Text 11: Animated Form as Interface Itself in Intersubjective World: Be Performing and Being Performed (2022)

Abstract
The acknowledgement of animation has been well known to common people since the early 20th century due to the success of American animation, but actually the indivisible and invisible relation between human and animation has been intertwined a long time ago since the human’s cognition exists. Onward to the present, the potential of animation still has been underrated and limited to mostly on screen. And even more, on the brink of the technology revolution, the world with countless new innovations, technologies, games and many other things related to human’s perception will inescapably challenge human’s thoughts, ideas, emotions and other inexplicable mysterious forms in the inner human. To confirm that animation has much potential as a means to manifest human’s capability, acknowledging the interface of animation which has consciously and unconsciously worked through animated form is needed. This article will explain how animation performs and is performed in the human’s intersubjective world and rigorously reveal the process of animation which lends a hand to ongoing human cognition.

Keyword
Animation. Animated form. Performance.

Introduction
Over the last century, animation has become the new medium in various fields of communication. The existence of animation made its remarkable presence in entertainment, technology, culture, and other fields related to humans. On the one hand, people realise the contribution it is making to society impacting human life, on the other hand, people also tend to think that, roughly speaking, the animation is creating new, virtual realities, worlds which separated from the real world and this might make human be far away from their daily life, the reality. But, in this article, I am trying to affirm that the animation does not separate people from each other but, on the opposite side, it is making people immerse themselves in a bigger world. The meaning of bigger is not about the material world but I include the innumerable subjective worlds which have been permeating our physical world. Therefore, the techniques or forms in animation in terms of tools which always change in the material world are not what I am interested in this article, but the function and the process of animation which are attached to human’s thought are.

In the first section of this article, I want to shed light on the liminal space and boundary to reveal the entwinement between animation and human life. In the second section, I want to clarify the indivisible of animated form as being animated/performed and be animating/performing form by suggesting some empirical approaches and explicate the ideas of how it works. I conclude with some examples of historical and chronological changes in human cognition as an affirmation that the animated form will be an essential means in the world.

The invisible but perceptible transitional space
In Animation: The New Performance?, Teri Silvio has pointed out that while the perspective of animation professions has been revolving around mediums of and definitions of animation, in the view of anthropology, animation has been a transitional space where human crosses, constructs and reconstructs between self and world as the projection of qualities perceived by human. And “we are already seeing the emergence of animation as an alternative model of and for humans in the world”. (Silvio, P.423) With her articulation of lines between dimensions of human life, the concept of performance and animation have blended the tangible and the intangible world.

To look forward to the world in which its boundaries have been drastically being unified and manifested, looking back and seeing traces of the transitional space before the term animation was welcomed in the early twentieth century (Bendazzi, 1994) can help us see its nature and its consequences. Homo Ludens A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, Johan Huizinga, closely examined temporary worlds within the ordinary world in both materially and ideally way. The temporary boundaries, the screen, the stage, the arena, the sport courts, the court of justice and etc. which can be rooted since human culture originated and developed are explicated to show the across space approaches which are interdependent with illusion. Imaginations in the mind which have been practiced and believed through acts of individual humans recreate their own time and space in opposition to a finite world. With this, the animated form has always been a go-between.

To be able to act and interface in the transitional and immaterial world, the space that humans always lack of vocabularies, words, and images to manifest things. The Metaphors in the History of Psychology, David E. Leary, dives into human language and thought which affirms the ultimate metaphor as true fundamental in life. “Metaphor is the fertile soil from which all language is born, and literal language is the graveyard into which all “dead metaphors” are put to rest” (Leary, 1990, P.6). Our basic mentalistic concepts are transferred from physical to psychological realm in an attempt to express what our inner experience is. It is like an animated statue made in the likeness of human beings, using the human body, objects, and environment as a means of reflecting on human nature. With characteristics of animation which are never or maybe impossible to be stationary, animation has been covertly working with human life as elementary.

The Autonomy of Elements and the Presence of Performer
In Theatre of the Animated Form, Halina Waszkiel obviously distinguishes a concrete line between what is an animated form and what is not by referring to the object that must be not alive in itself and thus it must not be human beings. I think the concept is too narrow and limited. The concept of being alive in the material world and the belief that animating a form is compulsory and cannot be the vice versa is not right.

According to the literary view, “the current status of animation in the media world, a status that gradually increases with the constant improvement of technology: animation is a leading tool for blurring the distinction between reality and representation” (Greenburg, 2011), the animated form can be roughly understood as a mere form which is animated, in other word, a passive form. But, to be more precise and delicately look into it, the moment an animated form is being animated, it also is simultaneously an active form in itself. As the animated form derives interchangeably between the objective world and our individual subjective worlds and is re-animated and re-animating by humans. To put it simply, humans are practically unconscious of countless animation performances in our everyday life.

To see it clearer, Ephemeral Animation, Nenagh Watson analysed the essence of puppetry and the illusion of life form by scrutinising the relation of the autonomy of elements, objects and the role and presence of puppeteers/performers. The illusion of independent life, a thrown puppet committed suicide by drowning in the sea and the sea animated the puppet superbly which there is not a human animator involved in action. This can clarify two significant ideas: the distinction of the role of puppeteer/animator and that of the puppet/animated form are never separated. The puppet and the sea are perceived as both performers and being performed. It shows that the animating is not limited by actions from an animator/performer/puppeteer but it is directly related to our intangible world. How does the puppet drown and how the sea animated the puppet? Why is it not merely an object floating on water? It occurred because they are being animated again in our own subjective world.

