Animation is, arguably, elemental in a number of ways: elemental in the sense of fundamental to cinema, the original form of moving visual image in the later 19th century, on which other cinematic forms come to build, or, in today’s register, as the essential basis, CGI, of contemporary commercial cinema; elemental in the sense of relating to the forces of nature, with the task across its history being the adequate approximation of water movement, fire and wind in animated visual effects; elemental too in the sense of bearing a relation to spiritual forces, enlivening, magical being. This seminar series explores these resonances through historical and contemporary animation, with specific focus on fire, water and air. It stretches animation from cartoons to art practice to digital formats to touchscreens, Networks of Things, sub-perceptual visualising systems, the conveyed and coloured cosmic confections from billion-dollar telescopes.
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Seminar 1: Fire, Animation's ecstasy in matter
Tue, Oct 21, 2025 -
Seminar 2: Air, and froth, foam and fog
Wed, Oct 22, 2025 -
Seminar 3: Water, shiny surfaces, flows
Thu, Oct 23, 2025 -
Public Lecture: Animation as Turbid Media - On New Ethers, Dusts and Particles
Fri, Oct 24, 2025
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her books include various studies of Walter Benjamin, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005); Derelicts (2014), Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016) and The Rise and Fall of Imperial Chemical Industries: Synthetics, Sensism and the Environment (2023). Work on the biopolitical economy of dairy, with Melanie Jackson, includes Deeper in the Pyramid (2018/2023). A study of anti-fascist radio pioneer Ernst Schoen (written with Sam Dolbear) appeared in 2023: Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the Twentieth Century.