This post looks at examples of work from the Royal College of Art’s (thereafter RCA) animation archive, to highlight ways in which distributed agency has been embraced in the production of experimental student films and suggest links between these approaches…
Tag Archive for experimental animation
Sky David’s Kinesthetic Pedagogy of Animation
by Lynn Tomlinson • October 28, 2025 • 2 Comments
This is a media-archaeological excavation of the unique animation teaching methods of artist Sky David, formerly known as Dennis Pies, who has spent his life combining art and science, working with movement, subjectivity, tactility, and animacy—an interdisciplinary practice in the…
Visualizing Trauma Memory Through Surreal Techniques
by Yixin Sun • May 20, 2025 • 1 Comment
Experimental animation, through its unconventional narratives, offers a compelling medium for expressing surreal feelings, personal philosophies, spiritual concerns, and abstract psychological trauma. Specifically, the unstable psychological state of the traumatized individual can be seen as placing their identity in a…
Horrifying Figures: Phil Tippett’s Mad God (2021) Reaffirms Stop-Motion’s Visceral Materiality
by Rachel Catlett • July 9, 2024 • 0 Comments
If a work of art is the sum of its parts, then the stop-motion animation Mad God (Tippett, 2021) has a very large sum indeed. Director Phil Tippett crafted this cinematic fever dream as a mad god himself, stitching together…
The Floating Horizon and Animated Disorientation
by Alla Gadassik • February 27, 2024 • 0 Comments
The horizon line is a key visual principle of the Western world-view, binding together histories of navigation, spatial representation, and philosophical inquiry. Ancient mariners valued the horizon as an orienting boundary between the earthly and the celestial, scanning perpendicularly across…
Two Moments: Experimental Animation and Interdisciplinary Pedagogy
by Ruth Hayes • May 4, 2020 • 1 Comment
In fall and winter of 2019-20, I collaborated with Alice Nelson, a Spanish language and Latin American Studies scholar, teaching the fulltime program “Arts of Urgency: Latin American Film and Literature” at The Evergreen State College. The ability to collaborate…