the abstract lines? To address this question, it could be useful to explore further the selectivity of information processing in human perception. A Japanese neuroscientist, Kenji Tanaka, discovers that there is, what he calls an “image simplification process” in our brain’s neuron activities.[13] This is an activity where neurons produce an initial rough categorisation of the image of the objects and then single out its details later.[14] A French cognitive neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene, also conceives that when we perceive objects, our neurons detect their characteristic configurations first and then an identity what the object is.[15] What is common to both scientists is that in our cognitive process, there is a selective process, which is a process of abstracting core information from the whole sensory data sources in order to produce a completed perception of the objects. The core information in this context can be also relevant to Kandinsky’s ‘inner necessity’. The abstract line can, therefore, contain ‘inner necessity’ which animates the objects and evokes affective feelings.

It is, however, clear that we perceive not just with optics, but with multiple senses in the whole body. Our perception, the body and the environment continuously influence each other. We often imagine, as Ingold remarks, that it is assumed that “things are perceived from a stationary platform…[B]ut in real life, for the most part, we do not perceive things from a single vantage point, but rather by walking around them”.[16] For him, ‘locomotion, not cognition, must be the starting point for the study of perceptual activity’.[17] How we perceive an object, therefore, depends on from where we see it (for example, perspective). The body is never static and fixed as a living organism as it is in continuous interaction with the environment. Hence it can be said that the living body is in constant animation.

The question here is, then, how can we as the ‘living’ body, apprehend our spatial perception?[18] To further this inquiry, I would like to address the relationship between the living body and the ocular process. There is a biological mechanism of human retinal perception which lies in the oculomotor system. When we see an object, it is hugely significant to ‘maintain a steady gaze’. Suzan R. Barry explains that we tend to believe that we sense the world first, and then we react, it is not true, since “we cannot perceive the world in any detail without moving at the same time — Perception and movement are intimately linked in a continuous two-way conversation”.[19]

Hence, to see an object clearly, as Barry argues, we need to develop a stable gaze not just while we are still, but also while we are in motion. How can we keep a stable gaze? Imagine when you keep looking straight ahead, then move your head left and right. Your eyes move in an opposite direction from your head movement. In this situation, the oculomotor system plays a central role. This is a mechanism, a compensatory eye movement, called the vestibular organs (the otolith organs and semicircular canals) that sense the head movement and then send the information to neurons to stimulate the brain in order to move the eyes in a direction the opposite to that of the head. “This is the vestibulo-ocular reflex”.[20] Thanks to this system, we can keep a stable gaze in motion, therefore we can keep body balance and spatial perception. Another vital function to see an object is ‘saccades’ which is a rapid movement of both eyes in the same direction. Saccades are executed by the fastest movement of six extraocular muscles in the human body, occurring in as little as one-fiftieth of a second. Owing to saccades, we can perceive our spatial surroundings by ‘rapidly and continually glimpse, recompose, remake visual data, piecing it together in order to constitute a continually experienced “visual field”’.[21] The visual fields here include both ‘still image’ as well as ‘moving image’. What is striking to know about our capacity to see is that “if the image of an object on your retina does not move at all, it fades away”.[22] Our eyes need to be continuously moving to retain a stable gaze in order to perceive the world. This suggests that we/our perception already always live in/with the animated/animating world. Furthermore, as Barry suggests, “we perceive an object by combining information from the eyes and other senses into a perceptual whole and directing your movement according to what you sense”.[23] Hence, we can integrate a range of information though the multisensory capacities of the body in order to perceive an object in the environment.

Our perception is, however, not only constructed by the bodily sensory system, but also by our memory, experience and tacit knowledge as mentioned earlier. Although there is as yet no scientific, neuropsychological or neurophysical evidence of the precise mechanism of the interconnectivity (for example, in a complex neuron network) between the biological sensory system and our memory, knowledge and experience, “it is almost a truism that we perceive not with the eyes, the ears or the surface of the skin, but with the whole body”.[24] Nevertheless, the debates of how our perception can be constituted and be influenced by memory, experience and tacit knowledge have been developed by many thinkers and critics. For example, Deleuze’s theory of time-image cinema[25] which is largely influenced by Bergson’s exploration of Matter and Memory.[26] The memory is also particularly important for Bernard Stiegler, especially its constitutive relation to technics. He argues that with the development of computational technical memory aids, human memory today is more and more exteriorised and expanded. Technical devices and systems systematically order human memories. Stiegler writes, “This is particularly apparent in the transition from mnemotechniques to mnemotechnologies[27] – from individual exteriorizations of memory functions to large-scale technological systems or networks that organize memories”.[28] Computationally organised memories consequently become “the new technological forms of knowledge”,[29] which provides a new way of seeing and perceiving the world. This process, conversely, “engender[s] a loss of knowledge”.[30] This is what Stiegler calls, pharmakon, which refers to the paradoxical double meaning: cure and poison. Thanks to technology, we expand our memories and knowledge, but at the same time, the dependence on the externalisation of memories reduces our immanent capacity to organise memories and knowledge, then we eventually become isolated from them. We forget techniques and tacit knowledge in an automated society. We lose our ‘own’ perception of the animated world.

A similar fear of the dangers of the computational technical systems can be found in Pallasmaa’s claims about “the computerized hand” in architecture design process.[31] He emphasises that “the computer imaging tends to flatten our magnificent multi-sensory and synchronic capacity of imagination by turning the design process into a passive visual manipulation, a retinal survey”.[32] Both Stiegler and Pallasmaa sound the alarm on losing our immanent human capacity of perception. Pallasmaa further stresses the importance of directness in hand-drawing to create a haptic connection between the object (its representation) and the designer’s mind (her/his perception). For him, “the computer drawing is a mediated construction”.[33]

This diminishing capacity of human perception is perfectly captured by his description of how the craftsmanship should be.

