COP2 End of Module Evaluation

The module has helped me become more confident in researching to come up with a question through primary and secondary research. I found coming up with my own question for the Critical Analysis challenging as I have diverse interests in the subject of Animation, and therefore exploring just one specific aspect of animation won’t do for me. I have only managed to found my question when we had the Animation Core Texts lecture which got me interested in the critical theory of popular culture by the Frankfurt School because of the scope is still within commercial entertainment, and are still applicable to the animation industry nowadays. I feel that the research that I did was more extensive and I was able to understand the theories and apply it into the practical context better than last year when I did an essay about The Culture Industry. I have learned many insightful knowledge which can be applied in the process of making the response for the studio briefs within the themes within the module rubric.

My Critical Analysis essay is about how to invite the audience to view the world as the world of possibilities. In simpler terms, it is how animation techniques can be used to show a different perspective of the world than just the world where people are working for the capitalist system. The idea is to see make the audience see the value of animation more than just a mere commercial entertainment. I am intrigued by synesthesia in the art of animation, which means the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body. The emotive nature of synesthesia can explain complexity of the world without simplifying it like animation made for commercial entertainment as explained by an entry on my blog. Due to my passion in this topic, I think I have read too much resources for my own good. I felt it as I have difficulties coming up with my own sentence for the sake of analysing the theories in depth. Instead, what I did was discussing a wide range of theories while having no clue of what to be explored to evidence the thesis that I was about to critically analyse. I reckon that the essay was heavy on the theory, while not discussing animation evidence in depth to make it strong enough to back the thesis. A learning point from this would be that the animation analysis has to be of stronger significance to provide backings for the main thesis. In the future I think I should learn to be more critical about animation and films to balance out my textual knowledge. 

The Visual Investigation brief is the one that is most enjoyable to do mainly because I challenged myself to express my thought in the form of collage. The spontaneous process of collaging helped a lot when filling up the contextual research because it is much faster than drawing. Collage is the best way to express the thought because it is a conscious effort to take images out of context and putting it into another context in meaningful ways. The collage aesthetic also suits the pop culture context I am discussing in my essay.

Although I enjoyed the intellectually stimulating Context of Practice 2 (COP2) module, my journey throughout this module was a tough one. I faced several problems which I will mention below, some have been solved while some has affected the quality of my work which quality does not meet my expectation. My time management is really poor for COP2 because I failed to use the Christmas Break to work on the essay as I underestimated the commitment of a free-lance job, whereas I used up my Easter Break for a pre-booked holiday. So, there goes most of my time which I could have spent for COP. Therefore, everything else other than the essay have to be done in a rush. What disappoint me the most is my badly planned Creative Response. I feel that the concept for the creative response is very weak as I did not have time to present my idea to Richard and my peers in less than a week before the module deadline. The plan is to make an animation from the 5 best pieces of my study on shapes, textures and compositions that evoke emotions in my concertina. However, those three aspects are lacking in my study and it has lost its coherence to what I have investigated in my essay and the Visual Investigation. Despite feeling dissatisfied with the poorly done Studio Brief 2, I think I should give myself a pat in the back because I procrastinate less than last year and have resilience to relentlessly work on all the required submissions for the deadline. With such attitude, I will be able to make better quality works if I were to do similar things in the future, without any disruptions that is out of my control.

To sum up, COP2 has contributed to my personal development as a critical artist. I have a mixed feeling towards this module: whereas I feel confident of my research and synthesis on the subject matter, I still have doubts on how to creatively respond to a generic essay topic. In the future, I want to be more proactive in terms of asking questions around to clarify my doubts. I have liked COP2 throughout the year, and it is not just a module that I want to get done quickly, which is exactly what I did close to the submission deadline. I did not enjoyed it. A lesson to take for next time, is to be more careful when making personal decisions that will affect my time to do any modules. Although I don’t planned my way through the module, I enjoyed the spontaneity in making the Visual Investigation which gave me a reassurance not to lose momentum in the last sprint.

Animation Core Texts

Frankfurt school's Critical Theory:

• Texts by Adorno, Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Lowenthal.
• Synthesis from radical Marxism and psychoanalysis to explain effects of popular culture to the mind of its audience.
• Leftist: urgency to escape from the fascist capitalist system in the America.
• Walter Benjamin reads popular culture in positive manner in contrast to the 4 scholars.

