Conference review

Abstract

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 696460A NM0010.