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This year’s Expanded Animation will take place at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, Austria.

Expanded Animation 2023

The eleventh edition of the Expanded Animation Symposium, organized by the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria and Ars Electronica, will take place from September 8th to 10th as part of the Ars Electronica Festival 2023.

In its eleven-year history, the Expanded Animation Symposium has examined the vast and constantly evolving field of animation and its myriad connections to other disciplines. Along this journey, the symposium has featured prominent and upcoming people, projects, and perspectives that have significantly shaped the current animation landscape. In addition to becoming a regular part of the Ars Electronica Festival, the symposium has expanded, developing from an initial one-day event to a three-day affair that includes multiple tracks, exhibitions, performances, and even an additional symposium, Synaesthetic Syntax.

After last year’s successful return to a physical venue, this year’s symposium will continue this approach as part of the Ars Electronica Festival. Throughout the three-day event, the speaker panels will feature several international artists, researchers, and developers who will discuss—in a live setting—topics related to this year’s theme, “The Art of Performance.”

SYNAESTHETIC SYNTAX

A shadow of a woman is visiable behind a series of oil rigs.
Infinitely Yours, Miwa Matreyek, Golden Nica winner, Prix Ars Electronica 2020

Synaesthetic Syntax IV: The Ghost vs the Machine

In this, our fourth symposium at the critical juncture of embodied, sensual perception and the processes and technologies of expanded animation, we turn our attention to kinaesthetic and physical presence. Our human senses of proprioception (detecting our own position in space) and the vestibular system (detecting gravity, movement and balance) allow us to map our surroundings, navigate through space and detect the proximity of others. In an age in which our city streets have become a film studio with our every movement tracked by surveillance cameras and our every thought, memory or social interaction mediated through the camera, GPS, microphone and motion sensors of our smart devices, what does it mean to have a body? In what ways can expanded animation explore the physical presence of the live human body in motion and what is the role of technology in relation to this?

Venue

The conference will be held at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. The media festival will take place on the 6th–10h of September 2023: https://ars.electronica.art/festival/en/.

Call for Papers

We are looking for thought-provoking proposals that present innovative perspectives on working in expanded animation with the live body in motion. The questions we are interested in include, but are not limited to:

  • How can we critically and creatively use live performance in animation and animation in live performance?
  • What can the liveness of performance bring to animation in terms of improvisation, participation, spontaneity and unpredictability?
  • Since ancient times, thousands of years of performance practice have produced many different ways to move a body from stylised forms of dance to exaggerated clowning. What is ‘life-like’ motion and why does psychological realism remain a goal for animated characters who are, after all, not human?
  • In what new ways can the properties of human kinaesthetics be applied to animation? How can balance, gravity, weight, movement patterns, spatial mapping and proximity detection be re-imagined and creatively explored?
  • What are the ethics of capturing and re-appropriating a performer’s physical movement signature with mocap? How can we counter the algorithmic biases built into the fabric of motion capture systems and the under-representation of different demographics in motion capture libraries?
  • How might the technologies of surveillance, motion detection and capture be subverted and used for new artistic purposes?
  • How can the space in which performance takes place be animated and what impact does this have on performer and audience experience?
  • Can animation be used in live performance to disrupt theatrical conventions such as the fourth wall and unity of time and space?
  • How can animation be used to create proximity and communal experience in connected audiences?
  • How can AI technology revolutionize/change the way we will animate human bodies?
  • What does it mean to have a body in interactive animated environments (metaverse, games, VR)?

Deadline

Submission deadline: Friday, 26th May 2023

How to Submit

We call for papers, presentations and responses to our themes above.

Submission is via Oxford Abstracts at this link: https://app.oxfordabstracts.com/stages/5966/submitter. You will be prompted to create a free account with Oxford Abstracts.

Your submission should include:

  • Title of your presentation
  • Abstract (brief summary of your proposed presentation) 500 words (including bibliographic references)
  • Short Biography – 200 words
  • Relevant links to moving image work/websites etc.

If the paper is practice-based, it should include reflection and contextualisation in addition to presenting the practice. We will not accept papers that propose to show the practice only.

Finally, we are unable to provide feedback on individual submissions.

Keynote: Ghislaine Boddington, body>data>space

Photo of Ghislaine BoddingtonGhislaine Boddington is an artist, curator, director and presenter, based in the UK and specialising in the future human, body responsive technologies and immersive experiences. She is co-founder and Creative Director of body>data>space (fka shinkansen), a pioneering interactive creative design collective who have advocated for the living body to be at the heart of the digital debate since the early 1990s. With a background in dance and performing arts and a long-term focus on the blending of our virtual and physical bodies, she engages in highly topical digital issues for our living bodies, including telepresence, biometrics, identity and representation of the self/other, connected body enhancements, digital intimacy and collective embodiment of the future.

