animate!

Wednesday 5 October 2005 19:30

Preview of this year’s animate! tv commissions at the Foundation for Art & Creative Technology, Liverpool. Six exciting new works take startling graphic journeys, reveal unsettling undercurrents and discover dazzling digital domains. Plus another four hand-picked recent animate! tv commissions, and a Q&A with animate! and Run Wrake, director of [...]

“I am writing, here, as a kind of casualty: someone who was seduced by this strange work, and has yet to recover. I have come to see that this is perhaps all I ever write about.” Ian Penman

Animation matters. It matters…

Because everything is going, is slipping beneath the waves, is starving or burning and maimed [...]

“His language of images makes it possible to understand familiar things without their ceasing to be unfamiliar. Simile brings distant things near while at the same time freezing them in an image protected from the ravaging force of habit.” Peter Szondi, from Walter Benjamin’s City Portraits.

The wings in the chest, do we feel them lift [...]

90 minutes, 1970, US, directed by Peter Watkins

Before one even considers the form and content of his singularly powerful body of work, the remarkable oeuvre of internationalist film-maker Peter Watkins is testament to the many inspirational qualities this committed artist has displayed, over four decades and in the face of concerted institutional and media hostility. [...]

The first sits on a bar stool outside a city centre supermarket exit. A modest, silent figure, a Muslim, he is straight-backed and holds in front of him a small, soft basket, from which erupts a dazzling plumage of peacock feathers, a spray shocking the monotone mood of the churning street.

To Muslims, the peacock is [...]

I believe it’s time to kill animation. Not the animation we watch, but the word we use to label it.

Everyone out there knows that animation means ‘invented’ characters brought to life on the screen by an animator. But those of us inside the world of the moving image, also use the term ‘animation’ to refer [...]

“My dreams move to the rhythm required by long journeys to countries as yet unknown, or to countries that are simply hypothetical or impossible.” Fernando Pessoa

Animation is five things today…

It is what happens when the mind, understanding that, in its strange dance with the world, things become too complex for the vessels generated by low [...]

Image by Sebastiao Salgado, 2005

In the beginning was the image, and the image was black and white. The place is an island in the frozen, southern origin of things. In the foreground, a valley floor, hard with the thinnest scrub and, tailing back into the hills behind, a climbing ridge much like the back of [...]

“Desire, loneliness, the wind in the flowering almond - surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects.” Louise Gluck

From where we sit, in a room that primes us well for the spaces beyond, the garden offers itself as a model of the kind of consciousness that could be of help. We follow the streams of [...]

There were 143 submissions to animate! tv’s latest commissioning round, 72 from London and 71 from rest-of-UK. Six projects have been chosen to share the annual production funding provided by Arts Council England and Channel 4 Television.

The artists in animate! tv’s new slate for 2005 are Sebastian Buerkner Fact, Joji Koyama [...]