Conference review

‘On the Aesthetics of the Made in Animation and Comics’: Interdisciplinary Symposium of German Language Animation and Comics Research: Herrenhausen Palace Conference Centre, 9–11 November 2016, Hanover, Germany

Animation and the medium of comics clearly can be, and often are, distinguished from each other. Regarding their aesthetics, however, they share a common ground: cel and stop-motion animation, computer-generated images (CGI) and comics are not only all (hand-)made artefacts, but they can also expose this ‘madeness’ in aesthetically specific ways. The variety of materials and techniques that can be used to make animation (see Furniss, 2008) by now constitutes a substantive area of research, covered by dedicated scholarly journals such as Animation Practice, Process & Production (2011–). These practices can result in artefacts with divergent aesthetics, revealing (or concealing) their ‘madeness’ to different degrees – something that animation studies have accounted for by situating both live action film and animated images on a continuum between mimesis and abstraction (Feyersinger, 2013; Furniss, 2007[1998]). Comics, for their part, have long been conceived as artefacts whose aesthetics result from the process of hand drawing, a notion that remains influential even after the advent of digital production and distribution technologies (Stein, 2015). Recently, however, the processes and practices of making comics have been examined in more detail (Brienza and Johnston, 2016; Wirag, 2016), while an increasing number of studies focus on the materiality of both printed and digital comics, showing how their ‘madeness’ includes, but is by no means limited to, the aspect of drawing (Thon and Wilde, 2016).

To systematically address these phenomena, and to explore possible connections between them, the AG Animation and AG Comicforschung (working groups for animation and comics studies) of the Gesellschaft für Medienwissenschaft (Society for German Language Media Studies) hosted their first joint conference in November 2016. Under the title ‘Zur Ästhetik des Gemachten in Animation und Comic’ (‘On the Aesthetics of the Made in Animation and Comics’), the conference was organized by Hans-Joachim Backe (Copenhagen), Julia Eckel (Bochum/Marburg), Erwin Feyersinger (Tübingen), Véronique Sina (Cologne) and Jan-Noël Thon (Tübingen). Funded by the Volkswagen Foundation, the event took place at Herrenhausen Palace Conference Centre in Hanover. The three-day programme included 2 keynote addresses, 7 panels with 19 papers and a panel discussion. As a consequence, there was no need to run sessions of parallel panels, which allowed for a continuous and fruitful conversation among the up to 50 participants (see the full programme in German at https://aesthetikdesgemachten.wordpress.com). In their opening remarks, organizers Julia Eckel and Véronique Sina addressed both general and specific aspects of an aesthetics of the made in animation and comics. Both of the latter can highlight their own artifice, providing opaque, graphic images that withdraw from the illusionism of transparent representations. But while comics achieve this partly due to their combinations of texts and images, which always remain visible as such (Groensteen, 2007), animation uses still images to create the illusion of movement (Wells, 1998), maintaining a more ambivalent relationship to the live-action film and its traditions of realism. Due to this, Eckel and Sina called for a comparatist, transmedia perspective to inform the discussions on the following days.

The conference started with a panel on the made in animation. In the first talk, Malte Hagener (Marburg) drew on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of the gesture to describe a transformation of subjectivity that manifests itself in digital animation. Using Pixar’s production logo and its moving Luxo table lamp as an example, Hagener argued that the gesture structures both the creation of digital animation and its narrations, pointing us to an entanglement of human identity and objects. Matthias C Hänselmann (Münster) took a semiotic perspective to differentiate between, on the one hand, the fact that all artefacts are made and, on the other, the ‘consciously made’, which becomes meaningful as a reflexive choice informing the creation of animations, subsequently encouraging a non-immersive mode of reception.