According to Chairy Tales: Object and Materiality in Animation by Paul Wells, the confiscated objects Guy Tarrant found in his colleagues’ drawers at a school unwarily enabled him to be a performer. With the talks between him and teachers and pupils on those objects, Tarrant animated those objects in his inner self, from the unknown confiscated objects to his own animated objects. The objects seem like vessels Tarrant possesses and performs. Therefore, What I am trying to propose here is that the definition of animated form should not be limited to only the form which is animated but it must include and be aware of the performance the animated form performs in our subjective world.

Animation Performance in Human’s Subjective World
To manifest how an animated form performs and is performed in a human’s subjective world, the concept of motion from Bergsonism, Gille Deleuze is a big help. Movement as physical experience is itself a composite. In one way, space is traversed by moving material objects but in another way pure movement is divisible. The physical experience of movement and the psychological experience of duration is indivisible and works simultaneously. As when the external things change, their moments do not succeed in itself, the consciousness that keeps them in mind is needed. To examine any movements, we need to observe how they have changed. This leads us to what I am trying to propose and confirm, the idea of animation performance in our inner. In Bergsonism, movement is primarily posited as a fact of consciousness. A performance in our subjective world contains a relatively large number of elements and the performance cannot be seen as long as the elements do not be noticed. We cannot say or perceive that they move until our consciousness has a distinct perception of them. In other words, until our consciousness animates the movement.

According to “The difficulty lies in knowing how an objective perception-image and a subjective perception-image are presented in the cinema” (Deleuze, 1983, P.71), Cinema 1 Movement Image, Gille Deleuze, the idea of dividing-in-two, for an instance, the objectivity and subjectivity, makes a big problem to the development of animation in the view of creator. Thinking that making an animation is to create a fantasy world or a new world which humans can completely jump into and jump out of that created world is not right. The challenges and the explanations of how a person has a difficulty when his or her perception jumps from an objective perception to a subjective perception, and vice versa due to the relation of the set and the view point leads forward to the notion of semi-subjectivity. “An empirical subject cannot be born into the world without simultaneously being reflected in a transcendental subject which thinks of it and in which it thinks itself.” (Delueze, 1983, P.73) Therefore, to see the animated form as merely a vessel or a medium which has different characteristics in each different technique is not sufficient.

We can see it clearly in War and Cinema the Logistics of Perception, Paul Virilio. With the revolution of science and technology in militaries, for instance, by the seventeenth century when the emergence of the astronomical telescope revolutionised human perception with the world, the geocentric cosmogony has given away. The spy-satellites, drones and other video-missiles in the twentieth century created a new science of vision which changes the interpretation of reality. “The ideal line appears thoroughly objective, and the semantic loss involves a new obliviousness to the element of interpretative subjectivity that is always in play in the act of looking.” (Virilio, 1986, P.3) By demonstrating that the remote perception from “watching machine” compared to seeing things through our own eyes has drastically changed human cognition which does not affect mere human perception. With these, we can see the potential of the mediated form, interaction and experiences.

In another view, the formlessness in Matierica, Keita Kurosaka, creates liminal space which the line between the form in the animation is so blurred that we do not know what we perceive on screen is something which are completely animated in advance by the animator or they are being animated through the screen at the moment the audience perceive. It is as if the formless animation is re-animated every time. In other words, the perception of animated form cannot be perceived separately from the idea of objectivity. They are interwoven from its nature, the (animated) form is being animated constantly in the subjective perception the entire time but the other simultaneous action also performs too, being animating.

The Next Immersed Animated World on The Brink of Technologies Revolution Era
In The Wretched of The Screen, Hito Steyerl, the traditional sense of the concept of time and space is based on a stable line due to the relation of humans with the linear perspective throughout human history. The stability of a viewer, an observer, or an audience always located on a ground. But the growth of aerial view and perception by the new technologies in recent years have redefined the standards of representation, time, and space. The state and the transition have been changed. For instance, the animated form in a 3-D animation programme has never started on ground anymore, the animated form will be created in 360-degree view reflecting the human perception which already is in the new establishment.

Compared to the changes and development of animation in Art in Motion Animation Aesthetics, Maureen Furniss, we can see how different animation techniques are contextually approached in different ways, in aesthetics view, as the audience unavoidably to be aware of the characteristic of the animated forms. The material, the methods, the process of making of animation and a range of factors affect the reception of animation in both traditional and digital techniques. But these also clarify that most animation inventions before and after the ongoing revolution of technologies: Cel Animation, Flip-Book, Stop-Motion, Sand Animation, etc. are mere initial steps when there are countless innovations occurring and upcoming every day.

To affirm that the animated form is flourish and will be an unprecedented tool in humans living on the brink of revolution that humans are stepping in. The comparison and examination of the history and the performance of money in History of Humankind, Yuval Noah Harari, is applicable. Money was a mental revolution and is not a material reality. It was a new inter-subjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared imagination, a psychological construct. The system of money still exists due to the trust of the figments of human’s collective imagination. This trust is a very complex political, social and economic relationship.

To sum up, with the process of the animation which always works on human’s intersubjectivity, even the animated form has been changed due to numberless factors, its performance has pervaded throughout human history. And the animated form will still and is going to take an essential role as an interface in the upcoming world.

Conclusion
In the anthropology view, animation is not something set apart from reality, no matter how transformation, modification and development in terms of technology give space for it. I see this essay as an essential step to re-balance the image of the animated form. Due to the emergence of animation in the technology revolution era, the concept of animation has been seen relying too much on technology. With these, the development of animation has been too narrow even though it’s well known as one of the interdisciplinary approaches. What I affirm here is that we can think of animation as part of our daily life. I have tried to integrate the objectivity and subjectivity of animated form in order to reveal the converted possibilities of how animation can go. My main goal here is to confirm the potential of animation and make it ready for the drastic change of human capacity in the technology used for the rest of the twenty-first century.

Reference
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