Animation and Automation

26 – 27 March 2009
The University of Manchester and Lancaster University

Conference Co-organisers: Jackie Stacey (RICC, Manchester) and Lucy Suchman
(CSS, Lancaster)

The aim of this symposium is to examine the relationship between Animation
and Automation by bringing into dialogue two already highly
interdisciplinary areas of scholarship: film studies, including new media
and visual culture, on one hand, and social studies of science and
technology, on the other. Our venture arises from a number of ongoing
debates about the changing meanings of the two, interrelated concepts of
animation and automation across the boundaries of the humanities, the arts
and the social sciences.

Drawn from these diverse fields, the participants are joined by a shared
interest in the entanglement of moving images, animate entities, and
machinic agencies. The place of movement in the constitution of life,
liveness and liveliness, the shifting of agencies from bodies to machines,
unstable boundaries of the organic and the synthetic, and the remembered
histories and projected futures of anatomical and technological
configurations form the starting place for discussion. Our aim is twofold:
to elucidate the specificities and diversity of initiatives in the creation
of life, of life-like creatures or images, and of artistic, cinematic and
scientific imitations of life; and to debate the justificatory assumptions
on which those projects have relied, analysing the transformations in ways
of thinking and their productive outcomes. Our discussions will be attentive
to enactments of resemblance and difference, boundary making and connection,
as well as to relations of discursive and material practices, imaginaries
and politics. At stake are possibilities for refiguring agency and
relocating responsibility in critical and generative ways that relate to
questions of animation and automation in particular.

The symposium will be structured across two days and hosted by The
University of Manchesters Centre for Screen Studies and Lancaster
Universitys Centre for Science Studies. The symposium will begin with a day
of events in Manchester:

1) an opening performance piece Animating Bodies by sociologist and live
performer Professor Jackie Orr (Syracuse) whose innovative modes of
presentation echo her groundbreaking conceptual work on the conference
themes

2) a UK premiere screening of Frances Leemings film Genetic Admiration
(2005), followed by a discussion with the filmmaker led by Profs. Jackie
Stacey (Manchester) and Kim Sawchuk (Concordia, Canada) aimed at elaborating
and illuminating Leemings use of collage animation (a technique combining
artistic and cinematic styles and genres) to explore the highly topical
issues of the recombinant practices of new forms of genetic engineering and
cloning

3) Screens 50th Anniversary Public Lecture by Professor Vivian Sobchack
(UCLA), co-sponsored by the journal.

Together these presentations will provide a provocative but also highly
accessible introduction to new directions in film, artistic performance and
critical scholarship and will set the stage for a more detailed and focused
academic discussion on the conceptual issues raised. Not only will this
first day attract a broad audience of academic and non-academic participants
but, in its very format of mixing live performance, film, artistic
presentations and academic analysis, it will animate the problematic of the
multiple mediations of life and liveness that lies at the heart of our
concerns.

The conference will move the following day to Lancaster University, which
houses a leading Centre for Science Studies (CSS), for a workshop designed
to continue our exploration of the issues. Each of the invited participants
has been selected based not only on the thematic connections among their
areas of specialisation, but also on the innovative and transdisciplinary
character of their scholarship. Rather than a conventional set of paper
sessions, the workshop will allow in-depth debate and detailed theoretical
and substantive discussions generated through pre-circulated statements of
interest by the participants, and drawing on the performances, screenings
and lectures of the previous day. The objective is that these discussions
should result in a conceptual framework that might form the basis for a
special issue of the journal Science as Culture and/or a special dossier of
short pieces on animation for publication in Screen, and in the longer term
for new work on these topics at the intersection of film studies and STS.

Speakers include:
Lisa Cartwright(Communications, UC San Diego)
Beth Coleman(Comparative Media Studies, MIT)
Stefan Helmreich(Anthropology, MIT)
M?nie Hogan(Communication Studies, Concordia)
Sarah Kember(Media and Communications, Goldsmiths)
Frances Leeming(independent filmmaker)
Adrian Mackenzie(CESAGen, Lancaster University)
Fiona O’Neill(CESAGen, Lancaster University)

Jackie Orr(Sociology, Syracuse University)
Kim Sawchuk(Communication Studies, Concordia University)
Natasha Schull(Science and Technology Studies, MIT)
Vivian Sobchack(School of Theatre, Film and Television, UCLA)
Jackie Stacey(RICC, The University of Manchester)
Lucy Suchman(CSS and Sociology, Lancaster University)
Aylish Wood(Film Studies, University of Kent)

Professor Vivian Sobchackwill deliver a lecture at 5pm on Thursday 26th
March at the Whitworth Art Gallery in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of
the film and television studies journal Screen.

To register: Registration will open January 5th, 2009.

For the Manchester event please fill in theregistration
<http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/ricc/events/animationautomation/documents/A%20and%20A%20Registration%20Form%20JS.doc>  formand send to
Debbie Woods:Debbie.Woods-2@manchester.ac.uk (The University of Manchester).

For the Lancaster event contact Ruth Love:r.love@lancaster.ac.uk (Lancaster
University).

The conference
<http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/ricc/events/animationautomation/documents/animation-programme.jpg>  poster and conference <http://www.socialsciences.manchester.ac.uk/ricc/events/animationautomation/documents/Automation%20information%20and%20programme.pdf>  programme are also available.