The Future of a Medium Once Known as Television

Read "The Future of a Medium Once Known as Television" by William Uricchio.
This essay was written when Youtube was only 4 years old (2009?)
Page 27, "Fox Interactive" was #2 and "megavideo" is mentioned.
Page 29, "Youtube screening room"
Page 30 Game walk through
Page 32, Youtube Symphony Orchestra
Page 35, Collage and montage discussed/defined.

Michael Snow's Visual Trickery

Read "Michael Snow's Visual Trickery" by Leah Modigliani published in Prefix Photo, vlume 15, number 2, 2015.
Reflections on a retrospective of his photography.
Comparison to Rene Magritte's La Condition Humaine of 1933. 

Animation studies as an interdisciplinary teaching field

Read "Animation studies as an interdisciplinary teaching field" by Paul Ward.
Many interesting points on what is good and not good about teaching and studying animation. Suggests interdis application rather than training/apprenticeship models since those models only train people to maintain the current methods and not to grow/change.
Page 324, compared with performance studies
Page 328, difficulties in teaching praxis methodologies.
Page 330, dark side of work study apprenticeship quote: John Textor, CEO of Digital Domain, "30% of the workforce at our digital studio down in Florida is not only going to be free, with student labor, it's going to be labor that's actually paying us for the privilege of working on our films". 

Spaces of Wonder

Read "Spaces of Wonder; animation and museology" by Edwin Carels.
page 293: "wunderkammer" - curiosity chamber, predates the curiosity cabinet, early museum for the elite where the wonders are laid out for those entering to touch and pick up.
Page 296: "in the museum, the visitor is free to move among images that are static, in the movie theatre, it is the opposite.
Page 298: "by putting things in a room or in a box, musea become instruments to direct our gaze"
Page 302, Robert Breer, animation, flipbooks, mutoscopes
Page 306, Anime character Annlee given to 24 artists to freely work with. Exhibition eventually held.
Page 309, Anthony McCall, "Line Describing a Cone", he uses light in smoky room as animation.
Page 311, "dispositif" - the immaterial effect of the work on the cinematic apparatus.
Page 313, "Animation beyond the animated film, implies a return to animation before the movie theatre". 

Take the B Train by George Griffin

Read "Take the B Train, reconstructing the proto-cinematic apparatus" by George Griffin.
Discussion of three concrete animation artists who have site specific sculptural works.
Gregory Barsamian who uses strobe lights. Page 278 describes strobe speeds.
Eric Dryer who uses modified flickering goggles.
Bill Brand who was a student of Paul Sharits and created a zeotrope-style work in the New York subway in 1980.

animated documentaries

Read "Animated Documentaries, aesthetics, politics and viewer engagement" by Nea Ehrlich.

Page 252, "Ranciere asserts that in order to destabilize existing systems of control, those who are denied visibility and political presence must be reinserted and "seen".
Page 253, leaving in audio distress/mistakes helps authentication. "diminish sense of animations constructed perfections".
Page 255, Ann Marie Fleming films "I was a child of Holocaust Survivors".
Page 256, minorities being depicted by others is discussed.
Page 257, "by emphasizing mediation, animated docs acknowledge the viewers centrality".
Page 259-260, argument for animated documentary video game is made but is less convincing than the animated doc. I felt she was cherry picking the meaning of various aspects of it to make the argument such as mentioning "familiarity with animation from childhood" as a positive but leaving out the negative. 

Reanimator

Read "Reanimator; embodied history, and the post-cinema trace in Ken Jacobs' temporal composites" by Jeffrey Skuller.
Page 225: pre-wwII USA animation politically challenges form but not in post war.
Page 227: (Jacobs) creates an experience of historical knowledge as something that is constantly in transformation, rather than as a static artifact from the  past"
Page 228-229, with failure of A/G to transform society, "how do we get there from here?" is replaced with "how did we end up here?".
Page 229, "contemporary artists ... exploring anachronistic materials ... is what Walter Benjamin called brooding".
Discussion of found film and rationalization/theory continues.
Page 231-232, Jacob's customized flicker projector "the nervous system" described
Page 234, composite digital images called "digital temporal composite".
Page 237, "In many ways, the emergence of digital technology returns us to individualized spectatorship of the peep show device, each person now peering into his individual screen". 

Socialimagestics and Cinemasymbiosis

Read "Socialimagestics and Cinemasymbiosis: the materiality of a realism" by Mark Bartlett

Page 199, knowlege for philosophy, perception and emotion for artist, "hallucinations and also facts" (Althussen)
Page 200, "Technicity refers to the way a given technology mediates our interaction with the world".
Page 204, "Chicago 10" animated documentary more effective than Godard or Allen.
Page 206, discussion of avant garde post war disconnect from mass media.
Page 211-212, live action ... ideologically maintains pre-cinematic humanist subjectivity through figural phantasms of indexicality, whereas animation ... critically engages humanistic subjectivity through indexicly of its phantasms"  (naturalistic/phantasmal)

Page 214, "I dream therefore I become"