“The craftsman needs practices to develop specific relationships between thought and making, idea and execution and action and matter, learning and performance, self-identity and work, pride and humility”.[34]

Although he applied this suggestion to the craftsman, we could also include animators, draughtsmen, even artists, in effect all of us who live in a hypomnesic computational society. What is crucial in this message is the importance of avoiding unintended integration of human conscious and perception with algorithmic reasoning and thinking: it is, therefore, essential to improve our ‘craftsman’s’ techniques and their spirits – craftsmanship. Hence it could be ventured if we could remain like a ‘craftsman’ who is not totally contaminated by the huge networked computational system (the ‘attention economy’), it would enable us to live a dignified human life and to continue to ‘perceive’ the ever-changing animated world.

Tomoko Tamari

[1] Paterson 2017: 25. Paterson, Mark. “Architecture of Sensation: Affect, Motility and the Oculomotor”. Body & Society 23 (1) (2017): 3–35.

[2] Tamari, 2021, forthcoming.

[3] Wolfflin, 2003: 53, emphasis in original. Wolfflin, Heinrich. “Linear and Painterly”. In The Visual Turn: Classical Film Theory and Art History. Edited by Angela Dalle Vacche, 51–5. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers University Press, 2003.

[4] Wolfflin, ibid. 56.

[5] Wolfflin, ibid. 54.

[6] Pallasmaa, 2009: 91–2. Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Thinking Hand, Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 2009.

[7] Ingold, 2013: 135. Ingold, Tim. Being Alive, Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description. London and New York: Routledge, 2011.

[8] Kandinsky, 1982: 160, cited in Ingold, 2013: 135. Kandinsky, Wassily. Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, Vol. 1 (1901-1921) and 2 (1922-1943). Edited by Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo. London: Faber & Faber, 1982.

[9] Ingold, 2013: 135.

[10] My Neighbor Totoro (Tonari no Totoro) is a Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki and animated by Studio Ghibli in 1988. Totoro is the main character and a seemingly forest spirit.

[11] Suzuki, 2010. ‘The producer, Toshio Suzuki talks about Studio Ghibli’s Production’, IT Media Business Online, 25 Nov 2010. https://www.itmedia.co.jp/makoto/articles/1011/25/news024_5.html (accessed 20 August 2020)

[12] Suzuki, ibid.

[13] See Dehaene 2009: 133–4. Dehaene, Stanislas. Reading in The Brain, The New Science of How We Read. New York: Penguin Books, 2009.

[14] Dehaene, 2009: 133.

[15] Dehaene, ibid.

[16] Ingold, 2011: 45.

[17] Ingold, 2000a: 166, cited in Ingold 2011: 46.

[18] A moving image has to be understood as a phenomenon of movement not only in space, but also in time. Considering time in relation to cognitive process is particularly important to understand the interdependent relationship between consciousness and non-consciousness (see Hayles, 2017: 41 onward and 2021, forthcoming). The debate on time (timing) in affect has also been discussed in a great deal in the fields of psychology, neuroscience, film theory and media theory, such as Brian Massumi’s “the missing half second” (Massumi, 2002). A number of books, such as Timing of Affect, Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics (2014) and A Tenth of A Second, A History (2009), are also important. For the purpose of this paper, I only focus on space and will consider issues related to time in another paper in the future.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press, 2002; Angerer, Marie-Luise, Bernd Bosel and Michaela Ott (eds). Timing of Affect, Epistemologies of Affection. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2014; Canales, Jimena. A Tenth of A Second, A History. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2009.

[19] Barry, 2009: 70. Barry, Susan R. Fixing My Gaze, A Scientist’s Journey into Seeing in Three Dimensions. New York: Basic Books, 2009.

[20] Barry, ibid. 77.

[21] See, for example, Burr and Morrone, 2004 on saccades, cited in Paterson, 2017: 7.

[22] Barry, 2009: 71.

[23] Barry, ibid. 75.

[24] Ingold, 2011: 45. According to the experimental psychologist, Makoto Ichikawa, we know that we have many types of illusions and their elements and characteristics, but we do not exactly know why human perception creates illusions and the mechanism in human perceptual system. https://yumenavi.info/lecture.aspx?GNKCD=g000191 (accessed 23 August 2020)

[25] For Deleuze, an image is infused with time. The time is an important axis to articulate memories. See his book, Cinema 2, The Time-Image, 1989. Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2, The Time-Image. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989.

[26] Bergson writes, “there is no perception which is not full of memories” (Bergson, 1986 [1911]: 11). Bergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1986 [1911]: ix. https://antilogicalism.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/matter-and-memory.pdf (accessed 28 August 2020)

[27] Mark Hansen elaborates on Stiegler’s terms: mnemotechniques refers “the artificial storage of individual memories that characterises hypomnesis from ideogrammatic writing to the print revolution”; mnemotechnologies means “the embedding of memories within technological systems that systematically order memories according to their own logics” (Hansen, 2010: 65). Hansen, Mark. “Introduction in Memory (Stiegler)”. In Critical Terms for Media Studies. Edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen, 66–87. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010; Stiegler, Bernard. “Memory”. In Critical Terms for Media Studies. Edited by W.J.T. Mitchell and Mark Hansen. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2010.

[28] Stiegler, 2010: 67.

[29] Stiegler, ibid. 67.

[30] Stiegler, ibid. 67.

[31] Pallasmaa, 2009: 95.

[32] Pallasmaa, ibid. 97.

[33] Pallasmaa, ibid. 97. It is, however, almost inevitable for us to take for granted ‘being-with-the machines’ in contemporary life of digital information society. Therefore, Pallasmaa insists, “The craftsman needs to embody the tool or instrument, internalize the nature of the material, and eventually turn him/herself into his/her own product, either material or immaterial”. (ibid. 53).

[34] Pallasmaa, ibid. 5.

Dr. Tomoko Tamari is a senior lecturer in sociology at the Institute for Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship, Goldsmiths, University of London. She is managing editor of Body & Society (SAGE). She is currently working on the following areas: AI and Society (https://www.tomokotamari.com/ai-and-society-series); Animation and Human Perception, which will be discussed in her forthcoming edited book entitled Human Perception and Digital Information Technologies: Animation, the Body and Affect (Bristol University Press).

