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Abstract: "Animation and Automation"
This presentation explores the shifting historical etymology and vexed meanings of ‘animation’ as the term entails both movement and life (one often but not always the sign of the other) and is expanded by its encounters with technology. Indeed, the distinction between movement and life becomes increasingly ambiguous as animation is transformed first by automated mechanical processes that replace human movement and labor and then by what seem autonomous electronic technologies that appear, as well, to have lives of their own. In this regard, Disney-Pixar's computer-animated WALL-E (2009) serves as a particularly apposite and illustration. Nostalgic for human life and movement yet dependent for their reanimation and redemption on two robots in a future that will have been, WALL-E dramatizes (often self-reflexively) the dialectical entanglements of moving images and animate entities, the constitution of life, liveness and liveliness, and the shifting of agency from increasingly inert human bodies to increasingly energetic and inventive machines.
Vivian Sobchack, American cinema and media theorist and cultural critic, is a prolific writer who has authored numerous books and articles across a diverse range of subjects, from historiography to film noir to work on documentary film, new media, and film feminism. Among many other works, she is the author of Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley 2004), Beyond the Gaze: Recent Approaches to Film Feminisims (special issue of Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Autumn 2004), and Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change (Minneapolis, 2000). She currently teaches courses in Visual Phenomenology, Contemporary Film Theory, Historiography, and Cultural Studies at UCLA.
