2012
Special issue on Animation and Automation
Everything is Animated
In a world of pervasive media and ubiquitous computing, this article asks what happens as everything (objects, subjects, and actions) moves toward animation across a network. How do media and mediation affect our sense of agency? I argue that the contemporary subject, as described by real-world media practice and ani- mated film, exists within a space of accelerated mediation that distorts self- perception. I use the example of A Scanner Darkly, the 2006 Richard Linklater film, to discuss the effects of pervasive media and how it affects the parameters of self- reflection and agency. The importance of A Scanner Darkly to my argument is that it provides a vision of pervasive mediation in which subjects and objects collide. In A Scanner Darkly, I focus on the use of rotoscoping animation as visual effect and con- ceptual filter. Effectively, as I argue, animation is used in this case to illustrate the loss of face-to-face engagement – the impossibility of the unmediated encounter. In the first section of the article, I conceptualize a networked subject in reference to the film’s rendition of a subject adrift in a field of mediation. In the second section, I con- trast this vision with a formulation of networked subjectivity that engages modalities of mediated presence to explore issues of agency in light of a technologically ani- mated environment. The question I ask is: if as a society we are subjected to a per- vasive mediation, how may we imagine modes of agency within an animated world?