This fall, ICA Miami’s Art + Research Center presents a virtual seminar series on Animation and the Future of the Image in dialogue with the museum’s landmark exhibition Joyce Pensato (1941–2019).
Taking Pensato’s engagement with iconic cartoon and live-action figures from American pop culture as a point of departure, the series investigates animation as an interdisciplinary aesthetic process, which involves thinking, form, and affect that cuts across painting, cinema, digital media, and AI.
Bringing together scholarly and artistic approaches, the seminar series explores animation not only as a visual technique, but as a philosophical and political condition, as what Deborah Levitt calls the “animatic apparatus.” The “animatic apparatus” is a post-cinematic formation that shapes contemporary subjectivity in an era of AI, algorithmic governance, and non-indexical images. The semester considers how the constitutive features of animation, including distortion, metamorphosis, repetition, and cartoon logic, resonate across painting and time-based media, raising questions about ethics, agency, perception, personhood, and control in an increasingly synthetic visual environment.
Drawing from critical theory, animation studies, media archaeology, and contemporary art, this four-week seminar will address the shifting ontologies of images and the bodies they produce and discipline. Rather than recording the world, the animatic apparatus generates, creating a distinct rhythm of time, and new questions around the status and future of the image.