Caroline Sebilleau is an artworker. She graduated as a doctorate student in practice-based research in art in 2020. Her thesis is an analysis of the relationship between artwork and exhibition. This research focuses on the relationships that an artwork maintained with its environment, an assemblage in which operators, materials and viewers are involved. Her practice is mainly collaborative, site-specific and based on co-creation with artists and non-artists. Using printed matter and photography inside of collaborative processes, she is always challenging the way we can do things together, archive those working processes, and how we can perform those experiences through narratives and spaces. 

Hilarotragoedia

Among the many cultural engagements with the notion of landscape that have emerged through the centuries, two areas of the world have produced traditions of exceptional richness: China and Europe. In the following lines, I am going to suggest a possible understanding of the notion of “landscape” and of its function, as it comes into focus through the oblique convergence of Chinese and European cultural traditions.

A relationship in the distance.

Dong-Xi, meaning literally “East-West”, is the Chinese Mandarin locution for ‘thing’. Perpendicular to it along the cardinal axis, Nan-Pei, “South-North”, stands instead for the distance and remoteness that opens between objects. As read through Mandarin vocabulary, the geography of a territory and the nature of its human and non-human populations substitute for the stable presence of land and objects the ephemeral tension that innerves and sustains a relationship between “others”.

Somewhere, nowhere

Along its journey through European art – even after its confluence into the dam of American culture – the notion of landscape has gravitated in the orbit of a fundamental opposition between “no-where” and “some-where”, between ineffability and language.

During the medieval period, faithful to the Byzantine theology of art, the golden background of sacred painting portrayed the landscape as a “no-where”: the sky of eternity envelops the whole world, while remaining irreducible to any of its features. Although the source of all space and time – compressed in the monochrome of its divine light, caught in the act of creation – the monochrome of medieval landscape stood at a stage that preceded any geographical specification. It was a no-place in no-history, a no-time in no-space.

At the onset of the Renaissance, at least since the time of Giotto, the landscape of European art moved towards the figure of a “some-where”: a field that can be measured, traversed, picked apart and recomposed at will; a certain place in a certain time.

Even with the later internalisation of the landscape – first in the realm of emotion and then in that of perception – the European dialectics between “no-where” and “some-where” were not disabled, but they simply moved, together with their metaphysical attributes of stability and definition, and their epistemic concern with clear-cut truth and falsity.

Figures in a landscape

Entities as relationships, space as a distance, the world as a some-where floating in the golden waters of no-where: it is possible to activate simultaneously these different takes on the notion of landscape, in an attempt to unlock the hermeneutical potential offered by each of them.

If the notion of landscape is in any way connected to the actual experience of living in space and time – that is, in a world – then the notion of landscape can be read as a story, in turn part of the existential narration of individual and collective life.

Space, stretching as a distance between objects, offers the stage over which each thing performs its worldly role as “one sole multitude” of silence and sound, ineffability and language, eternity and time, laughter and tears.

Axial movements

Each thing, revealed in its theatrical quality as a “figure”, emerges as a coincidentia oppositorum of the existential Orient and Occident. It stands restlessly in the landscape, moving through the stage of the world along its South-North axis, seeking their equidistant point where its inner tension might finally be resolved. Yet, as it reaches the equatorial line between “some-where” and “no-where”, the place where seasons cast no shadow, a figure feels its inner geography rotating perpendicularly. As soon as it has pacified its own inner tension of being both a presence and an absence in the landscape, a figure begins to look simultaneously through and at its own existential mask. Now that its foreignness to and entanglement in the world have been recomposed, now that it has gained a metaphysical passport to the world, what is it supposed to write in it? A figure standing on the equator between somewhere and no-where, has become both “this” and “that”, both identical and other to itself.

Seeking its own “proper” longitude between East and West, a figure seeks a station of deliverance from the pull exerted upon it by the entries in the dictionary of the world. Yet, as soon as it finds it – as soon as it reaches the point symbolised by Jerusalem in the area of the Large Middle-East, and by China as the world’s Zhōngguó (“the nation in the middle”) – and liberates itself from attachment to identity and difference, a figure in the landscape feels its compass rotating once again. And again, it takes to moving vertically along the axis between “some-thing” and “no-thing”, in the steps of a new dance towards the equator.

Hilarotragoedia

Aware at last of its fate of dispossession and detachment, even from itself, a figure in a landscape notices that their contours continue those of the landscape, like the line of a finger developing into a hand. One sole, two-faced destiny befalls them both: the tragedy of a desire that is never fulfilled, and the comedy of a frustration that understands its own futility.

The landscape, in art and thus in life, opens its curtains to show each day anew the spectacle of a hilarotragoedia, the laughing to the point of tears of each object in the world, and of the world itself, as all float between their own beginning and their own end; and after that end, again, to a beginning.

Federico Campagna

Federico Campagna is an Italian philosopher based in London. His latest books are Prophetic Culture: Recreation For Adolescents (Bloomsbury, 2021) and Technic And Magic: The Reconstruction Of Reality (Bloomsbury, 2021). He works as a lecturer in philosophy at the Royal Academy KABK in the Hague, and as the rights director at the radical publishing house Verso Books. He is currently writing a new book, titled The Sea Between the Lands: A Story Of The Mediterranean Imagination. 

