Abstract
We consider the visual aesthetics of animation design, particularly those in the ever popular medium of popular 3D computer animation. This burgeoning field of film and animation has attracted an ever-growing number of viewers, creators and fans and as a result of such growing attention this paper seeks to ask an important question: are the aesthetics of these films new media representations of humanity’s changing relationship to the world around us? To answer the question, this paper first offers an overview of animation’s ever-shifting relationship to (photo)reality, arriving at a definition for a new animated poetics which focuses not on reality but on augmenting material aspects of textures to create more tangible images. The materiality of the 3D computer image encourage audiences to easily mentalize the tangibility of the objects presented, creating cinesthetic bodies which experience synthetic landscapes and textures. Embodiment in an animated environment, then, is part of the result of the aesthetics that 3D animations have presented for decades, and this embodiment serves as a new node on our posthuman future. Drawing on the work of Siegfried Kracauer, Katherine Hayles, Kristiane Voss and others we situate computer animation in a new vision for digital humanities, arguing that as a working model for the digital human our experience of ever-changing, unreal-yet-more-than-real synthetic shapes is one of the most apt.
Presenters
Nathan SnowAssociate Professor, Communication, Utah Tech University, Utah, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
Beyond Borders: The Role of the Humanities in Reimagining Communities
KEYWORDS
Posthumanism, Materialty, Cinesthetics, Animation, Theory, Media, Film, Emobodiment, Digital Humanities
