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ADVENTURE-LANDING a compendium of animation

This research investigates non-commercial and experimental animation. Focusing on the criticism of contemporary artwork and its economies, it incorporates animation into fine arts. The book features an elaborate study of animation in the Western context, taking material from my postdoctoral research conducted in Tokyo (2009). While the former develops an argument around the singular nature of animation based on its specific image, the latter concerns the structural coherence between a single cultural expression, in this case Japanese animation, as well as geographical, institutional and social concerns. Assuming the conceptual limitations of existing models of animation theories in the art context, the research addresses the urgency to review and further investigate materials of animation embedded in Japanese culture, now becoming subsumed in a wider globalised landscape. The theme of animation is approached using a triple methodology: philosophy, art and media theory, and practice, with supplementary discourses of urban studies and geography. These provide a net of suggestions and tools with which a unifying concept of animation, opposed to a fully determined single entity, can be found. Locating the potential for theorising animation by identifying its image through the concept of the virtual/actual (Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze), the studies contest assumptions of medium-specificity or animation’s presentation as a technological event. Building on existing literature (Cholodenko 1991, Leslie 2002), the significance and original contribution to knowledge of the research can be traced in this displacement of animation, inscribing it within the dynamics of the artwork and visual economy of images, thereby emphasising a conceptual force of de and re-territorialisation. Part 2 of the book developed from a research residency at Tokyo University of the Arts (Geidai) partially funded by The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation. Related research includes a peer-reviewed essay entitled ‘Nervous Light Places’ in ‘Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal’ (SAGE, 2010).