The annual Society for Animation Studies Conference is coming up, and will be held at University of Arts London — College of Communication. I will co-chair and present on the first panel on the first day, alongside Jacqueline Ristola and Aurélie Petit (and JS Wu, in spirit!). My abstract is below. Hope to see many London friends around!

Panel 1A: Bad Animation, Lecture Theatre A; 9:30am-11:15am

Talk Title: Looking for Skin

Where do boundaries begin and end in noisy images? How does the median become mediocre in mass aggregates of data? How do Western ideals of form translate into and contrast with the organic notions of Simondonian metastability? Through these questions, this paper conducts a philosophical inquiry of AI-animated representations of the body, wherein form is “found” in an approximate aggregation of data rather than “designed” by the human-determined ligne claire. In doing so, this paper resituates the phenomenological “spectatorship” or “viewership” endemic to the work of the likes of Vivian Sobchack, Laura U. Marks, and Shane Denson, and lays out the terms of how computationally-generated animated media fundamentally transform the human-object “encounter.”

For those who cannot make it to the conference: I will be around London from 6-22 July, 2025. Shoot me an email or DM if you’d like to meet up!