Dance

Dance, which, in the realm of altered body, silence, and movement into which it projects a subtle version of the dancer, makes possible immobilization, the genetic element of motion, allows all sorts of extraordinary movements, including an auto-mobility of the inanimate. The first couple of times when its winding mechanism came to a stop, the doll became again motionless; the third time the winding mechanism came to a stop, its faint sound no longer audible, the doll continued to move, having acceded to the auto-mobility allowed by dance in the realm of altered body, silence, and movement in which it projects a subtle version of the dancer. When the mechanical doll attains the state of dance, a cessation of its movement would be due to its becoming frozen in dance’s realm of altered body, movement, silence, and music. The notion of rewinding the doll’s mechanism occurred to its erstwhile master, but, being himself a dancer, he dismissed it—he must have sensed that he would not be able to do so since the doll was then frozen still, thus withheld from time, with the consequence that the action of rewinding it, one that takes place in time or is a form of time, could not be effectuated until the doll was no longer frozen but subject to time again. The doll resumed its movement on its own once the silence-over had receded. (Jalal_Toufic,_The_Dancer_s_Two_Bodies)

Jalal Toufic

Jalal Toufic is a thinker and a mortal to death. He was born in 1962 in Beirut or Baghdad and died before dying in 1989 in Evanston, Illinois. His books, many of which were published by Forthcoming Books, are available for download as PDF files at his website: http://www.jalaltoufic.com. He was a participant in the Sharjah Biennials 6, 10 and 11, the 9th Shanghai Biennale, Documenta 13, the 3rd Athens Biennale, and “A History: Art, Architecture, and Design, from the 1980s Until Today” (Centre Pompidou). In 2011, he was a guest of the Artists-in-Berlin Program of the DAAD; and in 2013–2014, he and Anton Vidokle led Ashkal Alwan’s third edition of Home Workspace Program, based in Beirut. He assumed the position of Director of the School of Visual Arts at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts (ALBA) in September 2015.

Capital: Automatic Subject – Animate Object

Marx’s project aims to understand the determination and concretisation of class society. As a society that contains racial and gendered determinations, which constitute oppressions lasting across generations, grasping what upholds this social formation implicates all facets of our social and individual lives. Ultimately, Marx wants to understand how a society can be liberated from oppressions that are determined by the capitalist system. To do this, Marx examines how class formations not only emerge, but what it is that so deeply sustains them. One factor Marx emphasises as sustaining class formation is the capitalist deprivation of human subjectivity itself. In other words, the deprivation of human agency^[1] to shape our own lives through determining our own social conditions. In capitalism, agency is suppressed not only by “false consciousness”, which sees the appearance of capitalist exchange as truly based on individual agency and equal exchange, but by practical activity that renders subjects objects and objects subjects.

Marx reveals that capital’s exchange abstraction not only reduces humans to objects of economic production and calculation, deprived of “humanity”^[2], but makes humans incapable of constructing a social relation whereby they transcend their economic function as objects of production and calculation. If the determining force shaping society cannot be located within the human individual, trans-individual or “collective” subject, Marx concludes that the primary agent shaping social conditions must be located elsewhere. This non-human element independently driving the historical process is not, for Marx, nature, which Marx locates in a metabolic relation with humanity and, therefore, not something opposed to human experience. Autonomy is, instead, located objectively at the core of what constitutes our social formation itself: capital.

Hanne Darboven, “Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (Cultural History 1880–1983)”[3]

This independent actor, capital, is a human creation that, while superseding and determining collective formation, cannot come into being without human action. Action transmits intention, ideas and sensuousness to the objective form in which the actor, or actors create. As such, action animates objects of production with knowledge and thought. Marx understands this dynamic to lie at the core of humanity – a capacity to construct social conditions and produce sensuous, objective culture (such as art and literature).

Capital is endowed with quasi-subjectivity – with the capacity to act independently of human agency – for two reasons, both equally necessary and interrelated. First, because the living actions of human beings, made of organic matter – of brains, muscles and nerves – are objectified in capital’s constitution, where objectively embedded actions constitute ‘abstract labour’. For Marx, abstract labour is the substance of value for capital; labour measured by time and accounted for by money is, as abstract labour, a subjectively-conjured abstract representation making up capital’s essential property. In this way capital is an object made up of human subjective properties. The second reason is that the exchange relation forming the passage of human action to abstract representation is based on the exchange of labour. Only in a configuration where labour is exchanged do capitalist exchange relations arise. Where the exchange of labour unfolds, those who exchange their labour do so because they do not own their own means of production. Otherwise, they would simply exchange things and not labour (capital’s grounding in private property requires that many of us do not own property apart from our own labour power). When the exchange of labour (human practice itself) becomes the predominant exchange relation, the movement of commodity exchange^[4] becomes the primary dynamic constituting the conditions of production of social relations. Marx uses the term fetishism to describe this process not only because the object produced is endowed with the character of human sensuousness through the creation of abstract values on account of abstract labour (labour measured in time and therefore endowed with an abstract quantity), but because the abstract value created – the exchange value as distinct from its use value – seemingly expands and grows independently of its conditions of production. The appearance of self-expansion makes the accumulation of capital life-like: it is an object endowed with the appearance of subjective capacity.

Marx’s explanation of commodity fetishism, however scientific, borders on the mystical when he insists that it entails the animation of the otherwise inanimate, illustrated by his famous example of the table whose objective status is reversed, or turned “upside down”, to render the table a “dancing” subject. Marx explains,

The form of wood for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing of its own free will.^[5]

The act of creation, or the making of an object through human effort, endows the object of creation with the product of that very effort. Human action, effort and thought become objectified in a thing, as in the case of human intellectual knowledge objectified in technology, infrastructure and art – from productive forms to genre forms. According to Marx, fetishism is the specific form of abstraction of human action internal to capital. The production of such fetishism arises not through abstraction qua abstraction.^[6] Instead, in the context of wage labour, the product of labour does not become merely an externalised expression of human agency, which might contribute to the reproduction and upkeep of our lives or objective shared culture (constituting community). Rather, the externalisation of human effort is instrumentalised for the purpose of generating ever more value.

