Summer / Winter Schools
Winter School "Doing Animation History: Exploring Challenges and New Visions in Writing Animation Histories"
March 25 to March 27, 2019
Ernst von Sieglin Lecture Hall, Hohentuebingen Castle, Tuebingen
With lectures by Franziska Bruckner, Suzanne Buchan, Edwin Carels, Malcolm Cook, Michael Cowan, Donald Crafton, Esther Leslie, and Alexandra Schneider.
Special highlight: A vaudeville performance of "Winsor and Gertie" March 26, 7:30 pm, Schulberg 2, Tuebingen
Organisers: Rada Bieberstein and Erwin Feyersinger
Contact: animation@mewi.uni-tuebingen.de
How can we write the history/histories of a field as heterogeneous and often marginalized as animation? At the winter school, we will discuss methods of researching especially those aspects of animation history that are overlooked, hard to trace, and non-canonical. By promoting an interdisciplinary network of young scholars and established researchers of animation studies, film studies, media studies, art history, and other related fields as well as film archivists, film educators, and film festival organisers, we aim at fostering innovative approaches to writing the history/histories of animation in a collaborative atmosphere.
One of the challenges of writing any animation history lies with the fact that animation is a "pervasive" cultural practice (Buchan 2013: 1–2) with many techniques, open to a range of visual languages with many individual styles, employed in almost all areas of life: from entertainment and science to education, advertisement, the arts, and information dissemination, all displayed with various technologies in different spatial contexts such as cinemas, museums, theatre stages, art galleries, hospitals, or public squares. Understanding animation in this variety and complexity with its "deep time relations of arts, sciences, and technologies" (Zielinski 2013: 26) makes the writing of a comprehensive history of animation difficult.
Supported by the Institutional Strategy of the University of Tuebingen (DFG, ZUK 63), the Society for Animation Studies, and AG Animation.
Summer School "Animation Studies"
September 16–18, 2015, Tübingen
The summer school "Animation Studies" provides an interdisciplinary approach to research on animation. By bringing young and senior researchers from Media Studies, Computer Science, and Psychology together, we provide a platform for fruitful discussions where new (interdisciplinary) ideas on animation research can emerge. Following this line, the summer school features keynotes and talks from those three disciplines, talks on ongoing interdisciplinary projects, and group work exploring interdisciplinary links. The keynotes and talk sessions are open to the public and guests are cordially invited. The group work sessions are restricted to the registered participants of the summer school. Keynotes will be given by Nichola Dobson, President of the Society for Animation Studies (SAS), Paul Wells, Director of the Animation Academy at Loughborough University, Tim Smith, Senior Lecturer studying eye movements and film cognition at Birkbeck, University of London, and Michael Black, Director of the Perceiving Systems department of the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen. This summer school is organized by Meike Uhrig (Media Studies), Frank Papenmeier (Psychology) and Alexandra Kirsch (Computer Science) and will be held September 16–18, 2015, in Tübingen, Germany.
