Experimental Animation by Harris Miriam;Husbands Lilly;Taberham Paul;

Author:Harris, Miriam;Husbands, Lilly;Taberham, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351788007
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)

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Beyond a Digital Écriture Féminine

Cyberfeminism and experimental computer animation

Birgitta Hosea

Where is the feminist experimental computer animation?

With the current resurgence of interest in feminism and growth in the ­proportion of women choosing to study animation at university (Vankin 2015), this chapter began with a search for examples of innovative, feminist approaches to experimental computer animation. Despite extensive literature review, online searches, calls on social media and academic networks, these proved harder to uncover than anticipated, which led to three further, related questions:

• Where are the women working in computer animation (and animation in general and in Information Technology (IT))?

• How do you define experimental computer animation?

• What might a feminist approach to experimental computer animation be?

As part of this enquiry, women artists who contributed to the earliest emerging forms of computer animation and cyberfeminist1 discourses from the turn of the millennium will be re-examined. Following the utopian ideas of these early adopters of technology, did women go on to liberate themselves through technology? The chapter will conclude that negotiating the issues of essentialism and intersectionality that follow a re-examination of cyberfeminism has wider implications for the possible futures that our society creates for itself.

Where are the women in computer animation?

To be assigned the female gender at birth is to be subject to a number of gendered assumptions and discourses from day one. From the pressure to wear a pink Disney princess outfit and play with girls’ toys, to the idea that technology is too complicated for women, we are, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, not born but become women. We may choose to either perform or defy these expectations, but, despite a century of four successive waves of feminism, they still run deeply in the fabric of our society. Although the current, fourth wave of feminism is heavily identified with social networks such as the Vagenda2 and the Everyday Sexism Project,3 this familiarity with online technologies has not correlated with equality of employment for women in IT, animation or games and women of colour remain particularly under-represented. There is a shocking lack of diversity amongst the individuals who are employed to make the popular culture that surrounds us and that reinforces all of our ideas about the world.

Rather than considering the mainstream animation industry as a whole, however, this chapter is concerned with digital experimentation: Animations on the cutting edge that have been created with a spirit of creative investigation rather than for the purpose of entertainment. Experimentation and innovation are vital, because if the developers of new technologies and new forms of entertainment continue to be limited to a small section of the population, they will continue to represent their own interests and not the wider concerns of the general population.

How do you define experimental computer animation?

A quick survey of many experimental animation festivals around the world today will reveal that there is a tendency for animation that foregrounds its digital origin to make up the minority of films on offer.4 Although all animation can now be considered digital, or

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