What is the difference/alignment between experimental film, video art and art animation? Nam June Paik
After a lengthy conversation between myself and a moving-image researcher who speaks from the position of fine art and considers experimental film and video art as having dominance over animation, I began to think about the theoretical and practice based experiments that engage with the definition of Animation as an artform, and the positioning of animation as the pre-form of film, and subsequently film as hybrid Animation. In many ways this issue arises in animation and film festival applications whereby the entrance requirement asks for a certain percentage of the film to be produced only by 'animation' techniques, and not filmed by a film camera.
Current debate between film and animation takes up polemic positions of argument, however, can animation process and ways of thinking be at the roots of film practice? Current histographic structure sees a split between the spectacle with a high degree of frame by frame, or artificially constructed worlds set against cinematic filmic narrative storytelling dominated by the technique of shooting on a continuous roll of film. When considered in this way the differences between film and animation seem small. So why isn't film named animation? Aside from economic and strategic reasons such as the art market, white box versus black box, context of high culture versus low culture, can animation be better defined as a cultural artefact expressing the human-technological evolution, and may best be considered the artform of the technological age.
It is the manipulation of space-time and world representation using the medium of technological advancement to express the evolutionary experience inherent in human innovation, that is not named film, but animation. However, not 'animation' as it is generally understood today but reconfigured as an artform embodying an expanded creative deployment of tools and materials in pure cultural expression achieved by the multiple manipulation of systems, in the name of free creative expression. A much more hybrid expanded creative field than currently defined. This leads to the freedom to say to the artist, it really is okay to define ones work as animation.
Animation can be framed as a cultural artefact expressing the worldview of the artist, constructed not only frame by frame but layer by layer within the frame. The use of new or ancient technology, and the engagement with control, chance or extended complex systems within, and outside of the studio, give rise to the widest possible variables within which to respond and express an artists worldview.
The complexity of animation theory seems to have roots in the various ways in which humans relate to world dependant on ones individual frame of reference in relation to cultural and social structures, that are tacit structures, are critical in the interpretation of artist animation (art animation).
One needs to consider then, ones own frame of reference and world model when interpreting art animation. If it is established that my own practice work is framed within the model of Holism and can be explained using Weiners cybernetic theoretical terminology, Where can other examples of this type of Holistic animation be located within the space between fine art and animation?
Nam June Paik
This extract was taken from an essay published on Nam June Paiks website, and was written by John Hanhardt, Guggenheim Museum.
" Video art imitates nature, not in its appearance or mass, but in its intimate "time-structure" . . . which is the process of AGING (a certain kind of irreversibility). Norbert Wiener, in his design of the Radar system (a micro two-way enveloping-time analysis), did the most profound thinking about Newtonian Time (reversible) and BergsonianTime (irreversible). Edmund Husserl, in his lecture on "The Phenomenology of Inner Time-consciousness" (1928), quotes St. Augustine (the best aesthetician of music in the Medieval age) who said "What is TIME?? If no one asks me, I know ... if some one asks me, 'I know not.' "This paradox in a twentieth-century modulation connects us to the Sartrian paradox "I am always not what I am and I am always what I am not."6 -Paik, 1976"
Thematically this work is similar to my own practice, however, the engagement at the human-technological interface is engaged with in deploying 'ancient technology, tools and materials' rather than exploring technology through the adaptation of technological tools and 'electric' materiality.
In a sense the use of actual materials and human methods reveals the complex systems within which one actually lives in material actual atoms/particles. The human body, its senses and the eye, and the complex system of nature set against the form of technology as revealed in and of itself is an attempt to align and balance ones sense of human boundary and physiological limits, with the expansive capacities of technology in an expression of 'liveliness' and a human experience. It is a sense of existing in two worlds simultaneously, feeling anchored on the actual while being stimulated by the imaginary. however, the boundary is itself self-imposed, one deeply rooted in science and western philosophy, but in actual fact is one of both visible and invisible complex systems that operate on multiple structures, layers and levels interconnect in relationship to one another.
'life' and notions of 'liveliness' is one of relationships, and not about difference/alignment in fact. Life can be understood not only in its detail, through it's component parts but in the context of how these parts function as a whole. The practice experiments illustrate how breaking a system and reconstructing systems it is possible to reveal the systems goal/purpose, and the underlying structure of the systems control mechanism. In this model there is a repositioning the individual ego to a collective whole that operates amelioratively within the system, or not.
One could also consider the willingness of the individual to work within an extended network system as fundamentally one of the need to understand the boundaries and limitation of the system within which one works, as one of knowledge of the system. This is essentially the context within which the work is places, and the social and cultural tacit structures that exist psychologically on encountering a work. This TED talk by Rory Sutherland raises this interesting facet of human psychology. This could relate to cgi visual effects representing a working system, a whole scene in which all component work together as a simulation of a natural world, and the willingness of the spectator to suspend disbelief in the knowledge of what they are seeing is meant to be artificial, and not 'real'.
