Animation Studies

Microtalks

Andres Montenegro.

“Mapping the Metaphorical and Uncanny Narrative of Balthus’s Painting Passage Du Commerce Saint Andre, through The Alley an Animated Fictional Interpretation of the Former.”

About Animate Energies SAS (Society of Animation Studies) 2021 Conference.

Animate Energies” evokes animation’s dialectical definitions and practices—animating the inanimate, endowing with life, making objects move, and, in many cases, the tedious work or mechanical labor concealed behind expressions of freedom and possibility. It also evokes forces, powers, and resources that can be exploitative and exploited, oppressive and oppressed, that can generate resistance or activism, and that can produce or endure unforeseen events. To measure energy is to describe action and transformation within a system, which can complicate agent-centered ideas about the experience of animating or being animated.

The conference theme “Animate Energies” invites inquiry into the interdisciplinarity of animation and into the various elements of animation production, distribution, exhibition, and reception. This includes efforts to understand the forces holding together distinct media assemblages—national and transnational studios, distribution infrastructure, aesthetic traditions, fan communities, transmedia narratives, and combinations thereof. This theme encourages participants to consider how animation enhances thinking about media not in terms of agents and objects but by way of movements, flows, and energies. This mode of inquiry includes comparing theories of animation to theories of mediation. Are claims that media constitute conditions and situations, extend and shape the human, create worlds, and structure being also the claims of animation? How might animation, in its many forms and definitions, draw attention to the energies of media or the activity, agency, and vitality of background conditions, structures, and environments, whether technological, economic, political, social, or ecological?