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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Vivian Sobchack, Professor Emerita in the Dept. of Film, Television, and Digital Media and former Associate Dean at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, will be speaking at the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture (LCC), on "Animation and Automation".
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.
For additional information: matthew.mcintyre@lcc.gatech.edu