Capital is the unity of the accumulation of this growth, meaning that capital is an object in so far as it is an abstract representation of a metaphysical substance: the very human excess of effort extracted from the process of production. When the act of production (labour) is measured by units of time and allotted a wage measured monetarily, the act is homogenised and represented in the abstract as a unit that is exchangeable. Hence labour becomes a commodity that has a use value (the act of making) and an exchange value (wage). When represented as an exchange value, a worker’s actions become homogenous and internally undifferentiated. They are therefore representable in abstract units, exchangeable with anything else. In this process a portion of the time the worker endures is not represented by the wage, yet objectively stored in the commodity produced. Upon sale by the capitalist this unpaid portion appears again as profit kept by the capitalist who owns the means of production, or the context in which labour takes place. This produces what Marx calls surplus value. In the case of surplus value, the content or substance of value (labour) is not exchanged for a wage but accumulated by the capitalist upon sale of the commodity,^[7] allowing for capital to accumulate more capital. The wage exchange (the capital-labour relation) is based on the exploitation of labour and therefore it is labour that supplies the excess of human effort that lies behind value’s growth.

This explanation supplies the foundation for why Marx uses the enigmatic term “automatic subject”^[8] to describe capital. If human action is endowed with the ontological property of agency, or subjectivity, then when socialised as homogenous labour through its measure in time and represented as a value (labour equal to all other labour because measured and objectified as value, despite any practical difference), this agency and subjectivity makes up the substance of what is accumulated as capital. Capital, endowed with human effort, retains the capability to supersede the individual’s capacity to act out the very subjective freedom that supports the dynamic. Within capitalism, the purpose of collective action is directed towards the accumulation of value, and, consequently, to the accumulation of more value represented as capital. Capital becomes animated as the subject of the process and humanity becomes subject to the process of the accumulation of capital. In so doing, humanity is determined as an abstraction purposed for the interest of accumulation of value. Humanity, therefore, becomes deprived of the very thing that allowed for the process to occur: the subjective agency to act.

Consequently, capitalism reduces human life to an objective medium for the reproduction of capital. Thus, capital – not humanity – constitutes the agentive subject of the accumulation process. Human life engages with capital’s social relation not as a subject endowed with agency but as a necessarily “other” ontological foundation. While completely dependent on the human labour that produces the substance of value as abstract labour, capital takes on its fetish character to seemingly reproduce without labour. Capital appears to be a self-moving “automatic subject” of the process of accumulation. Capital becomes animate.

Philosophically speaking, capital is an animate object or an objective subject of a process. While the modern human subject represents the unity of a process of personification (the I of a relational self-conscious being that thinks), capital is interpreted as subject because it represents the unity of historical acts that determine social relations as a mode of production. Capital’s process is characterised by the manner in which objects circulate: commodities such as labour, money, technological hardware/software and consumer goods move in such a way as to reproduce capital. Circulation is determined by the movement of the subject reproducing itself, which is itself an object: Capital. Capital is therefore a subject-object: an animate (in its life-like, self-reproducing appearance) object; and an automatic (in its objective foundation in human production) subject: two oppositional characterisations of the same antinomy.

It is the primacy of the abstraction of capital that makes this subject-object possible. Only when a category of thought (a logic/abstraction) is given primacy over being do subject-objects philosophically come into being. Yet, in his materialism, Marx remained sceptical of philosophies that accorded primacy to abstractions in the guise of metaphysical truths (as in Hegel’s Spirit); Marx regarded these as misconceived overdeterminations of material, practice and, ultimately, life by conceptual and formal thought. However, Marx did think that capital was a historical object, or social form, that created a dynamic in which abstractions overdetermined practical life. Therefore, capital is a subject-object historically created by social practice.  Here, the dichotomy between subject and object is dialectically understood: subjective and objective elements are generative of their very distinction. In the process of generating its distinction as an objective abstraction, capital becomes subject.

Hanne Darboven, “Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (Cultural History 1880–1983)”[9]

The world of abstract appearances, in which capital guides the circulation of commodities, exists as a “phantasmagoria”. Here, the animation of the objective world conceals the real relations of production subjected to the movement of capital as an “automatic subject”. The ocular description employed emphasises capital’s apparent agency to determine social relations. Agency is of course the key element that renders the thinking of capital as subject possible. Yet, at the same time, capital’s agency is always for Marx an appearance that hides the real social relation. As such, capital becomes an animation of social relations. Like animation, where a still image appears in motion, the appearance of social existence within capitalist relations contradicts the real conditions of production.

The phantasmagoric system of relations within which capital exists are independent and alien from any subjective meaning (an abstraction from experience). Nonetheless, they represent the qualitative dimension of any individual’s social experience. In bourgeois society, individuals’ qualities become objective and unpaired from their personality, becoming objects within a world that can only be owned or exchanged, whilst the state of owning or exchanging are positions of subjection determined by the movement of capital as automatic subject itself. This leads to the fragmentation of experience where individuals treat their own ideas, abilities and even psychic states as quantifiable objects of the external world in which they can own and exchange.

Within the intellectual tradition in which Marx worked^[10], that which rendered a subject a subject, or an individual an agent, was the self-conscious life of the individual. An individual (subject) thinks itself, predicates its own thoughts, and as such possesses a psychology. Yet in the world of appearances, in which subjects regard other subjects, the psychology of the other (as the place ‘will’ and therefore the possibility of autonomous thinking/action are located) is always assumed. This assumption of psychology brings more plausibility to the antinomy of the automatic subject of capital. At the level of appearance, capital is a subject, while its nature as automatic is understood through the critique of its fetish, which reveals the illusion of semblant autonomy or free movement. Capital appears as subject (self-reproducing its own conditions), but from the point of view of the social relations that produce the appearance (obscured by the appearance), capital is the automation of a social form purposed towards the growth of wealth (and not merely the distribution of resources for survival and care).