The second panel dealt with the complex relations between the made and the real. Bettina Papenburg (Düsseldorf) drew on Roger Odin’s notion of a ‘documentarizing lecture’ to specify how digital animations used within the life sciences can be accepted as documents despite their highly artificial qualities. In the next talk, Christine Gundermann (Cologne) demonstrated how authentic representations of history are staged in comics, and how the latter can visually evoke experiences of ‘pastness’. Jan-Noël Thon (Tübingen) returned to the question of the documentary, challenging recent applications of the term to computer games. Thon argued that this categorization overlooks how the computer-generated graphics and ludic elements of games deviate from indexical representations of documented events, and proposed to sharpen Martha Rosler’s (2004) neologism of the ‘post-documentary’ to accommodate varying claims of reference.

The first conference day ended with a keynote address by Jaqueline Berndt (Kyoto/Stockholm), who provided an in-depth view of the persistence of handicraft in global manga and anime culture. Berndt demonstrated how an analogue, hand-drawn style is still commonly used for manga and anime characters, resulting in a prevailing aesthetics of ‘flatness’ (Murakami, 2000), which has economical as well as technological motivations. However, as Berndt argued further, the public for serialized manga and anime ages, and a prevailing climate of ‘endangerment’ leads to new stylistic experiments that reflect on the aesthetics of the hand-crafted, combine it with digital 3D animation or even address the tactile qualities of making CGI. Berndt concluded that the easy adaptability of characters within popular consumer culture (e.g. for cosplay) remains an important factor for fans, even if hand-drawn, magazine-based manga no longer provide the sole origin for the narratives and/or characters of the contemporary media mix (Steinberg, 2012) or convergence culture (Jenkins, 2006). Most of the discussions during the first day thus circled around the different functions the aesthetics of the made can take for recipients and audiences, who can approach ‘consciously made’ artefacts in a variety of ways, e.g. as self-reflexive art, documents or fan culture objects.

On the second day, the relations between animation and comics took centre stage, while style emerged as a recurring term – designating both the individual, subjective approaches to producing artefacts and the broader ‘styles’ of historical phases or sociocultural contexts. In the first talk, Véronique Sina (Cologne) conceptualized mediality and gender as interdependent categories of performativity, which allowed her to demonstrate how the artificial quality of the gender stereotypes in Frank Miller’s Sin City comics is exposed even more in their two remediations to film from 2005 and 2014. Nina Heindl (Bochum/Cologne) explained how an Aristotelean notion of poiesis as ‘making’ is the subject of reflections in the works of Chris Ware, which include printed and digital comics as well as animated films. Andreas Rauscher (Siegen/Kiel) reconsidered the cartoon as a self-reflexive mode of creating fictional worlds, which can be applied to comics and animation, but also to live-action films and TV serials.

In the following two panels, the technical, sensual and material dimensions of the made were considered. Suzanne Buchan (London) traced artistic strategies of deliberate imperfection from the aesthetics of analogue scratch video art to the glitches in digital animation, while Lukas RA Wilde (Tübingen) turned to Japan’s media culture, looking at its use of kyara, i.e. highly adaptable proto characters. Maike Sarah Reinerth (Hamburg) raised the question of who can be identified as the creators of hand-made animation sequences when they are used to represent subjective imaginations in live action films: directors, animators and fictitious characters all may figure as ‘authors’ that are responsible for the animation’s subjective qualities. Jeff Thoss (Berlin) analysed the imitation of print artifacts from the 19th and 20th centuries in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s Black Dossier (2007), showing how a comic can remediate, and thus insist on, the material foundations of popular culture.

In the late afternoon, Nicola Glaubitz (Darmstadt) gave the second keynote address, approaching the practice of rapid drawing from an art historical perspective. As Glaubitz showed, rapid drawing as a public performance has a long history in the visual arts. However, it remains largely undertheorized, as drawing and sketching have traditionally been regarded as preliminary practices in service of the conception of allegedly ‘higher’ forms, e.g. oil paintings. Glaubitz showed how artists like JMW Turner and Jackson Pollock turned the creation of their artworks into public or film-recorded performances, and how the rapidity of creation processes caused accusations of charlatanry and commercialization. Finally, Glaubitz explored a crucial link between public drawing and the early film, which both circulated as attractions at fairs and vaudevilles, and met in the works of James Stuart Blackton and Émile Cohl (see Crafton, 1993[1982]).