East Asian post-human Prometheus

Read "East Asian post-human Prometheus" by Joon Yang Kim. Discussion of anime, ani, Japanimation, etc as well as western stereotypes.
Page 175-176, Kraftwork robots based on Japanese businessmen. Suggests "western stereotypes of the Japanese hold them to be sub-human, as if they have no feeling, no emotion, no humanity".
Discusses differences between Pinocchio versus Astro Boy in becoming human. Page 178, "however, it is still difficult to transform the non-Western body into the Western one".
Page 184, Robocop vs Ghose in the Shell, American vs Japanese cyborg discussion.

a cinema of apprehension

Read "A Cinema of Apprehension; a third entelechy of the vitalist machine" by Suzane Buchan.
Pag 146-146, discusses Gunning's "To Scan a Ghost" and uses some of his approach to talk about puppet animation which is not resting between living and dead but rather is material and not alive.
Page 152: in discussing Brothers Quay "Street of Crocodiles" non-anthropomorphic puppets as vitalist machines which "do not perform a soul and do not, and cannot, die".
Page 157: discussion of use of waste materials and Brothers Quay, citing Walter Benjamin.
Page 162: Gunning discussing Kracaur; "cinema's value lay in exposing a fundamental loss of coherence and authenticity"
Page 164: another Gunning quote on disintegration.
Page 165: quoting Bennett on the surprise encounter outcomes, either pleasure or uncanny.

Coming to Life

Read "Coming to Life: Cartoon animals and natural philosophy" by Thomas Lamarre in Pervasive Animation.
Much discussion of 1930s cel animation with focus on early Japanese work (dog soldier "Norakuro Nitohei).
Page 121: local/non-local as character versus character/background.
Page 122, compositing error in bed example (too lazy to create new background?).
126: animation as ambassadors versus as marrying one.
Page 127: life-death-life again and the uncanny.

At one point, he discusses how animals take on human characteristics when animated. Non-animals (plants, beds, etc) which come to life, take on animal characteristics. A vegetable will grow arms and form a face, it will not just be a moving vegetable. 

Ecocritique and the materialities of animation

Read "Ecocritique and the Mateialities of Animation" by Sean Cubitt in Pervasive Animation.
Divides animation into three catagories; direct (drawn onto film,etc), pro-filmic (photographed figures or artwork), and vector (which comes to life on its own such as computer animation or shadow puppets).
Page 96-97, Dog Star Man and Mothlight. Len Lye.
Page 98: ""Paradoxically, it is in direct animation that we are most aware of the individual frames. ... Direct animation maintains the eternal presence of flux".
Page 105, "Ryan" by Chris Landreth on Ryan Larkin.
Page 106; Emile Cohl
Page 109; pre-cinema animation devices exhibition at ACMI (Australian Centtre for the Moving Image) in 2006.
Page 109: Strobe light on dance floor renders "dancers into animated images of themselves"

Animation's Petrified Unrest by Esther Leslie

Animation's Petrified Unrest by Esther Leslie in Pervasive Animation book
Notes
Many discussions of Reynaud who invented the praxiniscope but later built the theatre obtique which expanded to become the pre-cinema animation projection machine. (page 75 on)
Page 76: "animation is ... movement set in relation to stillness"
Page 79: kinaesthetic vision: the vision we use in the world, ie, using all our senses. In drawing, this is suggested through motion lines.
Page 83: Marx and depreciation of the self, ie: workers represented by their hands rather than as people. Also discusses how people in animation expresses as, or reduced to, symbols and lines (ie: exclamation marks).
Page 86: Marey's device with rotating shutter for multiple short exposures on one frame, 1882.
Page 85 to end, discussion of starting/stopping or still/movement of body when running, eyes when looking, and many other things.

Transforming Image by Gunning

Read "The Transforming Image" by Tom Gunning in Pervasive Animation book. Very worthwhile read. Must follow up with more of his books.

Page 52: cites Lev Manovich to discuss cinema as a subgenre of animation.
Page 56-57: natural magic
Page 57: "Blow book" described. "Devices of Wonder" book by Stafford ad Terpack (2002) could be something to follow up with.
Page 60: flipbook image "insubstantial, purely perceptual image, prgnant with possibility of appearance ... the Ur-form of the animated image"
Page 62: flipbook vs blow book.  Also, Pascal Fouche described as "historian of the flipbook".
Page 65: Mary Ann Doane essay on the flipbook cited.

Last two pages discusses magic, Melies, and stuff I should draw from for my presentation next month. 

Expanded Animation article

Read "Expanded Animation" by Siegfried Zielinski in collection "Pervasive Animation" (AFI Film Readers, Routage, 2013).
This essay mostly discusses animated objects and the history/context of anamatronics and the early use of electricity to made dead muscles move. 

Penoptacon and early cinema lectures

Finished Illusions in Motion.
Last notes: page 339, definition and history of real penoptacon, Jeremy Bentaham, 1780-1790s.
page 364, narrator of panorama compared to early cinema. Gives me idea to have Mr. Saul do a panorama narration.
also p 364, "Media Culture" defined as "a cultural condition, where large numbers of people live  under the constant influence of media (anything from newspapers to the internet).  Mediated communication has increasingly replaced face-to-face encounters,: people relate to each other at a distance by technological devices, and gain much of their information from media channels operated by governments and corporations." (Huntamo)