Agency alights from the perspective of self-consciousness’ externalisation where the individual subject becomes a relational subject developed and formed by the objective world (which exists within history). Self-consciousness necessarily entails looking out in order to look in, amounting to a reflection from the outside that determines inner life. Hegelian philosophy best articulates this process. For Hegel, the examination of the relationships between subject and object as a process of self-conscious becoming begat the theorisation of a universal subject of history (absolute Spirit); individual self-consciousness is overdetermined by this “Spirit” in such a way as to make each individual subject a product of the whole. In this way, the individual subject is not only wholly relational to all other subjects, but also a product of historical circumstance. The claim that capital is subject, far from an exorbitant anthropomorphism, is an interpretation of Hegel’s objective Spirit, understood by Hegel as the subject-object of history. However, in straying from the theological implications of “Spirit”, which is a religious universal concept that Hegel takes to be an ontological given, Marx interprets absolute Spirit as an objective manifestation of human production (manifest not only in thought but in practice, ritual and infrastructure). Marx, with an explicitly modern eye, locates the subject of history in capital: the automatic subject that will necessarily constitute a subject-object. Using Hegelian thought, Marx undermines the universal ontological truths of theology. But Marx departs from Hegel to understand the dominance of economic social form as the determining the movement of history, transposing metaphysics from given truths (however processual) to the result of collective practice.

The appearance of an automatic subject, like an animate object, is what we necessarily see even if we know the appearance does not represent its own conditions of production. Animation, a practical method that renders images ostensibly mobile, results from the combination of social form (as in forms of illustration and media) and the essential characteristics of life, illustrating the core of the subject-object antinomy as an antinomy of life and form. Human life upholds capital’s social form. Through social practice, human life provides the substance of value that gives capital its “life-like” character; and, through subjection to form, it bares the different forms of appearance of capital (such as wage, rent, and the general mediation of money for survival).

The contradiction between life and form in Capital is much like Lukacs’ version of the Kierkegaardian gesture, as he understands it in his essay The Foundering of Form against Life: “there is no explanation, for what is there is more than an explanation, it is a gesture”. While for Lukacs the gesture, which is the movement of life, “always reacts back upon the soul that makes it”, what Marx reveals is that in capitalist social relations, gesture (practice) retrospectively constitutes the individual in subjection to capital’s movement. To understand and appreciate what sustains capitalist social form and its corresponding systems of oppression so deeply, Marx’s contends that analyses cannot merely understand the technical distribution of wealth and its intersection with identity (as offered by most economic critiques coming from the left); rather, we must explain the subjection of life to social form: a complex dynamic taking place between and through subjects and objects. Far from a mere articulation of objective process, the theorisation of capitalist form as ‘automatic subject’ permits a closer understanding of lived experience. As Lukacs wrote, ‘“form” is neither subjectively conjured nor objectively imposed; it holds out the possibility for a mediation and even indissolubility of the subjective and objective realms.”’^[11] Form animates the subject and in so doing re-shapes life, creating it anew.

Rebecca Carson

[1] An agent is not merely a free individual or the author of an action, but a subject situated within relations that co-determine an action, implying the giving way of the dualism between passive and active when thinking about the possibility and limits of free will.

[2] A ‘species-being’ that, although it exists not in conditions of their own choosing, is marked by being collectively endowed with the capacity to shape social conditions.

[3] Hanne Darboven, Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (Cultural History 1880–1983), 1980–83. Installation view, DIA:Chelsea, Dia Art Foundation, New York. Photo: Cathy Carver, 1996. © Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015.

[4] The predominance of the abstraction of exchange value, appearing as price, over use value or the usefulness of the good sold.

[5] Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1, trans Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1990), 163–64.

[6] As we might find human effort objectified in such a way as to encourage our own development as sensuous beings, as in the case of the objectification of human effort in an artwork.

[7] The commodity is not sold for more than it is worth, rather, the labour producing the commodity is not paid for in the full amount that is gained through the sale, allowing the capitalist to keep a portion of the value that the commodity is sold for. In this way capital appears to grow when in fact the accumulation of more value is based on the exploitation of labour.

[8] Marx uses this term on p. 255 in Capital Volume 1, in the section ‘The General Formula for Capital’, in order to describe the life of self-valorising value, or capital as having a life function.

[9] Hanne Darboven “Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983 (Cultural History 1880–1983)”, 1980–83, Installation view, M23projects, December 16, 2016, Dia Art Foundation, New York. © Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2016. URL http://instagram.com/m23projects https://pic.twitter.com/hSDWpe1dnC

[10] German idealism.

[11] György Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 3.

Rebecca Carson is a lecturer in Critical and Historical Studies at the Royal College of Art, London in the Fine Arts Department, where she researches Marx and Philosophy. She is also a lecturer at Goldsmiths College where she teachinges Critical Studies in the Art Department. Her chapter “‘Money as Money: Suzanne de Brunhoff’s Marxist Monetary Theory’” appeared in Marx Inattuale, Edizioni Efesto (2019) and her article ‘“Fictitious Capital and the Re-emergence of Personal Forms of Domination’” in Continental Thought & Theory (2017). She is co-editor of ‘‘Politics of the Many’‘  with Bloomsbury where she contributed the chapter ‘The Marxism of Post-marxism.’ Her current research looks at Marx’s philosophical use of the term “life” in relation to Hegelian philosophy, in order to understand differentiated forms of subjection within the expanded reproduction of capital. 

Caroline Sebilleau is an artworker. She graduated as a doctorate student in practice-based research in art in 2020. Her thesis is an analysis of the relationship between artwork and exhibition. This research focuses on the relationships that an artwork maintained with its environment, an assemblage in which operators, materials and viewers are involved. Her practice is mainly collaborative, site-specific and based on co-creation with artists and non-artists. Using printed matter and photography inside of collaborative processes, she is always challenging the way we can do things together, archive those working processes, and how we can perform those experiences through narratives and spaces. 

Meet-cute with a tree

Birch, Scots pine, bog myrtle, bracken, creeping ladies’ tresses, glittering wood moss and clumps of yolky chanterelles people this forest. There is no back or foreground. The forest is continuous, alive. Trees communicate with each other, share food and drink, send warnings, protect the young and old and weak.

