Abstract
At his recent inaugural lecture at Middlesex University London, Professor of Visual Culture Nicholas Mirzoeff included a photograph of the earth from space, captured with a 70 mm Hasselblad by Apollo 17 in 1972. As one of the most widely-distributed images (Hartwell, 2007), this photo-indexical image of the earth affected the collective conscious of the fragility and limits of our planet to a degree as yet not possible, because earlier representations were based on imagination, physics and astronomy, and the truth value of this photograph was uncontested – it was taken by a human being, from space.
The perceptual aspects of scale have long fascinated artists, writers and scientists; notable examples are Alice’s mushroom-induced shrinking and growing in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Charles and Ray Eames’ iconic Powers of Ten (1977) and recent CGI visualisations of nanoworlds and cell biology. In animation, imaged representations of our planet have featured in many films over the years, from Koko’s Earth Control (Max and Dave Fleischer, 1928) to Tex Avery’s King Size Canary (1947). Avery’s film used the visual hyperbole possible in animation in all his films, but the finale in this one is a scalar masterpiece. It moves from a living room through a metropolis and the Boulder Dam to an animated view of earth from animated space. The spatial ‘zoom-out’ is motivated by the narrative of ballooning sizes of Avery’s slapstick menagerie; through a cat–mouse–dog–canary chase, enhanced by misappropriation of a bottle of ‘Garden Jumbo Gro’ garden elixir, the film ends with two gargantua perched on top of the ‘blue marble’. This classic Hollywood cartoon is a nonpareil example of how artists can use animation to take us – and their characters – on animated scalar travels that we can imagine, but not access physically.
This special issue of animation: an interdisciplinary journal, guest edited by Sylvie Bissonnette, is titled ‘Animating Space and Scalar Travels’. Because many of the works discussed visualize animated research in contemporary human biology, marine science, geospatial visualisation and more, the articles take a more serious look at the implications of what Avery applied his wit to. Bissonnette has gathered a remarkable collective of authors from a wide range of disciplines from integrative studies and philosophy to ecocinema and emerging media, the latter being an apt description for the developments of animation and CGI, and their non-entertainment use in non-humanities disciplines and research. It has been a pleasure to work with Sylvie and her authors, and we hope this issue, that both expands the formal and technical features and augments notional definitions of animation finds a wide and varied readership.
Thirty years after the first ‘blue marble’ shot, NASA digitally composited a view of earth from NASA’s Suomi NPP earth-observing satellite. In its first week on Flickr it had more than 3.1 million views, and is one of the most accessed images on the site (Kuring, 2012). In the past decade alone, we are witness to breathtaking developments in the expansion of animated imagery in visual culture. The shift from analogue to digital has made possible a rise in availability of big data that makes images like this possible, initiated development of new epistemological queries and approaches and, of course, requires rethinking of the spectator and his or her positioning as viewer of these dramatic shifts in scale. This special issue will make a contribution to growing debates around animation and the digital in film and media studies. These debates have the potential to also expand our perception of this disciplinary field, how it can grow in tandem with emerging media, and how a more wide-reaching corpus of moving image culture that includes science and technology will guarantee its scholarly voices to be heard – and read – in years to come.