New Work: Special Issue of ‘Animation’ on Space and Scalar Travels

Animating Scale and Scalar Travel
Guest Editor: Sylvie Bissonnette (UC Berkeley)

The collection of articles in this special issue of animation: an interdisciplinary journal examines conceptions of life and the universe at a variety of scales in animated media. In our era of media globalization and bioengineering, recent modes of visualization have offered the opportunity to experience the world at microscopic and macroscopic scales. Explorations of the body’s interior, visual flâneries of miniaturized urban spaces, journeys through cosmic landscapes, reanimations of the genomic data of marine microbes, and mobile visions of protein folding in video games all challenge viewers’ spatio-temporal frame of reference and produce novel embodied experiences that transform our understanding of the physical limits of the body and its agency. The nine articles in this issue consider a range of visual styles and techniques that influence our understanding of the limits of animation and the particular ways in which each style or technique animates space, including cel animations, hybrid animated films, computer animations, CG cinema, and online video games.

“Introduction to the Special Issue: Animating Space and Scalar Travels”

“Scalar Travel Documentaries: Animating the Limits of the Body and Life”

“Remediating Panorama on the Small Screen: Scale, Movement and Spectatorship in Software-Driven Panoramic Photography”

“Tilt-Shift Flânerie: Miniature View, Globalscape”
Author: Jennifer Lynde Barker

“The Multilocal Self: Performance Capture, Remote Surgery, and Persistent Materiality”

“Reach In and Feel Something: On the Strategic Reconstruction of Touch in Virtual Space”

“Proteus and the Digital: Scalar Transformations of Seawater’s Materiality in Ocean Animations”

“Playable Virus: HIV Molecular Aesthetics in Science and Popular Culture”