That day, the forest was a stage. It was still, any slight breeze broken by the tree canopy; the birdsong and distant noise of people walking their dogs happened off stage. The ground in the forest was not flat, nor were the trees all upright. I steadied my camera on a monopod, watching, listening. Listing too, balanced on the edge of a deep rectangular pit, all that remained of a long abandoned house. The pit was full of wood moss and bracken, but still, I might have sprained an ankle had I tripped on a root and over-balanced. I wanted to catch hold of the dead tree standing by me on a shard but it wouldn’t hold my weight. It was rotting, giving life to other trees, ants, mycelium, bugs and birds.

Fell opens with a meet-cute between a man and a large branch of a tree. A meet-cute is a technical term in cinema for the first meeting between two protagonists who will form a romantic bond later on in the film. A man enters the frame, pushes and is pushed, easing the tree over without breaking it. Each body moves and is moved by the other. The tree branch seems to come to life in the human caring for it, in the gentle handling of its human-life-like limbs and scale. The man’s clothes, gloves and shoes form a protective barrier but also suggest a dignity and respect—this isn’t about the man trying to be subsumed into the forest, into wild nature, or the tree becoming an extension of the man.

The bough swinging between limbs and hands, the whistle of air and wind, the rhythm of breathing, the cracking bark muffled by soft, spongy undergrowth, is a dance of life and death. For a while, the dead wood becomes animated for the camera. The tree comes alive, but of course it is already, even though it is dead. No longer recognizably oak, ash, birch or pine, the skeleton will soon be covered in borrowed foliage, home to insects, birds and mammals. Matter is animate, vibrant even. Sapped of its own life, the tree lives on in others, imbibed through soil, fungi, lichen, worms, water and air, in the entangled forest biome.

The camera imposes a frame and time that brings into focus this movement, this anima of the forest. The anima happens somewhere between the man, the dead tree, the forest, and the observer. The anima at work in the interdependent lives of the forest is revealed to the observer in the intimate dance of man and tree. The observer, through the presence of the camera, becomes a part of the ecology of the wood, at the very least its psychic ecology. Fell suggests a kind of animation at work in the wood, in and around and outside the image. It is reassuring somehow, to watch and be part of this play, a play with image capture and carbon capture, a play with words. Is it erotic? Is this dead or alive, play or serious? I can be enamoured with instead of enarmoured against the world.

Within the frame, the objects—human, trees, branch, floor—are in motion. The film is not exactly animation or live action—maybe a kind of resuscitation. In stop frame animation objects are moved or manipulated between shots to produce an illusion of movement. Here the manipulation happens in front of the camera. The life of the branch takes a new turn in the hands of the performer and the eyes of the beholder. Filming anything is a move to animate, to activate, to put something in motion, twice or even thrice over: in the act of filming, in the anticipated future watching, feeling and reflecting. But then, you might say, everything is animation. So what is the opposite of animation? Inanimate is not the same as no longer animate—stopped, halted, poised or paused. The still image is obviously not the opposite, but a part of the picture, the frozen image of the not-yet animated, not yet activated.

Animation and ecology

Would the ivy on my wall grow over my hand if I sat still long enough? I’ll never see the tree grow but only grown, except in natural history documentaries using time-lapse video. Life and death in the forest is bound up with the movements of microscopic mycelium, sap rising, worms, squirrels, mice, insects, humans and everything else. Digital animation (of all kinds) is often used to help describe current knowledge of the various movements of the natural world which are at scales too small or large, slow or fast for humans perceive. This isn’t what I mean though. The anima of the forest is more than the sum of its movements. To know something of the living forest you have to spend time in it, to move about in it, to breath it, to smell and feed from it, to be a creature of the respiring, unobserved life of the forest. And then, to imagine the movements of the infinitely small and infinitely large is a poetic leap of animation that our minds are quite capable of.

The artifice of animating still objects to make them look like they are moving sometimes feels like a way of repairing a lost capacity to connect with things in the world, to imagine and feel movements that we cannot or can no longer, perceive or understand. Humans are not outside or separate from the worlds we live in. “Nature” is a fraught category, often opposed to “culture”; some say nature is no longer, but others (and I concur) say it is everything, whatever word you decide to use. When we keep ourselves to ourselves, apart from the natural world, ignore it, stop caring, lose our feel for it, try to control, contain, bound nature, we lose track of ourselves. We lose, we are lost and a lot else besides.

So, what can animation do or mean in relation to ecology, or ecosophy? Ecosophie is a term coined by Félix Guattari, bringing ecology and philosophy together in one concept. In his book Les Trois Ecologies[1], Guattari argues for an ecosophy that attends to and seeks to repair the “three ecologies”: environmental, social and mental or psychic ecology. A collection of Guattari’s ecological writings is gathered in Qu’est ce que l’écosophie?[2].

Is animation only representation of movement? Or is it making something move that doesn’t move? Or wasn’t moving? It needn’t be only about representation or visual representation. You might animate someone or yourself with something, make it necessary for them or you to move. Push someone, edge them towards something, towards a feeling, a response, an appreciation, a love; make them and you care. And if you care, then well, you can do lots of things. This is a kind of animation, one aspect of activism. Activism implies the need for and possibility of transformation. Even when the odds are stacked against it, activism implies that by putting your body on the line to act in the service of a reimagined world you just might change other people’s minds and actions.

If animation is moving things that are still or dead, but nothing is dead, just altering from one state to another or dispersing like spores, cells, gases or atoms—then is everything already animated? Animation might be useful for appreciating the dead as living on, the still as about to move, artifice as lively, transformation as a possibility.

Animation for activism

“The extraction of toxic heavy metals for use in digital devices has [also] fuelled genocidal conflict around the world, and will likely render many environments uninhabitable.”[3]

I claim animation for purposes other than mining, electronics, Artificial Intelligence or warfare. I claim the real intelligence of animation, of the feelings and bodies that animate. I claim animation for making leaps of the imagination, for appreciating the in-between moments and the feel of things and for repairing broken worlds. Instead of touching the keyboard or screen, touch bark, touch a branch of a tree or stroke the surface of a leaf. Is it shiny or furry? Rough or smooth? Do the veins of the leaf spread off an axis, or gather to a point at the base of the leaf? Other things you can’t do with a screen: enjoy the dark—when edges are lost or blurred; be cold and shiver to warm up; tickle, wriggle or wrestle; sniff, taste, sting, rub, soothe, scrape, scratch or bite.