Ghislaine’s practice led outputs and presentations, under the heading “The Internet of Bodies”,  lead to public facing outputs. She co-presents bi-weekly as Studio Expert for BBC Digital Planet (fka Click), the BBC World Service flagship technology and society radio programme and podcast. She is invited worldwide as a keynote speaker, presenter, host and panelist and consults into the arts, education, creative industries and business sectors. Across the last thirty years she has curated on theme of the future of the physical for Dance Umbrella and ICA in the nineties, eight multi-partner EU Creative Media projects (1998–2015) and Nesta’s FutureFest (2015–18). She has commissioned and produced over fifty body technology artistic works and has directed mid-scale participatory immersion experiences for festivals and venues globally, including the Royal National Theatre, Glastonbury and FutureFest. She was an Artist Research Fellow at Middlesex University (1999–2019) and is currently Reader in Digital Immersion at Greenwich University. 

As an active advocate for diversity and inclusivity since the 1980s, she is a co-founder of Women Shift Digital (2012 to date), a Trustee for the Stemettes and Spokesperson for the Deutsche Bank “Women Entrepreneurs in Social Tech” Accelerator.  She was an Inventor of the Year Finalist in the Tech Inclusive Alliance Awards 2019.

In 2017, Ghislaine was awarded the IX Immersion Experience Visionary Pioneer Award by Society for Arts and Technology (SAT) for her long-term innovative work in digital arts, and in particular her “passionate and inspirational engagement towards embodied intelligence”.

Committees

The symposium is jointly organized by Dr. Juergen Hagler, Ars Electronica, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg and Professor Dr. Birgitta Hosea, Animation Research Centre, University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK.

Scientific committee: Professor Rose Bond, PNCA, USA; Andy Buchanan, independent scholar; Associate Professor Max Hattler, School of Creative Media, CityU, Hong Kong.

SPEAKERS

We are currently in the process of inviting speakers for Expanded Animation 2023. We will add them here as soon as they are confirmed.

PROGRAM

The schedule of Expanded Animation is currently in the making. It will appear here once it’s finished.

LIVE

Visit the Expanded Animation YouTube channel to see current and past content. Scheduled live streams are shown below.

Expanded Animation Publication

Expanded Animation – Mapping and Unlimited Landscape

The symposium Expanded Animation began in 2013 and offered a first approach to the expanding field of computer animation. It has since become an established part of the Ars Electronica Animation Festival and the international competition Prix Ars Electronica Computer Animation. Every year under an overarching theme, the symposium has researched the field of technology, art, animation, and aesthetics, investigated the collapsing boundaries in digital animation, and explored positions and future trends. As with the first conferences on computer animation at Ars Electronica in the 1980s, practice and theory are equally important. The richly illustrated publication Expanded Animation: Mapping an Unlimited Landscape features contributions from speakers and artists from the past six years and presents an overview of the prize winners in prix category Computer Animation from 2011 to 2018.

250 pages, 250 Illustrations

BUY ONLINE

PARTNERS & CREDITS

Partners

The symposium has been made possible through a collaboration between the Digital Arts program at the Hagenberg Campus of the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, the University for the Creative Arts, and the Ars Electronica Festival. We want to thank the following sponsors for their support.

Supported by

Organization

Expanded Animation is brought to you by a group of dedicated people from the University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Hagenberg Campus (FH OÖ), the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham, UK (UCA), and Gold Extra.

Conference Organizers

Juergen Hagler | Symposium Chair, Ars Electronica Animation Festival Director
Alexander Wilhelm | Co-Chair Expanded Animation, FH OÖ
Birgitta Hosea | Co-Chair Synaesthetic Syntax, UCA
Patrick Proier | Co-Organizer, Head of Production, FH OÖ
Christoph Schaufler | Co-Organizer, Head of Production, FH OÖ
Wolfgang Hochleitner | Co-Organizer, Head of Web & Communications, FH OÖ
Jeremiah Diephuis | Co-Organizer, FH OÖ
Michael Lankes | Co-Organizer, FH OÖ
Huoston Rodrigues | Co-Organizer, FH OÖ
Reinhold Bidner | Co-Organizer, Gold Extra

Team

Axel Bauer | Production Director & Graphics, FH OÖ
Simona Beck | Studio Engineering, FH OÖ
Selina Behrens | Graphics & Studio Engineering, FH OÖ
Susanne Divacka | Photo Documentation, FH OÖ
Simone Feldbacher | Associate Director, FH OÖ
Miriam Feldner | Audio, FH OÖ
River Gadermaier | Associate Director, FH OÖ
Nils Gallist | Social Media, FH OÖ
Sarah Haim | Camera, FH OÖ
Marlene Kremsmayr | Associate Director, Studio Engineering & Web, FH OÖ
Kevin La | Production Director, Graphics, Photo Documentation & Web, FH OÖ
Daniel Leichinger | Production Director, FH OÖ
Selina Mensah
| Camera & Trailer, FH OÖ
Hannah Ofner | Audio, FH OÖ
Lilith-Isa Samer | Audio & Social Media, FH OÖ
Leonie Sametinger | Studio Engineering, FH OÖ
Anton Schneeberger | Camera, FH OÖ
Vivian Seidl | Social Media, FH OÖ
Martin Siedler | Audio & Trailer, FH OÖ

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