The early work 'one' was constructed in a way as to have multiple interpretations. Two frameworks through which the work may be viewed is through 'mechanism' 'vitalism' or 'holism' and placed in the context on the white box as sculpture or black box as film, that are recorded and archived as final work and process development films archived in the online network.
The majority of the practice work consists of both a physical artefact and an intangible animation. Many artefacts are destroyed by natural processes during or after filming.
Current debate between film and animation takes up polemic positions of argument, however, can animation process and ways of thinking be at the roots of film practice? Current histographic structure sees a split between the spectacle with a high degree of frame by frame, or artificially constructed worlds set against cinematic filmic narrative storytelling dominated by the technique of shooting on a continuous roll of film. When considered in this way the differences between film and animation seem small. So why isn't film named animation? Aside from economic and strategic reasons such as the art market, white box versus black box, context of high culture versus low culture, can animation be better defined as a cultural artefact expressing the human-technological evolution, and may best be considered the artform of the technological age.
It is the manipulation of space-time and world representation using the medium of technological advancement to express the evolutionary experience inherent in human innovation, that is not named film, but animation. However, not 'animation' as it is generally understood today but reconfigured as an artform embodying an expanded creative deployment of tools and materials in pure cultural expression achieved by the multiple manipulation of systems, in the name of free creative expression. A much more hybrid expanded creative field than currently defined. This leads to the freedom to say to the artist, it really is okay to define ones work as animation.
Animation can be framed as a cultural artefact expressing the worldview of the artist, constructed not only frame by frame but layer by layer within the frame. The use of new or ancient technology, and the engagement with control, chance or extended complex systems within, and outside of the studio, give rise to the widest possible variables within which to respond and express an artists worldview.
The complexity of animation theory seems to have roots in the various ways in which humans relate to world dependant on ones individual frame of reference in relation to cultural and social structures, that are tacit structures, are critical in the interpretation of artist animation (art animation).
One needs to consider then, ones own frame of reference and world model when interpreting art animation. If it is established that my own practice work is framed within the model of Holism and can be explained using Weiners cybernetic theoretical terminology, Where can other examples of this type of Holistic animation be located within the space between fine art and animation?
Nam June Paik
This extract was taken from an essay published on Nam June Paiks website, and was written by John Hanhardt, Guggenheim Museum.
" Video art imitates nature, not in its appearance or mass, but in its intimate "time-structure" . . . which is the process of AGING (a certain kind of irreversibility). Norbert Wiener, in his design of the Radar system (a micro two-way enveloping-time analysis), did the most profound thinking about Newtonian Time (reversible) and BergsonianTime (irreversible). Edmund Husserl, in his lecture on "The Phenomenology of Inner Time-consciousness" (1928), quotes St. Augustine (the best aesthetician of music in the Medieval age) who said "What is TIME?? If no one asks me, I know ... if some one asks me, 'I know not.' "This paradox in a twentieth-century modulation connects us to the Sartrian paradox "I am always not what I am and I am always what I am not."6 -Paik, 1976"
Thematically this work is similar to my own practice, however, the engagement at the human-technological interface is engaged with in deploying 'ancient technology, tools and materials' rather than exploring technology through the adaptation of technological tools and 'electric' materiality.
In a sense the use of actual materials and human methods reveals the complex systems within which one actually lives in material actual atoms/particles. The human body, its senses and the eye, and the complex system of nature set against the form of technology as revealed in and of itself is an attempt to align and balance ones sense of human boundary and physiological limits, with the expansive capacities of technology in an expression of 'liveliness' and a human experience. It is a sense of existing in two worlds simultaneously, feeling anchored on the actual while being stimulated by the imaginary. however, the boundary is itself self-imposed, one deeply rooted in science and western philosophy, but in actual fact is one of both visible and invisible complex systems that operate on multiple structures, layers and levels interconnect in relationship to one another.
'life' and notions of 'liveliness' is one of relationships, and not about difference/alignment in fact. Life can be understood not only in its detail, through it's component parts but in the context of how these parts function as a whole. The practice experiments illustrate how breaking a system and reconstructing systems it is possible to reveal the systems goal/purpose, and the underlying structure of the systems control mechanism. In this model there is a repositioning the individual ego to a collective whole that operates amelioratively within the system, or not.
One could also consider the willingness of the individual to work within an extended network system as fundamentally one of the need to understand the boundaries and limitation of the system within which one works, as one of knowledge of the system. This is essentially the context within which the work is places, and the social and cultural tacit structures that exist psychologically on encountering a work. This TED talk by Rory Sutherland raises this interesting facet of human psychology. This could relate to cgi visual effects representing a working system, a whole scene in which all component work together as a simulation of a natural world, and the willingness of the spectator to suspend disbelief in the knowledge of what they are seeing is meant to be artificial, and not 'real'.
The early work 'one' was constructed in a way as to have multiple interpretations. Two frameworks through which the work may be viewed is through 'mechanism' 'vitalism' or 'holism' and placed in the context on the white box as sculpture or black box as film, that are recorded and archived as final work and process development films archived in the online network.
The majority of the practice work consists of both a physical artefact and an intangible animation. Many artefacts are destroyed by natural processes during or after filming.