The second conference day was closed by a panel discussion joined by Mariola Brillowska (media artist, Hamburg), Aisha Franz (comics artist/illustrator, Berlin), Andreas Hykade (animation artist, Stuttgart/Ludwigsburg), Andreas C Knigge (author/comics journalist, Hamburg/Crete), Felix Mertikat (comics artist/illustrator/game developer, Ludwigsburg) and Annegret Richter (managing director AG Animationsfilm; Federal Association of the German Animation Industry, Leipzig). Moderated by Franziska Bruckner (AG Animation, Vienna) and Marie Schröer (AG Comicforschung, Berlin), the panel focused on the practitioners’ individual styles, art schools as free spaces, and switching between work in animation and comics. The participants took decidedly different positions concerning the importance of handicraft, the division of creative labour and the opportunities (or perils) of digital production technologies.

The last day of the conference began with a networking meeting, which was scheduled to coordinate future initiatives of AG Animation and AG Comicforschung, but also to encourage connections to further institutions from the fields of animation and comics research and practice. Represented at the meeting were AG Animationsfilm, ASIFA Austria, DIAF (German Institute for Animated Film), the Animationsinstitut of the Filmakademie Baden-Wuerttemberg, ComFor (German Society for Comics Studies) and Comic Solidarity (an advocacy group of self-published webcomics artists). The extra slot was well received, and delegates exchanged their ideas concerning possible collaborations between university-based research (reflecting and theorizing on the made in animation and comics) and the education of artists (who actually make new kinds of forms and artefacts).

The last two panels of the conference focused on the performativity of the made and on the made in comics. In the first panel, Juergen Hagler (Linz) turned to the broad field of expanded animation and its subversive use of anomalies as a means to reflect on existing media technologies. A different perspective on performance was provided by Mathias Bremgartner (Berne) in his talk on theatre adaptations of comics or manga. As Bremgartner argued, theatre has a potential to realize or represent any other mediality; productions like Batman Live (2011), TeZukA (2011) or Hapless Hooligan in ‘Still Moving’ (2010) thus can integrate comics as well as animation, ultimately blurring a clear distinction between the two. Turning to the specificities of the made in comics, Lukas Etter (Siegen) considered style as an individual aesthetics of making that becomes the subject of paratextual emphases in works by Art Spiegelman, Matt Madden or OuBaPo (Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle) which act as reflexive ‘style studies’. Christina Meyer (Hanover/Siegen) considered the broader technological, social and economic contexts of creating comics, pointing out the diverse factors that affected the aesthetics of coloured supplements and newspaper comics in the late 19th century and the iterations of Richard F Outcault’s Yellow Kid character.

In their closing remarks, the organizers concluded that the aesthetics of the made indeed turned out to be the starting point they had hoped for that would inspire collaborative research on animation and comics, and hint at relevant topics for future projects. These topics include, but are not limited to, a sharpened understanding of self-reflexivity, which will be the subject of a workshop hosted by the AG Comicforschung in March 2017, as well as the respective roles of animation and comics within historical and recent convergence cultures. With the making of animation spreading across highly diverse media, and recently produced digital comics integrating animation as well as using new modes of reader interaction, joint projects with other divisions of media studies, e.g. game and interface studies, seem highly promising.

Two further dimensions of dialogue were hinted at during the conference. First, the idea of an exchange between animation and comics scholars and artists was brought up multiple times. Second, as the diverse examples and phenomena presented at the conference proved, animation and comics research from the German language countries has a vast transcultural scope, and its theoretical and methodological approaches are worthy of being discussed on the transnational stage as well. In addition to the available English language publications by members of both working groups, conferences held in English thus remain a valuable complement to events like the one in Hanover, to further discuss the aesthetics of the made as a result of specific medial, historical and cultural contexts, which are nevertheless connected.