Primitive Modes
https://www.neme.org/projects/hosted/primitive-modes
Animation has always occupied the space between cinema and the visual arts. The individual frames of traditional animated films, which require a painstaking manual construction, are excellent paradigms of futility: McLaren reminds us that the images don’t matter, 1 it is what happens in between that matters. So, cinema may well be truth at 24 times per second, 2 but animation is the complementary (and necessary) doubt that comes between each of them, refuting – at a speed of 24 times per second – every categorical claim to certainty.
Cholodenko 3 senses that animation is a ghost – a Warburgian survivance as Didi-Huberman would call it, a ‘thing’ predating cinema and haunting cinema throughout the century. 4 Photography may have attempted to obscure the fact, but, as Manovich points out, computer generated imagery reasserts cinema’s inherent treachery: every image, even the recorded one, is a painterly surface to be modified and reworked (Manovich 1995, 3).
By disturbing the institutional mode of representation, animation as artwork (in contrast to animation as film) recovers, reinstates and reactualises the primitive creative possibilities of the medium. 5 It questions choices made in the historical flow; it presents – and fulfils – all the what-ifs. It challenges acquired tastes and established habits of viewing, and demands of the viewer to question and redefine their expectations.
These are illusions, emulations, imitations, mimicries that question life, conscience, intelligence, and agency. They are the uncomfortable dislocations of methods of creation and representation – and if the mode of representing does not meet popular expectations, it calls for a change in the way of looking and, by extension, of understanding.
In this indefinable (one could employ the overused term ‘liminal’) space, traditionally created 2D animation coexists with experimental mixed media film, narrative and non-narrative films, video games, mixed media installations, illustrations, and motion graphics.
The exhibition presents fourteen artworks created by students of the Department of Multimedia and Graphic Arts of the Faculty of Fine and Applied Arts of the Cyprus University of Technology in various (almost all possible) forms and shapes.
There is no combining theory and no attempt to pretend to a unifying principle here: this exhibition is defined by the mere anarchy of a cabinet of curiosities: a chaotic, contradictory and eclectic inventory of ‘things.’ What unifies them (by denying them their specificity that would isolate them) is the gesture of grouping them together, providing them a context in which they have to survive the spectator’s eye, side to side, by becoming something else, something more, something primitive, something other, a what-if, a not-yet, a not-exactly.
Participating students
Elisavet Aristodimou, Andreas Astanios, Emili Ioannou, Andreas Koukoumas, Zoi Constantinou, Katerina Constantinou, Daniel Nicolaou & Dimitris Pericleous, Maria Nicolaou, Andriana Panayi, Maria Panayi, Sokratis Sokratous, Alexandros Theocharous, Maria Christou, Panagiotis Christou
Dates
Opening: 22 June 2024; 8pm
Opening dates/times: 23-25 June 2024; 5:30pm-8:30pm
Notes
- George Sifianos. "The Definition of Animation: A letter from Norman McLaren." Animation Journal: 62-66 1995.
- Jean-Luc Godard, dir. Le Petit Soldat. Paris: Les Films du Losange, 1960
- Alan Cholodenko. 2013. "The Crypt, the Haunted House, of Cinema." Cultural Studies Review 10(2): 99–113. doi.org/10.5130/csr.v10i2.3474
- George Sifianos. "The Definition of Animation: A letter from Norman McLaren." Animation Journal: 62-66 1995.
- Georges Didi-Huberman. L’image survivante: Histoire de l’art et temps des fantômes selon Aby Warburg. Paris: Les éditions du Minuit 2002.
