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Other Life-formings Parastoo Anoushahpour, Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman, Laurie Kang, Alex McLeod, Pedro Neves Marques, Linda Sanchez, Amanda Strong One of the greatest capacities of the medium of animation is its magic— the apparent bringing-to-life of a world of static objects, uncertain com- panions, and unruly agencies. Things move, they do, they feel the propul- sion of awakened urgencies. This “magic,” in fact a technology of repre- sentation which cascades still images in order to undo the perceived still- ness of the image, also illuminates a fundamental relationship between people and things. Animation activates non-human agency as observed by a spectator, a participant, a co-performer recognizing the coming-to- life of an object, an animal, a photographic or digital entity. It opens space for the sentience and sign-making capacities of other-than-human beings, invites non-human languages, unsettles anthropocentric logics. It “mod- els the possibility of possibility.”1 In visualizing the liveliness of the non- human, animation complicates relationships with nature, technology, and the notion of time (still moments unfrozen, progress undone). Animation, it turns out, opens opportunities to ask questions about the constituent elements of life: who or what gets coded as living? By what schema do we grant liveliness, agency, animacy to non-humans? Through whose technologies do we come to see life, and to identify with it? By what means might we refuse or refute ethnographic fascinations with an- imism, instead attuning ourselves to expanded frameworks for liveliness? Other Life-formings interrogates the conditions of coming-to-life along four lines of inquiry: capacities for movement, language, forming, and empathy. Across stop-motion animation, digital modelling, photo-sensitive inter- January 13–March 7, 2020 species collaboration, kinetic sculpture, and video installation, the exhibi- tion tracks the precarious empathies enlivened by animation. Blackwood Gallery 1 Esther Leslie, “Animation and History” in Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham and London: Duke University Press, Curated by Alison Cooley 2014) 25–35. Other Life-formings How might we begin to see and encounter cluding plant and animal lives), but further On a technical level, animation’s lineage il- mothers’ garden, comprising an informal the myriad ways more-than-human worlds across landscapes, natural forces and ele- luminates the medium’s complex relation- archive of sites in the process of becoming: are touching and restructuring our senses, ments, through to chemical vitalities, ances- ship to reproducing movement. Its prede- that is, of spaces of worlding. our experiences, our social, political, and tors, machines, human-made physical and cessors include elaborate plays with light environmental assemblages? If there is a digital environments, and artificial forms of and illusion—shadow puppetry (ancient Amanda Strong’s short film, Biidaaban (The way of seeing and making worlds that sub- intelligence. One of the definitive tasks in this light projection) and optical toys (flip books, Dawn Comes) (2018), activates all the incred- verts inherited hierarchies, animation might endeavour is to attend to multiplicity and to zoetropes, praxinoscopes)—and it con- ible potential of stop-motion animation in give us some clues about where to start. think liveliness across many conceptual and verges with film history in the space of world-building and centres its attention on Animation is, in many ways, a technology material sites and processes, including In- movement tracking (as employed by the the animacy of the everyday world. The of possibility: both in its “low” form, such digenous and decolonial thought, vital ma- likes of Étienne-Jules Marey and Eadweard world Strong creates—drawn from Leanne as the cartoon that “reminds us of the life terialisms, and queer and feminist ecologies. Muybridge). These technologies have in Betasamosake Simpson’s works The Gift is in other things,”1 and in its broader sense, common the rapid sequencing of still im- in the Making, Caribou Ghosts and Untold referring to cultural mechanisms that in- Other Life-formings interrogates the condi- ages to create the perception of move- Stories, and Plight—pictures myriad forms clude the transformation of everything from tions of coming-to-life along four main lines ment: a fact that prompts film and anima- of life, but at once recognizes that these genetics to digital intimacies.2 of inquiry: capacities for movement, lan- tion scholar Alan Cholodenko to assert that live in tension. She imagines the built envi- guage, forming, and empathy. These ten- “all film . is a form of animation.”7 Ani- ronment and its inhabitants (physical, spir- The exhibition Other Life-formings departs dencies are not meant to specify life forms mation’s relation to the notion of time com- itual, and spectral) as equally animate— from conceptions of animation in order to as either “natural” or “unnatural,” nor do