We shouldn’t reduce the physical living world to materiality. Ecology as animation imagines—elegantly, simply, correctly—matter as vibrant, tracing movement and feeling between things, living, dead or neither. It recognises that nothing is still or in one place or isolated, foreground or background.

I haven’t eaten this tree, but I have taken it into my body through love and touch and play. I haven’t turned it into wood by making a chair or a table, or a sheet of laminate to spread across the floor. The wood has its own story, or rather it doesn’t and nor do I. Story is how I make sense of it but actually it doesn’t need a story. We shared a place and moment, and then went our separate ways, forever tied together with gossamer threads of memory and dust and sweat.

Activists suspended high up, nesting in trees in ancient woodlands to prevent their destruction, draw on animism. They recognise a metaphysical challenge to opening a new coal mine, building an airport or railway line. Activists tying themselves to trees is a popular form of environmental activism in England since the activist Swampy in the 1980s climbed trees to protest against highway building. It is more widespread today, in France for example and in England against the building of the so-called HS2 High Speed Railway line (2020, http://stophs2.org/). These tree-dwellers are animated by a feeling, an understanding, that their lives are connected to the living, dying woods, that infrastructure is not man-made, but made together with and in the environment, with lives, matter, weather. And they care.

What is left for culture after ecology?

What and where are we as humans in this understanding of ecology? Are we just in the way, interrupting, destroying the animation, the regeneration or recovery of environments, the evolution and thriving of species? Do we think of culture as separate in order to believe we have made it by ourselves, as self-sufficient humans? Is this really where value comes from? Right now using our natural abilities, affordances, desires and learned skills to create food, medicines, artefacts, tools, buildings, shelters, social structures, rituals, is fraught with danger and risk. How can we appreciate contemporary culture at a time when humanity (by no means all humans) through capitalism is causing such destruction of the natural world and suffering?

I find it very hard sometimes to feel part of nature, even though I know intellectually and through many of my experiences that I am of course. It is often easier to recognise or identify with or through culture (that we often separate out from nature to pat ourselves on the back that we made such things). But we are similar to other life, and need to respond to and listen and be cared for by the lives around us, by the living environment. We are part of nature whether we feel it or not. But I love the pleasure of feeling it, experiencing it, seeking knowledge of it in whatever ways I can. Like other living beings—mammals and birds especially but also trees it turns out too—humans are very good at caring when we want to be. Sometimes we almost can’t help it.

We cannot afford to despair, otherwise who will care? Care don’t despair.

There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with anthropomorphism. It is not so good when it is about controlling or patronising or infantilising the other. But it can be a step towards caring, towards recognising the reality and subjectivity of the other and one’s own connection to things in the world that seem utterly strange and different and not-human. Isn’t it worse to make everything into a machine or a resource? That’s the dead-end of utilitarianism. If objects and other beings are given life (or rather their role in multiple livings is appreciated and recognised) then they can be loved sometimes or hated sometimes, but not ignored. It is a step on the way to appreciating and accepting the otherness and unknowability of another’s experience. A forest is a good place to start.

Perhaps in the beginning we made a clearing in the forest, a space to be human in and now the clearing has cleared away the forest.

We need the rustling of forests again, the long lives of trees, the air, food and weather they make. We can be part of the anima of the forest again with our swinging legs and arms and trunks, stumbling, mumbling, tumbling, falling; slipping, sliding, clambering, striding or resting. Our skin and bark, our voices and echoes, our breathing and the depths of the soil, the leaf litter, moss and lichen, let us lose and find ourselves among the trees.

Ruth Maclennan

[1] Félix Guattari, Les Trois Ecologies, (Paris: Galilée, 1989).

[2] Félix Guattari, Qu’est ce que l’écosophie? (Paris: Editions Lignes, 2018).

[3] Tim Ingold, Correspondences: Knowing from the Inside (University of Aberdeen, 2017), 21.

Ruth Maclennan is an artist.  Her work includes moving image works, photographs, performances, writing, and interdisciplinary and collaborative research. Her recent films and photographs explore how the climate emergency has irrevocably transformed ways of understanding landscape and place – both for their inhabitants, and as representation. Maclennan exhibits widely internationally in exhibitions and film festivals in Europe, USA, Japan, Australia and Central Asia, Korea and Taiwan.  She has a PhD in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art. Her films are distributed by LUX, https://lux.org.uk/artist/ruth-maclennan.

Deborah Levitt is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media Studies at The New School. She is the author of The Animatic Apparatus: Animation, Vitality, and the Futures of the Image (Zero Books, 2018) and co-editor of Acting and Performance in Moving Image Culture: Bodies, Screens, and Renderings (2012). She is currently completing a book, Rendering Worlds, that investigates media’s emergent perceptual infrastructures as platforms for developing a new pluralist political imaginary. She is also co-editing, with Heather Warren-Crow, a collection of new essays on animation theory to be published as volume 3 in the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Animation Studies. 

Kazuhiro GOSHIMA is a visual artist. Taking the theme of the boundary between digital and analog, he has produced numerous video works and installation art works. Recent works include the dissection of the camera obscura “the Absence of the Painter” (installation, 2018-), a frameless moving picture system “This may not be a movie” (installation, 2014), and a three-dimensional shadow by a special technique “SHADOWLAND” (2013). He held a large-scale exhibition in Akihabara, Tokyo in 2020. Goshima is lecturer at the Image Forum Visual Institute and part-time lecturer at Okayama Prefectural University, Josai International University, Nagaoka Institute of Design. http://www.goshiman.com/