A graveyard: autumn fireflies, two or three Gensho, 1742 In this two-part blog post, I will use the story structure of Hotaru no Haka (Grave of the Fireflies, Isao Takahata, 1988) to highlight how in the two identifiable story timelines…
This blog theme is part of an emerging project that explores what image-oriented disciplines like Art History, Media and Film Studies contribute to the academic and public debate about AI, specifically what it means to conceptualize AI as a cultural…
The connection between AI and animation is currently widely discussed with regard to the influence of machine learning technologies on animation production (e.g., see The Next Leap: How A.I. will change the 3D industry – Andrew Price). What animation is…
The digital humans are among us. In February of 2021, Epic Games, developers of the Unreal Engine, a leading video game software engine, announced the impending launch of its MetaHuman Creator application. “Creating truly convincing digital humans is hard,” acknowledged…
Envisioners press buttons to inform, in the strictest sense of that word, namely, to make something improbable out of possibilities. They press buttons to seduce the automatic apparatus into making something that is improbable within its program. They press buttons…
Giannalberto Bendazzi was uniquely capable of being both entirely approachable and formidable at the same time. Speaking to colleagues as I prepared this text, the daunting email subject “why don’t you write a book on x,” was frequently mentioned. As…
According to Deleuze, we all live in the realm of cliché which is like an umbrella sheltering us from an infinite realm of meaningless chaos. When art moves us on a bodily level and disrupts our perceptual habits, it punctures…
Review of Stevie Suan. Anime’s Identity: Performativity and Form Beyond Japan. United States, University of Minnesota Press, 2021. Traditional scholarship on anime has left the identity of the media form as de facto Japanese, reducing a global industrial network into…
In 1910, Congregation minister Herbert Jump published his Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture, preaching boldly for producing short visual parables that could teach faith and ethics. Throughout the 20th century, numerous animated films sought to inculcate viewers in matters…
In China, the most-watched TV news program, News Simulcast (Xinwen Lianbo), usually ends with another daily show, the Weather Report (Tianqi Yubao). Launched in 1980, Tianqi Yubao is co-produced by CCTV and the National Meteorological Center (CMN, 2020). The broadcaster,…
