We invite chapter proposals for the second of four volumes of the Encyclopedia of Animation Studies: Techniques, Processes, Environments (Bloomsbury, 2024). The expansive four-volume series will showcase established and emerging scholarship on animation, including transdisciplinary approaches that consider the proliferating forms and roles of animation today. This second volume, edited by Dr. Franziska Bruckner and Dr. Alla Gadassik, focuses specifically on animation techniques, processes, and environments – how, where, and why animation is made and exhibited.
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The Fall 2021 issue of the journal JCSM (Journal of Cinema and Media Studies) includes a wonderful dossier of essays on new approaches to animation studies, edited by Ryan Pierson. This was a great opportunity for me to share my love for the multiplane animation stand and its enduring influence on animation aesthetics around the world. Entries cover a wide range of topics, including animation and scientific inquiry, contemporary Russian animation, and educational animation.
Continue reading “Love for the multiplane stand”
I published an article on women’s independent animation and feminized creative labour in the summer 2021 issue of Feminist Media Histories. It’s currently available to read for free on their website here.
Continue reading “Homeworkers, not freelancers”
What can community-focused, site-specific media exhibition look like during a pandemic? How can the social intimacy that has always been a part of artists’ cinema adapt to the context of physical distancing?
Rear Window Cinema transforms artists’ private windows (domestic and studio spaces) into ephemeral screens for rear-window projections that are externally visible to passersby on the street. Between the months of October and December, animation artists displayed animated letters to their neighbourhoods, using their windows as the creative point of departure and eventual surface for projection.
Continue reading “Rear Window Cinema: Letters from Isolation (2020-2021)”
Looking for Anne was a short video produced for a travelling cross-Canada exhibition marking the centennial anniversary of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s book Anne of Green Gables. The video toured the exhibition nationally and introduced key themes from Dr. Irene Gammel’s book Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic. The video was produced as part of my affiliation with the Modern Literature & Culture Centre (MLC) at Ryerson University at the time.
Marion and Gen (2010), is a film/video essay and accompanying text. This project was commissioned as part of the Requiem//102 Project. The “Requiem//102” project was a collaboration between artists, scholars, and writers. Each contributor wrote (or made) a response based on one still frame from Darren Aronofsky’s 2000 film Requiem for a Dream. My contribution is a short film that begins with my assigned still image and then forms an alternate biography for the character of Marion Silver.
Continue reading “Marion and Gen (2010), 7:10min”
September 12, 2012 was my last day of research at the Len Lye Archive, maintained by the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery in New Plymouth, New Zealand. Len Lye’s ideas about the role of “kinaesthetic empathy” in art-making profoundly shaped how I think about the history of animation. As a Visiting Researcher at the archive, I got to study the documents and working tools of this pioneering experimental animator.
Continue reading “Research: Visiting the Len Lye Archive, New Plymouth”
June 30, 2016: I finally have time to migrate my website from an overpriced (and poorly managed) web builder to WordPress. This is just a temporary page (and template) up until I gradually move all of my previous posts and update new items.
Alla Gadassik: Media Scholar and Animation Curator 