Interpreting Animation and Vice Versa: Can We Philosophize in Flash?

Interpreting Animation and Vice Versa: Can We
Philosophize in Flash?

John
Zuern

University of Hawaii-Manoa
zuern@hawaii.edu

2002

University of Tübingen

Tübingen

ALLC/ACH 2002

editor

Harald
Fuchs

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

From the notorious HTML <blink> tag and simple animated GIFs to
elaborate cinematic presentations produced with Java, DHTML, or authoring
systems such as Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Shockwave, and Adobe LiveObject,
moving images and texts have become a ubiquitous feature of the World Wide Web.
As computer animation technologies have become more robust and accessible,
animations of all kinds have become more prevalent in electronic art and
literature, displays of information, and pedagogical materials. For scholars
working to develop critical methodologies for the analysis of electronic media,
computer animations--whether they take the form of word-and-image poetry,
film-like narratives, or diagrammatic representations of philosophical
concepts--offer challenging moving targets. Animation requires an interpretive
approach that can account not only for the role of spatial and temporal
dimensions in the production of the work's meaning, but also for the technical,
code-based operations that create the specific animated elements in the work. As
this presentation will argue, engaging the complex issues involved in a
hermeneutics of animation propels us toward a recognition of the potential of
animation as a medium of hermeneutic reflection in its own right. Extending to
computer animation the same consideration that has recently been given to
scholarly hypertext [2, 5] leads us to a view of animation not simply as the
object of hermeneutic inquiry, but as a way of "doing hermeneutics" in the
strong sense of philosophizing about meaning and interpretation.
Focusing on a small set of concrete examples, this presentation briefly outlines
a set of questions confronting the interpretation of computer animation:
1. What is the semiotic function of the movement of elements in an
animation? This question elicits more or less straightforward answers
only when we are discussing "representational" animations that strive
for versimilitude of movement in animated figures (realistic gaits in
humans and other creatures, for example--the sum of the animated
movements means "walking"). When the movement is essentially
"non-mimetic" (the appearance and disappearance of text, for example),
how do we understand the contribution of the motion to the "whole"
meaning of the work?
2. What is the relationship of the precise chronometic time and
geometric space assigned to elements in the code of the animation (the
values of a setTimeout method in JavaScript, for example) to the
phenomenological experience of time and space produced in the work for a
reader [10] (such as the perception of an object crossing the screen
"slowly")? As much as the programming that underlies traditional
hypertext systems, the technical substrata of computer animation
suggests a need for a comparative method that reads the text of the code
alongside the manifest text of the work on the screen, viewing the
finished animation as a dialogic hybrid of (at least) two distinct
languages.
3. Is it possible (or useful) to distinguish broad genres of animation
that correspond to narrative, lyric, and drama? How does the sequencing
of elements in an animation intersect with the rhetorical conventions of
these traditional genres, and in what ways can the movement of animation
disrupt and complicate these forms? Can we imagine, following Kolb's
work on hypertext writing in philosophy [6], a dialectical,
argumentative mode of animation?
4. How do animated elements contribute to whatever forms of
interactivity a specific electronic work invites?
5. How do animations intersect with other communication technologies,
especially the hypertext systems in which they are often embedded?

Each of the examples I discuss illustrate these challenges. in addition, each
indicates the potential of animation as a means of visualizing theoretical
concepts and hermeneutic procedures. Josh Santangelo's DHTML poem "Iris" cites
and interprets lines of D. H. Lawrence [9]; the collaborative Flash project "Im
Zeitalter der Konversationseuphorie" by Merkel, R. et al. presents an elaborate
meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of human communication [11];
and Charles Heinemann's "Jacques Lacan's Imaginary Prisoner Game" offers a
Java-driven dramatization of one of Lacan's models of temporality in the psyche
[4].
To reinforce my claim that animation provides a powerful medium for critical and
metacritical discourse in the fields of philosophy and literary criticism, I
will conclude my presentation with a few examples of work from a graduate
seminar in aesthetics in which students produced web-based diagrams of concepts
as a way of investigating their developing theoretical frameworks. Students drew
on the approach to modeling concepts introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari [3] and W.J.T. Mitchell's critical iconology, especially the
formulation of "ut pictora theoria" [8]. Their diagrams presented both single
concepts such as "intertextuality" and "power" as well as relationships among
concepts, such as the intersection of "authenticity," "justice,"
"representation," and "community." Working together to produce protocols for
animating these diagrams in Macromedia Flash led the seminar participants into
dynamic discussions of the processes, relations, hierarchies, and even the
contradictions that structure--and animate--our thinking about literature and
culture.
Computer animation not only invites us to shuttle among different fields,
shifting, for example, from theories of editing effects in the cinema to
narratological accounts of sequence and perspective to phenomenological
reflections on the cognition of movement; it also expands the range of
disciplines that can help us understand how movement can produce, problematize,
and impede meaning. My paper suggests that in order for critics of electronic
media to account more fully for the phenomenon of online animation, we will at
the same time have to take fuller advantage of the medium for the expression of
our own critical ideas. The natural sciences frequently employ digital animation
techniques for the purpose of visualizing structures, processes, and
relationships within a wide range of data [1]. Envisioning a philosophical
writing practice in the humanities (including, of course, intellectual work such
as literary and cultural criticism) in which animation serves more than an
ancillary, illustrative role in an occasional diagram is one way to meet the
challenge of what Adrian Miles has called the "riskful writing" that
acknowledges hypertext's debt to cinematic forms. As I hope to demonstrate,
however, even these simple diagrams and modest literary productions are in a
sense rehearsals for a lively future discourse in--and not merely
about--electronic media.

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