ACUERDO PARA EL DESARROLLO DE CAPACIDADES?

This chapter starts with the object itself, and considers the animated object both as a metaleptic device and how it operates as a visual image within the digital space. In object stop motion animation the materiality of the animated object is vitally important as the object speaks for the animator in the same way as an actor speaks for a film. The object’s selection, presence, framing and tactility are all visually and materially voicing the central structural elements of the animated idea as revealed through movement. The object’s performance, by animated necessity, was mediated through the camera, in the past on film, and now in digital. This offers some exciting possibilities but also a slightly different relationship to the object, the image and its metaleptic potential.

Elizabeth Walden positions contemporary object stop motion as a kind of paradox, existing in a digital sliver between the destruction of the index by digital photography and the possibilities offered by materiality when indexicality is removed,

The infinite malleability of the digital image paradoxically creates the conditions for an encounter with materiality, and that encounter makes possible a deep re- ordering of our relation to things. 163

While I agree that the material possibilities of images have increased through digital means, I would argue that the index is simply rearranged, reordered and reshuffled by digital imagery rather than removed entirely. While it is true that the objects of digital photography or cinematography can easily be uncoupled from their indexical relationships to their subjects because the digital image is so easily manipulated, it still remains that a (representational) manipulated digital image is still coupled to an index of sorts in order to be believably connected to an (imaginary) indexical moment. The index

163 _{Elizabeth Walden, “Heavy as a Feather: On Agnieszka Woznicka’s Birdy, Object Animation} and the Moral Gravity of Things,” Animation: an interdisiplinary journal (2010-7), 59.

for these types of images retreats to layers, shadows, blurs, occlusion and reflections, and each one of these elements contributes to the whole of a non-indexical yet representational image. It is in the layering and compositing of these images that brings them to a place where a suspension of the index of disbelief can be sustained. It is the layering being perfected by CGI in mainstream cinema that allows for the entire Marvel back-catalogue to be made believably cinematic, one comic book at a time.

As a practitioner, the new digital hegemony allows for more than just a new relationship with the index. The promise of “the digital assumption of the power to create whatever can be conceived without material constraint” is a heady one.164 _{I chose to exercise it in} a tangential way, not by creating elements from scratch through defining points of mathematical geometry (the essential technique in creating CGI objects), but through manipulating the photo frames I take to specific outcomes. The materials are real but the limits to what is practical are lessened, and the ability to easily incorporate elements, erase mistakes and manage filmic time is a new type of freedom. The ability to easily create macro shooting environments allowed me access to a whole new world of scale and material. The arrangement of the work and the oblique progression through the different station points is a type of falling into animation. I move from the representational (spaces, shadows, doors) into a more abstracted visual space throughout the course of this project, and the filings and ferrofluid make the perfect dust and fluids for these imagined spaces. I didn’t have any desire to form these into other objects or make them perform in mimetic ways, instead I became interested in their inherent nature and visual properties and sought to capture that as a main visual and theoretical concern. I echo Walden’s description of object animation:

Object animation, rather, directs us to the objects themselves. It frees materiality

164 _{Elizabeth Walden, “Heavy as a Feather: On Agnieszka Woznicka’s Birdy, Object Animation} and the Moral Gravity of Things.” , 61.

from its practical or natural contexts to see what it can do. It begins collaboration between the material and the animator: the animator teases out latent potential in the objects, while the objects direct the animator in their possibilities 165

In the macro world of extreme close ups I finally found the material texture, form and substance I had been searching for during this project, with the additional bonus of making procedural animation from analogue means.

The combination of analogue and digital is a central part of this project. The “mirrors as layers” in the Schüfftan process plates are also an archaeology of digital practices as I wanted to see how the layers work, why they function as they do and how they contribute to meaning in and of themselves. This process came back to an analogue process enabled by digital means and I think that this is an exciting nexus of process and materials. The digital process is a material as well, as it has rules, limits and techniques and it shouldn’t always be seen as simply a reflection of the photographic or the photoreal.

On a practical note, digital affordances have brought once high-end means to easily contained one-person operations. With a laptop and a camera, I can now single-handedly crew shoots, do my own lighting, create post-production effects and make colour corrections with my own animated experiments. I own my own equipment and I don’t need to hire specialist gear or specialist gear operators. These things may sound peripheral or tangental to the actual work, but they’re not, as they enable and empower work outside the gendered norms of media, art and cultural production.

165 _{Elizabeth Walden, “Heavy as a Feather: On Agnieszka Woznicka’s Birdy, Object Animation} and the Moral Gravity of Things.” , 63.