plicates the photographic instant and film- the story is not concerned with what or ask questions about the constituent ele- they make an argument for life as measured ic frame, inviting all kinds of manipulations who is alive, but instead about how they ments of life: who or what gets coded as on a spectrum of proximities to the human. of pace and causality. But alongside this are in relation.9 In Strong’s film, both the living? By what schemas do we grant liveli- While popular science takes up figures like capacity to show movement by manipu- traditional Indigenous knowledge of maple ness, agency, and animacy to non-humans? “The Blob” (a single-celled slime mold that lating the tempo of images, when it comes sap harvesting and the exclusionary logics Through whose technologies do we come to can move, learn, and communicate across to the history of movement-capture, it’s of white surburbanism are brought to life: see life as animate and to identify with it? By other slime molds) with fervour, in an at- clear that its earliest instances of the form trees and their roots surge and flow, mo- what means might we refuse or repurpose tempt to untangle where exactly it might were also deeply invested in scrutinizing tion-sensing lights call themselves to mil- ethnographic fascinations with animism and be categorized along the spectrum of sen- the living body.8 itary attention, orange fencing threatens attune instead to expanded frameworks tience,5 this exhibition is more interested in the gender-fluid protagonist’s capacity to for liveliness? illuminating tensions involved in the think- What living bodies might the apparatus of carry out their simple gestures of suste- ing of coming-to-life and bringing-to-life animation invite us to reconsider? In The nance. No white bodies appear and the re- In the settler-colonial state of Canada, an that are present, if at times latent, in forms Lighthouse (2014), Parastoo Anoushahpour sult is a compelling visualization of the set- engagement with the animacy of the more- of animation as a technology as well as recasts the still image (a 35mm slide) as a tler state as a disembodied, but still very than-human world is haunted by a history of through collective imperatives to encounter moving one through a kinetic gesture— much moving structure organized around framing Indigenous and non-western prac- life—in all of its forming—more responsibly. playing on a history of optical trickery and ownership, individualism, private property, tices and belief systems as animist through movement capture to also complicate the and surveillance. A 10,000 year-old Sas- a form of racist ethnography that delegiti- Movement status of memory, of landscape, and of ar- quatch serves as a kind of transhuman em- mizes these practices and perspectives by rival as fixed and definite. Laurie Kang’s bodiment both of ancestral, living, more- rendering them as merely superstitious or The relation between still and moving im- works also pull the image’s fixedness into than-human knowledge and of the merg- explicitly savage. How can we take seriously ages is an extension of the relationship be- question—often working with photosensi- ers between Indigenous knowledges and the lives and knowledges of other beings tween still and moving bodies (living and tive materials across a slow-moving collab- emergent media. without reenacting the violence of this mod- dead, animate and inanimate). One of ani- oration where images continue to take form ernist/colonial reductionism?3 Many recent mation’s magical and uncanny powers6 has over their entire existence, Terrene (2019) Crucially, all three artists imagine the land- projects have already taken up animism as a always been to crack open—through move- also registers the artist’s hand (through the scape as moving, gesturing to knowledges conceptual terrain for critical investigation.4 ment—a possibility that those beings we use of a hand-scanner) as a moving photo- and more-than-human worlds that hold us This exhibition attempts to think life and live- consider nonliving are in fact acting, think- graphic device. In Terrene, the sun-tanned spatially. In Anoushahpour’s moving-image liness more broadly, across a spectrum of ing, working, and adapting, although per- backdrops made from photosensitive pa- shadowplay, the whole landscape presents questions that encompass not only entities haps at scales or in ways imperceptible or per—a “living” image?— are set against con- itself in a kind of eclipse: a broader mobile that are already understood to be alive (in- incomprehensible to human logics. struction sites and close-ups of her grand- cosmos of the living. 6 7 Language who was shut down sixteen hours after This moves the question of liveliness be- Empathy launching, having absorbed and parroted yond the social ordering of animacy that Languages structure and code what may Twitter-users’ most inflammatory utteranc- language produces and into a territory Animation is a way of producing relations be alive (or not), just as they code rela- es.

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