[ecrea] CFP: Experimental and Expanded Animation: Current Perspectives & New Directions

CALL FOR PAPERS
Proposals are invited for an interdisciplinary one-day conference with 
an evening reception, screening and exhibition.
At the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, Surrey, UK.
Conference date: Wednesday, February 13th 2019.

THEME
With their recent volume: Experimental and Expanded Animation: Current 
Perspectives & New Directions, Hamlyn and Smith aimed to reach further 
into understandings of what experimental animation is, and has been, 
since Robert Russett and Cecile Starr defined it in 1976. This 
conference aims to further focus our project and to develop findings 
from the publication through more immediate methods of open dialogue 
and/or film practice. The prompts listed below have been condensed from 
themes emerging in the volume. However we welcome proposals that respond 
to these areas and also those that pursue other lines of enquiry. A 
range of disciplinary approaches is encouraged and the conference aims 
to include papers from practitioners, practitioner/scholars and 
scholars. As well as traditional 20 min papers we encourage alternative 
methods for sharing ideas and materials through, for example, performed 
presentations, artistic works, mini-workshops and lightning talks.
PROMPTS
Craft/ materiality
Transparency of process and use of materials has been central to 
experimental/ materialist film practice and theory. To what extent has 
the homogenization of media today prompted a rise in more recent craft 
theory? How do Marxist materialist theories relate to post-human and new 
materialist discourse and in which ways do these more recent 
methodologies impact upon our understandings of experimental expanded 
animation?
Feminism/women in experimental animation
It’s understood that the privacy of animation production conditions 
facilitates exploration into issues relating to feminism.  Female 
animators today are translating concerns, such as the domestic, 
sexuality and the body, into large scale, expanded and performed 
animation.  Does such work, installed in spaces beyond the 
gallery/cinema, and in which the female animator is visible on stage, 
impact upon expression of the female experience, or has this become less 
crucial to articulate, and how does feminist theory offer insights into 
this area?
Industry/ independent
Critically reworked commercial animation is occurring today within the 
purview of experimental film. Outwardly appearing as traditional 
cartoons, how does this material sit within a field that has tended to 
emphasise the auteur and has avoided the graphic, the narrative and the 
popular?
Inter-disciplinary
Increasingly we see interdisciplinary approaches employed to analyse 
animation, including for example post-humanist scholarship; aesthetics; 
phenomenology; feminism and critical theory. To what extent do these 
methods cast light on animated texts, or do they detract from 
fundamental questions concerning form and the medium?

Medium/ context
Media including photography, dance, and performance for example have 
been central to animation since vaudeville, and then through the 
expanded cinema of the 60s.  How is experimental animation advanced 
through media ‘impurity’, and to what extent are theories such as 
inter-mediality, which suggests that individual qualities of distinct 
media are enhanced through their interlocking, of value?
Perception/reception
Animation that is articulated beyond the single screen could be said to 
emphasise a perceptual and phenomenological engagement. Flicker for 
example, is located in the physiology of the viewer, while animated 
installation demands a mobile spectator.  Both modes of spectatorship 
are contingent and situated in the present of their apprehension.  How 
is animation in the expanded field continuing to elicit new modes of 
spectatorship?

Representation/ technologies  3D-CG and internet animation has the 
capacity to invent and manipulate the extant world in myriad ways.  How 
is CG being used in the context of experimental expanded animated film?
Utopia/ ecology Gene Youngblood hailed expanded cinema as reflecting a 
utopian expansion of both consciousness and technology.  Today much 
experimental expanded animation, made through contracted means of found 
or old materials, can be regarded as a response to resources made scarce 
through either forced obsolescence, unsustainable practice and/or as a 
creative resistance to media acceleration. How does the trend toward a 
careful ecology of materials impact on experimental animation languages?
SUBMISSION
Please submit an abstract (up to 500 words), 3–5 bibliographical 
sources, 3-5 keywords as well as a short bio by 15th of November 2018 
to: (vsmith9 /at/ ucreative.ac.uk)  with the subject heading: ‘Experimental 
Animation Conference’. The selected abstracts for the conference will be 
announced by late November 2018.

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