Popular culture went through a streamlined production to generate money. The outcomes:

• monotonous, standardised
• 'Retour ala Normale': forcing conformity into the unconsciousness to maintain the status quo
• superficial needs over essential needs
• life and art reduced to monotonous line of production

Pseudo-individualisation(the 'drugs for mindless consuming zombies'):

• to conceal the formulaic standardisation in music by giving it varying characteristics, such as repackaging to make consumers buy the same thing over and over.
• make the consumers docile through musical rhythm, physical response to pop music immediately expose to the desire for mass to obey.

Impact to the society:

• Perpetuation of the set formulas that works, made desirable for the sake of giving infantile security.
• (Herbert Marcuse) Products indoctrinate and manipulate the society, causing them to demonstrate one-dimensional thought and behaviour.

Authentic Culture & Mass Culture:

• Intellectuals' outcry that presses on the total revolutionary change from the core to achieve authenticity.
• Avant-garde cinema screened only for a niche target audience. (elitist)

Walter Benjamin 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' (1936)

• Pop culture's consumption can be resisted and played as a form of rebellion; consume without being brainwashed.
• Shift from elitism to democracy in art. For instance, reproducible art have the capacity to fight back against traditional elitist culture.
• Digital culture have brought art to our fingertips. The exhibition value no longer depends on context it is placed on, instead it is designed to transcend through spatial boundaries to spread its revolutionary potential for social change.
• Auteur Theory: relationship between cinema and art where signature styles, like in the work of art, is incorporated in cinematography.

Richard Sennett 'Together'

Abstract

A source that is unused for the essay, but is one of which that contributes to the main argument. The book's introduction is relevant to the professional practice of an artist mainly about the cooperative work and how it can help to resonates the purpose of the work better compared to when they isolate themselves from the society. I do not think the book have substantial information that can be relevant to back the argument in my essay as it got deep into the sociology of creative practice.Therefore, I decided not to use this book as reference.

PREFACE

x.

‘Practical skill is a tool rather than salvation, but lacking it, issues of Meaning and Value remain abstractions.’

xi.

‘… no one could survive as a passive creature without will; we have at least to attempt to make the way we live.’

INTRODUCTION

4.

(on diversity: sexuality, race and religion)

‘To force all this complexity into a single cultural mould would be politically repressive and tell a lie about ourselves. The ‘self’ is a composite of sentiments, affiliations and behaviours which seldom fit neatly together; any call for tribal unity will reduce this personal complexity.’

5.

(Bernard Madeville fable of the bees, Georg Simmel the strangers)

‘… some public good can come from shared vice, but only if people do not ‘suffer’ from religious, political or indeed any convictions.’

6.

‘One result of managing conflict well, as in a war or political struggle, is that such cooperation sustains social groups across the misfortunes and upheavals at times.’

8.

‘Cultural homogenisation is apparent in modern architecture, clothing, fast food, popular music, hotels … an endless, globalisation list. ‘Everybody is basically the same’ expresses a neutrality-seeking view of the world. The desire to neutralise difference, to domesticate it, arises … from an anxiety about difference, which intersects with economics of global consumer culture. One result is to weaken the impulse to cooperate with those who remain intractably Other.’

9.

‘people are losing the skills to deal with intractable differences as material inequality isolates them, short-term labour makes their social contacts more superficial and activates anxiety about the Other. We are losing skills of cooperation needed to make a complex society work.’

13.

(Erik Erikson)

‘self-awareness emerges within the context of experimenting and communicating to others.’

16.

(on collective rehearsals)

‘Musicians with good rehearsal skills work forensically, investigating concrete problems. True, many musicians are highly opinionated …, but these opinions will sway others only if they shape a particular moment of collective sound. This empiricism is perhaps the most resonant point about artistic cooperation in a rehearsal: cooperation is built from the ground up. Performers need to find and work on telling, significant specifics.’

17.

‘Ritual makes expressive cooperation work … As will appear, ritual enables expressive cooperation in religion, in the workplace, in politics and in community life.’

