From Shadow Citizens to Teflon Stars: Reception of the Transfiguring Effects of New Moving Image Technologies

Robert Zemeckis' Beowulf (2007) is the latest film made using motion capture technology, a film that tells the story of a hero's quest to defeat a series of monsters. This article examines not only the thematic role of monstrosity in the film, but also the way in which the film's very construction, through motion capture and CGI, can be understood as monstrous. That is, after Deleuze's Cinema 2: The Time Image (1989[1985]), Beowulf can be understood as typifying a cinema that has seen a shift from montage to montrage, a cinema that shows. Analysing the aesthetics of monstrosity in Beowulf, the author also considers how the film's motion capture synthespian performances can be understood as comic through Henri Bergson's (1912Bergson's ( [1900) theory of laughter, which suggests that humans laugh at mechanized human beings.

Section: Du Numérique Plaqué Sur Du Vivantmentioning

confidence: 96%

Beowulf: The Digital Monster Movie

Brown

2009

“…Nowhere is this more vividly illustrated than in Final Fantasy , whose premiere was preceded by an aggressive PR campaign hailing it as the harbinger of a new technology-driven cinema. Lisa Bode (2006: 174) remarks that:pre-release reportage and promotion characterized [ Final Fantasy ] as a ‘milestone’ or ‘landmark’ in cinema history, and as a spectacle of cutting-edge technology, labour and capital, with articles that gushed excitedly about the US$10m hair-do consisting of 60,000 hairs on lead synthespian Aki Ross’s head, and the 200 digital artists and animators who worked on her face.…”

Section: Contr-awe-lable Worlds: Animation To Marvel Atmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mastery Machine: Digital Animation and Fantasies of Control

Mihailova

2013

For decades, the notion of the creator's absolute control over the drawn image has remained a staple of animation discourse, and the advent of computer animation has recently reinvigorated this discussion. The animated science fiction features Metropia (Tarik Saleh, 2009), Metropolis (Rintaro, 2001, and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (Hironobu Sakaguchi and Motonori Sakakibara, 2001) engage utopian daydreams and articulate anxieties about the high degree of artistic mastery facilitated by advanced technology. Using these three films as case studies, this text examines computer-animated futuristic urban spaces as architectures of control. It discusses digital bodies as products of animators' increased mastery over mimetic representations of the human form and explores the ways in which computer animation foregrounds its technological and artistic control over the image as a feat to marvel at. In doing so, this analysis highlights the evolution of the dream of the omnipotent creator into a fantasy of omnipotent machinery, while also foregrounding concerns about the possible danger of technology undermining animators' labor and making it obsolete in the context of contemporary production practices.The notion of absolute creative control of the animator over the image is often evoked in discussions of drawn animation (other forms of animation, such as puppetry and stop motion, raise a separate set of questions which will not be addressed here). Past scholarship has regarded cel animation as endowing the director with a degree of mastery over the film unmatched by other cinematic modes. For instance, Paul Wells (1998: 228) has argued that 'a completed animation represents an example of an entirely controlled environment which is a symbolic space wholly predicated on the whim, intention, and bravura of the animator.' It is this emphasis on the individual in the production of drawn animation that has given rise to fantasies of all-powerfulness, of the

“…3 Over the last 15 years, 'vactors' (virtual actors), synthespians, cyberstars, and performance capture have received growing attention in film, media and screen scholarship. Examples of work in the area include contextualization of performance capture through discussions of the history of animation, rotoscoping and embodiment (Bouldin, 2004;Gunning, 2006); analyses of performance capture's technological history, apparatus and spectator engagement (North, 2005(North, , 2008; explorations of realism and special effects (Allison, 2011;Prince, 1996Prince, , 2012; discussions of the production culture of animation and digital visual effects (Freedman, 2012;Telotte, 2010); a psychoanalytic investigation of digital actors (Creed, 2000); and interrogations of the hybrid/monstrous ontology of performance capture and the uncanniness of the image (Aldred, 2011;Bode, 2006;Brown, 2009;Monnet, 2004). While almost all of these works touch on issues of phenomenology and the body, none takes the embodied relationship between performer and digital visualization as its primary concern.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Multilocal Self: Performance Capture, Remote Surgery, and Persistent Materiality

Ayers

2014

Over the last two decades, the technologies of performance capture and robotic surgery have increased in both use and visibility. While these technologies might initially seem quite dissimilar, they each produce a human-machine assemblage that enacts itself across different scales. Each technology 'captures' a performance, translates that performance into digital information, and recodes that performance into another body. This article argues that both performance capture and remote surgery penetrate the materiality of the body and reconstitute that materiality elsewhere, as a human's bodily movements are captured, transmitted, translated, and finally recoded into that of another body, be it an analogue or digital form of embodiment. The shift in scale produced by each technology -in terms of movement, perception, experience, and sensation -demonstrates the extent to which these technologies of telepresence foster a multilocal experience of the body, the dispersion of authorial control across the human-machine assemblage, and a reinforcement of embodied experience despite an embrace of cultural fantasies of the disembodiment of information. This article takes an explicitly phenomenological position, examining the connective tissue that binds actor and avatar, surgeon and robot. The ligaments that connect human and nonhuman both separate and draw the entities close together, and this article explores the resultant shifts in scale, perception, and experience engendered by performance capture and robotic surgery.