Abstract
New media are increasingly pushing animation studies toward more holistic ways of thinking about animation as an ‘animating force of any kind’ (Morton, 2013: 54), something that could be said to exist in a liminal space between inanimate and animate, that is, between perceptually stilled and perceptually and experientially brought to motion, and expressing a lively or living quality. Esther Leslie’s Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form builds on this idea by focusing on how we are contemporaneously witness to and part of a ‘liquid crystal’ epoch that begins in the 19th century and finds its sublime moment now in the form of the Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screen. Leslie’s previous book, Hollywood Flatlands (2002), laid the grounds for a theory and history of animation linked to early avant-garde art and modernist criticism. In Liquid Crystals, animation resurfaces in a meditation on ‘mode[s] of process[ing] existence’ and thus matters of life and liveliness or lack thereof in everything from art and politics to film and ecology (p. 20).
The liquid crystal with which Leslie is concerned is ‘a dialectical form of nature or in nature, possessing contradictory qualities at one and the same time’ (p. 19). Here, Leslie considers a strange and persistent natural materiality of images, particularly when they appear to be alive, that is, when they appear to be fluctuating and adapting through time. Animation ‘as such’ becomes a composition of forces, a coded and homogenized translation of time, space and life, into an ontologically vital image. For Leslie, the persistence and potentiality of liquid crystal forms reside in their ability to affirm the vital or animate in the face of the non-vital or inanimate forces of our worlds and imaginations.
The book uses this perspective to map a series of liquid crystalline forms framed by chapter headings and subsections like ‘Slush’, ‘Ice’, ‘Snowflakes’, ‘Liquid Sunshine’, ‘Cloudburst’, ‘Permafrost’ and ‘Blizzard’. Leslie begins with the liquid crystal in art, specifically in Caspar David Friedrich’s Das Eismeer (c. 1824, oil on canvas), which depicts a disaster at sea: a shipwreck held by a massive pile of ice. The painting is of interest in part because it maintains its performative and auratic quality by re-emerging as a source for other artists, bouncing back and forth, looping throughout history and giving rise to other visualizations, like Friedrich Kunath’s The Sea Is a Good Place to Think of the Future (Die gescheiterte Melancholie), a 2009 art installation where the debris of a collapsed house is assembled to resemble the ice-stacks in Das Eismeer. More subtly, Leslie finds resemblances here with Harun Farocki’s film series Parallel I–IV (2012–2014), which presents in the domain of computer animation (specifically, video game and computer graphics) the transformation from pixel to a spectacular and sublime photorealistic imagery of clouds, trees and water; and, further, the electronic glow of the many screens that mediate our new media world.
With this archaeology of liquid crystalline forms, we find a familiar metaphor through and in animation: Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of plasmaticness, that quality of Disney’s early animations that revels in the fluctuation and elasticity of animated forms; things, figures or entities in a perpetual state of alertness and reproduction (Leyda, 1988). But Leslie does much more than simply map a constellation of familiar and unfamiliar animated, metamorphic forms. Liquid Crystals expands considerations of the plasmatic to the politics of snow globes as a class of objects; fact–fiction synergies; the resistible and resistant form of the liquid crystal in art; capitalism and the fluidity and liquidity of the market and commerce; utopian–dystopian cosmic ice theory (Welteislehre, 1894) and its cosmotechnical societies; new worlds of ‘dreamlike submersion’ (p. 217) found in the digital environ of the LED screen; and the Situationists’ claim for the decline of a spectacle-commodity economy (p. 249).
A central thread in Leslie’s discussion is the haunting process of subsumption. As she explains, ‘To think liquid crystal, from the sea of ice to the melting poles, is to think against the power of their subsumption’ (p. 263). Leslie’s concern with the liquid crystal in this regard is essentially with bringing out the apparent power of a phase of matter as it not only presents itself to our worlds, bodies and minds, but indeed is somehow embedded in the reading and production of these. A central thesis of the book is that our era of media technology is a liquid crystal phase defined by the emergence of an LED environment in which new media – omnipresent and infiltrating all aspects of our experiences, imaginations, and knowledges – organize and give meaning to ‘life’ in unforeseen ways. For Leslie, the digital environ of the LED screen is seductive, particularly with its surplus of hues and forever-modulating forms that are as alien and abject as they are beautiful and hypnotizing, constituting a surplus–or excess–vision, a liquid crystal sublime which is ‘photorealistic, but without easy comparison in real-world experience’ (p. 217).
Liquid Crystals is thus a timely reflection on our current cultural conditions in a new media ecology. Meticulously researched and cutting across various disciplines, the book is also a unique contribution to animation studies. Leslie offers a wealth of new information and engaging visual analyses in a novelistic style that is both speculative and historically-researched, and promises to make Leslie’s complex theoretical meditations accessible to a diverse readership, including students, scholars and practitioners. The book also lays a rich foundation for thinking the animation of the present as a heterogeneous discourse and practice beyond the arguably hegemonic position ‘animation’ still holds. Liquid Crystals is, ultimately, essential reading for mediating and speculating on the very (im)material among and through which we find ourselves today.