18-19.

dialectical approach aims to reach common understanding

‘Skill in practising dialectic lies in detecting what might establish that common ground.’

‘You pick up on the intention, the context, make it explicit and talk about it.’

20.

Adam Smith on sympathy

‘Imagination can overcome these barriers; it can make a leap from difference to likeness so that strange or foreign experience seems our own. Then we can identify with them and will sympathise with their trials.’

21.

Empathy

‘Curiosity figures more strongly in empathy than in sympathy.’

22.

Sympathy v.s. Empathy

‘As a philosophic matter, sympathy can be understood as one emotional reward for the thesis-antithesis-synthesis play of dialectic; ‘Finally we understand each other,’ and that feels good. Empathy is more linked to dialogic exchange; though curiosity sustains the exchange, we don’t experience the same satisfaction of closure, wrapping things up. But empathy does contain its own emotional reward.’

Indirection gives a leeway for experimentation and improvisation

‘… this subjunctive mood opened up a space for experiment; tentativeness issued an invitation to others to join in.’

23.

‘By practising indirection, speaking to one another in the subjunctive mood, we can experience a certain kind of sociable pleasure: being with other people, focusing on and learning about them, without forcing ourselves into the mould of being like them.’

24.

‘In dialogics, while people do not neatly fir together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle, yet they can get both knowledge and pleasure from their exchanges.’

24 – 25.

Cooperation online

‘Their most potent political effect occurs when they stimulate and arouse people to act off-line, rather than containing them to experience on-screen.’

27.

Machine moderates

‘Its (Google Wave’s) dialectical, linear structure failed to account for the complexities which develop through cooperation.’

28.

Problem with machine moderation in online cooperation

‘…meeting face to face to practise more effective lateral thinking, including everyone fully in the conversation.’

‘shedding context often means shedding sense; understanding between people shrinks.’

29.

‘The fault is in the … software written by engineers with an inadequate understanding of social exchange.’

Visual Investigation: (Side B) Creative Response

In the creative response to the synesthesia techniques introduced by experimental filmmaker, I would like to do a study which investigates compositions, colours, forms and textures with mix media from the photos that I have taken in the past. The idea is to take into considerations of what it takes to convey certain emotions that I feel when I took the picture. I used personal old photos because it represents my perspective to the world. However, the cactus page was special as I did a live observational drawing of three different cacti and imagine how each of them can shape-shift to transform into a different-shaped cactus.

I was about to have the 5 best composition studies animated but the workload have been to overwhelming. Everything has to be rushed, even when I was doing the study, such that I can't do an animated response.

Visual Investigation: (Side A) Contextual Studies

To avoid any confusion, I have to clarify that the concertina consist of one sided Visual Investigation, while the other side is used for the Creative Response. Initially, I have no idea on how to start a visual investigation, and the idea of writing it down on the concertina directly scares me a little because I can't erase if I made a mistake. So, I decided to choose to do collage as the main medium to fill up the concertina. The visual investigation that I made outlines the theory revolving the Human Condition and the society that we lived in, mainly inspired by the Frankfurt School critical theorist, Theodor Adorno. It then moves on into selected pieces of stills from Persepolis. It was indeed the animation that I analysed in the essay because it coherently explained a close-minded society, which is closely relatable even for those who lived in a developed country. 

The succeeding illustration in the concertina also explain the basic human need to express ourselves. The quotes throughout the visual investigation, unless otherwise specified, were obtained, deconstructed and pieced together with images came from Stan VanderBeek's poem 'Re:Vision' that I have obtained from his portfolio website about the significance of cinema as an art form. 

The last segment of side A in the concertina investigates the synesthesia using colours, forms and textures from different styles of experimental animations, still accompanied by texts from VanderBeek's poem which gives description of the thought process that leads to motion pictures. 

Visual Investigation: Synesthesia in Animation

I was discussing the topic of my essay with Mike, and he suggested to look at Mark Rothko if I want to explore theories relevant to synesthesia. He is well-known for his abstract expressionism paintings characterised by block colours. Rothko believed his art could free unconscious energies, previously liberated by mythological images, symbols and rituals. 

