BVA103-A Critique of Animation ( Conversation with the Article)

Summary of the Article:
This article is about how animation and film as come so far, using the technology created years ago and how it has been improved on significantly. 

Names:

Harun Farocki was a German film maker, born January 9, 1944.

Etienne-Jules Marey was a French physiologist, born March 5, 1830. 

Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer born born April 9, 1830.

Anselm Franke is a curator and writer

Thom Andersen is an American filmmaker,

Erhard Schuttpelz is a Professor at Univeristy Siegen

Interesting points:

• Between Marey and motion-capture technology lies the twentieth century: the industrialization of death, and the victory of capital; technology in the service of the absolute negation of life, and the reconstruction of life as its inscription into what would be called the “social factory,” the subsumption  of life under capital.
• This scan of an actor's face was developed by the Avatar CGI team in conjunction with the University of Southern California. Their objective was to produce Emily, a hyperreal CGI character modeled exactly after the real-life actor whose face enabled the scan.
• The patient had to be reanimated, and in the course of this reanimation (and thus de-alienation and de-objectification), the oppositional matrix of the disciplinary society had to be undone.
• The winter of artificial intelligence: this refers to a period of several decades in which AI and robotics failed to fulfill the horizon of expectations in reconstructing and automatizing life. 
• reductionist, militaristic reality principle of an “administered life.” 
• Thus, the “frontier” between the complex and the complicated has transformed: the complicated now “accommodates” and “frames” the complex, by monitoring its flows and registering any deviations from the “patterns of life,” using them to expand their scope by means of generative algorithms. Harun referred to the data maps of operational computer animations that are used to monitor complex systems—from factories to cities to battlefields—as “ideal-typical” images, images that seek to outperform cinematographic and photographic representations, and indeed the reality of life itself.
• Instead, the image increasingly becomes the measure of an always-imperfect reality. It was this inversion that Harun’s work never failed to put back on its feet.

Definitions:

Subsumption: incorporating something under a more general category.

Phantasms: something existing in perception only.

Clinical Positivism: scientifically detached; unemotional, a quality of being encouraging or promising of a successful outcome. 

Dichotomies: being two fold;a classification into two opposed parts or sub-classes. 

Neoliberalism: a politcal orientation originating in the 1960's, blending liberal political views with an emphasis on economic growth.

Brechtian: style of German theatre.

Computation: the procedure of calculating; determining something by mathematical or logical methods

Diagnostician: a doctor who specialized in medical diagnosis.

Dialectical: of or relating to or employing dialectic

Conflations: merging of two or more sets of information, texts, ideas, etc into one.

About the Author

Anselm Franke is a Berlin-based curator and writer, currently Head of Visual Arts at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, where recent exhibitions have included #3 Down to Earth and Forensis. In 2012, Franke curated the Taipei Biennial based on the theme “Modern Monsters / Death and Life of Fiction.” From 2006–2010, Franke was artistic director of Antwerp’s Extra City Kunsthal. Franke will be the chief curator for the tenth Shanghai Biennale, which opens on November 22, 2014. He has edited, published, and contributed to numerous publications.

© 2014 e-flux and the author