“Interpreting Animation and Vice Versa: Can We Philosophize in Flash?”

John Zuern University of Hawaii-Manoa zuern@hawaii.edu

From the notorious HTML <blink> tag and simple animated GIFs to elaborate cinematic presentations produced with Java, DHTML, or authoring systems such as Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Shockwave, and Adobe LiveObject, moving images and texts have become a ubiquitous feature of the World Wide Web. As computer animation technologies have become more robust and accessible, animations of all kinds have become more prevalent in electronic art and literature, displays of information, and pedagogical materials. For scholars working to develop critical methodologies for the analysis of electronic media, computer animations--whether they take the form of word-and-image poetry, film-like narratives, or diagrammatic representations of philosophical concepts--offer challenging moving targets. Animation requires an interpretive approach that can account not only for the role of spatial and temporal dimensions in the production of the work's meaning, but also for the technical, code-based operations that create the specific animated elements in the work. As this presentation will argue, engaging the complex issues involved in a hermeneutics of animation propels us toward a recognition of the potential of animation as a medium of hermeneutic reflection in its own right. Extending to computer animation the same consideration that has recently been given to scholarly hypertext [2, 5] leads us to a view of animation not simply as the object of hermeneutic inquiry, but as a way of "doing hermeneutics" in the strong sense of philosophizing about meaning and interpretation. Focusing on a small set of concrete examples, this presentation briefly outlines a set of questions confronting the interpretation of computer animation:

1. What is the semiotic function of the movement of elements in an animation? This question elicits more or less straightforward answers only when we are discussing "representational" animations that strive for versimilitude of movement in animated figures (realistic gaits in humans and other creatures, for example--the sum of the animated movements means "walking"). When the movement is essentially "non-mimetic" (the appearance and disappearance of text, for example), how do we understand the contribution of the motion to the "whole" meaning of the work?
2. What is the relationship of the precise chronometic time and geometric space assigned to elements in the code of the animation (the values of a setTimeout method in JavaScript, for example) to the phenomenological experience of time and space produced in the work for a reader [10] (such as the perception of an object crossing the screen "slowly")? As much as the programming that underlies traditional hypertext systems, the technical substrata of computer animation suggests a need for a comparative method that reads the text of the code alongside the manifest text of the work on the screen, viewing the finished animation as a dialogic hybrid of (at least) two distinct languages.
3. Is it possible (or useful) to distinguish broad genres of animation that correspond to narrative, lyric, and drama? How does the sequencing of elements in an animation intersect with the rhetorical conventions of these traditional genres, and in what ways can the movement of animation disrupt and complicate these forms? Can we imagine, following Kolb's work on hypertext writing in philosophy [6], a dialectical, argumentative mode of animation?
4. How do animated elements contribute to whatever forms of interactivity a specific electronic work invites?
5. How do animations intersect with other communication technologies, especially the hypertext systems in which they are often embedded?

Each of the examples I discuss illustrate these challenges. in addition, each indicates the potential of animation as a means of visualizing theoretical concepts and hermeneutic procedures. Josh Santangelo's DHTML poem "Iris" cites and interprets lines of D. H. Lawrence [9]; the collaborative Flash project "Im Zeitalter der Konversationseuphorie" by Merkel, R. et al. presents an elaborate meditation on the possibilities and impossibilities of human communication [11]; and Charles Heinemann's "Jacques Lacan's Imaginary Prisoner Game" offers a Java-driven dramatization of one of Lacan's models of temporality in the psyche [4]. To reinforce my claim that animation provides a powerful medium for critical and metacritical discourse in the fields of philosophy and literary criticism, I will conclude my presentation with a few examples of work from a graduate seminar in aesthetics in which students produced web-based diagrams of concepts as a way of investigating their developing theoretical frameworks. Students drew on the approach to modeling concepts introduced by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari [3] and W.J.T. Mitchell's critical iconology, especially the formulation of "ut pictora theoria" [8]. Their diagrams presented both single concepts such as "intertextuality" and "power" as well as relationships among concepts, such as the intersection of "authenticity," "justice," "representation," and "community." Working together to produce protocols for animating these diagrams in Macromedia Flash led the seminar participants into dynamic discussions of the processes, relations, hierarchies, and even the contradictions that structure--and animate--our thinking about literature and culture. Computer animation not only invites us to shuttle among different fields, shifting, for example, from theories of editing effects in the cinema to narratological accounts of sequence and perspective to phenomenological reflections on the cognition of movement; it also expands the range of disciplines that can help us understand how movement can produce, problematize, and impede meaning. My paper suggests that in order for critics of electronic media to account more fully for the phenomenon of online animation, we will at the same time have to take fuller advantage of the medium for the expression of our own critical ideas. The natural sciences frequently employ digital animation techniques for the purpose of visualizing structures, processes, and relationships within a wide range of data [1]. Envisioning a philosophical writing practice in the humanities (including, of course, intellectual work such as literary and cultural criticism) in which animation serves more than an ancillary, illustrative role in an occasional diagram is one way to meet the challenge of what Adrian Miles has called the "riskful writing" that acknowledges hypertext's debt to cinematic forms. As I hope to demonstrate, however, even these simple diagrams and modest literary productions are in a sense rehearsals for a lively future discourse in--and not merely about--electronic media.

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