The cult value of his paintings is reliant on the context they are exhibited in, evidenced by the Rothko Chapel where people could cry at the moment they were looking at his set of paintings. Rothko thinks that the intended meaning of a painting should not be in the way in the relationship between the artist and the audience. 

He loved the abstract for its lack of representation and urged his audience to seek clarity and personal spirituality by projecting their own internal ideas onto his canvas. He revered the ”elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea and between the idea and the observer.” 

(http://www.ozy.com/flashback/the-spirituality-of-mark-rothko/4463)

narrative based synesthesia

Dot and the Line is rather unconventional way for cartoonist animator, Chuck Jones, to tell a story using shapes. The story is adapted from a book well-known for its use of mathematical pun to the character driven narrative. The staging is planned through such that it can best portray the emotions that the director wants to convey. The stills from this film pasted on the concertina are examples techniques used to express emotion. Limitations of the flat cutouts animation with no characters gives room for experimentation to get the emotion across through engaging narration and the appropriate screen composition. 

music based synesthesia

Oskar Fischinger an engineer-turned-experimental-animator who pioneers the music based synesthesia approach to experimental animation. He uses paper cutouts tied onto thin wires to make his animation titled: 'An Optical Poem'. The animation demonstrates a good use of the variations in form, colour and movement of the basic shapes through space. It successfully translates Fischinger's impression on the classical music to the audience's subconsciousness through something that is abstract.

Boogie Doodle is one of Norman McLaren's experimentation of making a camera-less animation. McLaren is a Scotland-born experimental animator who holds up an opinion that what triggers most experimental animation is the limitations and low-budget equipment. His work reflects this opinion as they all relies on mimesis and movements rather than realistically painted backgrounds and still images. Through Boogie Doodle, he has evidenced that the simple aesthetic balances out elaborate movements. Although synesthesia is subjective, McLaren's manages to make movements of the doodles coherent to the music in the sequential images painted on the 35mm film that is engaging to watch even in the eye of the masses. 

Boogie-Doodle from National Film Board of Canada on Vimeo.

COP2 Critical Analysis

Study Task 3: Theodor Adorno - How to Look at Television

In How to Look at Television, Adorno critics capitalism in the film industry through its effect of the audience. He deemed that it is the product of a ‘rigid institutionalisation’ which transforms the popular culture into a means to control the masses to conform. In other words television and other mass culture is characterised by ‘the repetitiveness, the selfsameness, and the ubiquity’ (Adorno,1954) targeted to annihilate individual was of thinking. The priority of marketisation has made TV films as commercial entertainment caters its content to validate the audience’s expectation to the plot, where tension is a maintained superficially to make the audience’s ‘longing for ”feeling on safe ground”’(Adorno, 1954). Genre cliches exploit infantile security of knowing that the protagonists will eventually overcome the ordeal. ‘The outcome of conflicts is pre-established, and all conflicts are mere sham. Society is always the winner, and the individual is only a puppet manipulated through social rules.’ (Adorno, 1954)  The effect of the cliched mass culture does not only give the audience false reassurance of their security, but also have given the producers profit-driven incentives to make films which leads them to be reluctant from taking risks. Therefore, the intellectual content of the commercial entertainment have always been ‘continuously lowered’ (Adorno, 1954) to maintain the status quo in the capitalist system. Adorno (1954) also observed the tendency for conflicts in films are vulgarly exposed, leaving no ‘accents on inwardness, inner conflict, and psychological ambivalence’, and therefore allowing this mass culture to be passively consumed by the audience. 

A perfect example of animation suits Adorno’s description of the mass culture would be Disney’s Animated Feature Robin Hood. Robin Hood tells a story about a thief that steals money from the impudent tax collector in a village ruled by a monarch to save the whole village from poverty. Despite the radical background of the protagonist, Disney have developed formulas which ‘pre-establish the attitudinal pattern’ of the spectator when confronted by the protagonist’s appearance against the middle-class traditional norm of being ‘good’. Throughout the story, Disney established Robin Hood as a ‘hero’ that everybody in the village looks up into, and therefore, any rebellious act dulled the audience capacity to discern the real quality to the experience, instead their capacity to pull out objective issues from the character’s journey throughout the narrative have been dulled by the passivity of the consumption of this mass entertainment.