What used to be clearly defined boundaries separating the various types and genres of digital animation have become blurred. Expansionist tendencies are unmistakable. The 2nd Expanded Animation  symposium is providing an international community of students, instructors, artists and theoreticians with an opportunity to convene and exchange ideas about increasingly permeable borders, peripheral areas, current trends and future developments in the field of computer animation.

Blurring boundaries

It deals with the blurring of boundaries, leading-edge zones, and hybridization in computer animation. This is once again an effort to shed light on what’s happening right now in art, theory and practice: Exploring the Vastness of Art, Theory and Play.

The first panel elaborates on areas of tension and interplay among animation, architecture and game art, as well as hybrids of animated filmmaking.

Current artistic positions

The second panel kicks things off on the theoretical side with consideration of current artistic positions: Polynoid, Robert Seidel and Universal Everything. The third panel addresses the subject of animation at the interface of gaming. The issues under consideration are participation, the transmission of players’ actions and the transference of their personalities into a virtual space, as well as new forms of narration via interaction.

Speakers

Ulrich Wegenast (DE), Franziska Bruckner (AT), Universal Everything (CH), Robert Seidel (DE), Polynoid (DE), Paolo Pedercini (IT/US), Mario von Rickenbach (CH)

Expanded Animation is a collaboration between the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, the Ars Electronica Festival and LENTOS Museum of Modern Art.

Organization

Jeremiah Diephuis, Jürgen Hagler, Michael Lankes, Patrick Proier, Alexander Wilhelm / University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg Campus (Department Digital Media)

Automated network systems control global production and transaction processes. Increasingly digital models and virtual information regimes modify social reality. Arts and cultural workers have played an important role in shaping these new digital worlds.

Subordination to the market

But an enthusiasm for flexibility and the temporary has given way to an even stronger subordination under the market. While many forms of media culture have been forced into the Creative Industries paradigm in recent years, others have ventured into the art world and have come to terms with the White Cube and its conventions. This development seems to restrict the degrees of freedom of cultural interaction and limits the space of the possible. What logic is driving these effects and what alternatives exist?

Rhetoric of radical change

Inspired by freely available online knowledge and cheaper new production machines like 3D Printers, things which were made only in industrial plants and by specialists have moved into the realm of “doing it yourself”. A development accompanied by a rhetoric of radical change and empowerment, the practical results are mostly quaintly produced small series of more or less useful design.

Guerilla engineering

Where is guerilla engineering and civil social appropriation of know-how turning into a self-referential zone of handicraft? Viennese World-Information Institute invites to investigate these questions in the international symposium Information as Reality at LENTOS Art Museum Linz.

In cooperation with the magazine Springerin