Animation Research Centre

Scouring, scrubbing, sweeping, bleaching, rinsing, brushing away – all these words refer to different ways of removing dirty marks during the act of cleaning. and every one of these processes was also used to make Erasure, a body of works brought together as a solo show at Hanmi Gallery, Seoul.

The exhibition included a short film, installations of animation projected over wall-mounted objects, defaced books, photographic documentation and remnants from a performance that took place at the private view. As well as the exhibition, Hosea produced a catalogue and two thematically linked book chapters.

Learn more

The WEAR Sustain project funded and supported dozens of design teams to create sustainable and ethically-produced wearable technology and e-textiles. The project featured at the 2018 Ars Electronica Festival in a showcase of prizewinning and nominated works, new results and prototypes coming out of the European Commission’s STARTS (Science, Technology and the Arts) initiative.

Learn more

This book discusses developments and continuities in experimental animation that, since Robert Russet and Cecile Starr’s Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art (1976), has proliferated in the context of expanded cinema, performance and live ‘making’ and is today exhibited in galleries, public sites and online. Read more

StoryFutures: AHRC Creative Cluster on Immersive Storytelling

StoryFutures and StoryFutures Academy: The National Centre for Immersive Storytelling place innovative storytelling at the heart of next generation immersive technologies and experiences. Both initiatives are funded by the UK government.

As the first book to be published on this subject, the term ‘performance drawing’ is used as a trope, or a thread of thinking, to describe a process of drawing dedicated to broadening the field through resourceful practices and cross-disciplinary influence. Read more

The “Computer Animation” category has been part of the Prix Ars Electronica since its very inception, and its development continues to display strength and vitality. It recognizes excellence in independent work in the arts and sciences as well as in high-end commercial productions in the film, advertising and entertainment industries. In this category, artistic originality counts just as much as masterful technical achievement. Read more

As a praxis for virtual gaze interaction this installation uses a digital representation of an art replica as an interface for emergent filmic experience. The act of looking at a virtual version of this replica spatially shifts the user, creating connections between their gaze and the space that surrounds them. Read more

Converging UCA arts specialties, the group brings together staff, students and other practitioners working within Digital Media, Creative Coding, Fashion and Textile Design, Computer Games, Digital Film (and Screen Arts), Acting and Performance, Animation, Architecture, Visual Communication, and more. Led by Professor Camille Baker, the vision of the X10DD Senses Laboratory is to share knowledge and develop new projects and research under an umbrella interest in interactive and immersive art and performance, wearables and haptic interface development, practices of embodiment, and notions of presence and affect. Within this endeavour, the group looks to collaborate with other institutions, using its professional networks in the UK, as well as Europe, Canada Australia and the US. While engaging with new and emerging modalities and technologies, X10DD Senses Laboratory strives to make socially responsible art and design, approaching issues of sustainability and the climate crisis and, data ethics and privacy, women’s health and equality, and others.

Group Aims: 

• Creating novel performance and interactive experience research and works, to benefit art, performance, design, and entertainment.
• Addressing societal issues, for example climate change and sustainability, pandemic impact, diversity issues, data ethics and identity, among many others.  
• Nurturing & mentoring digital media/emerging technology research and collaboration across the university.
• Attracting and supporting PhD, Masters’ and staff research in the areas of interest to the group.
• Running a regular internal symposium for UCA research staff and students.
• Hosting an annual lecture of an international speaker of significance.  
• Hosting an international cross-disciplinary conference on Extended Senses.
• Ensuring that methods of practice and material understanding are placed at the centre of critical debate.
• Facilitating the involvement of artists and academics, both from within and from outside UCA, in order to create international networks.
• Facilitating links internally and externally and developing collaborative relationships with other institutions, networks, galleries and museums, and businesses, as well as supporting, develop and submit appropriate funding applications for innovative research

Find out more

PhD project: Queering blockchain with speculative animated fiction

More about Ruini Shi

PhD project: Phenomenal Blackness : Tracing the black body’s movements in Animation  from Hypervisibility to Erasure

More about Maybelle Peters

PhD project: Aesthetics of Sex, Violence and Death in 2D Animation: Challenges and Opportunities

More about Tomas Mitkus

Dr Vicky Smith (2015): The animator's body: feeling negative, feeling positive
https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.659226

Dr Sarah Bown (2015): Landscape as transitional space in film practice
https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.681181

Dr Reza Yousefzadeh Tabasi (2011): The effect of context on socially-engaged animation: The case of Mr and Mrs Mockroach
https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.543188

Dr Charles DA Costa (2007): Racial stereotyping and selective positioning in contemporary British animation
https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.499066

Dr Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib (2009): The hybrid nature of realism in the Aardman Studio's early animated shorts
https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.506518

Tomas Mitkus, Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, Lithuania

Professor Dr Gabriele Jutz,  Universität für angewandte Kunst, Vienna, Austria

Dr Pedro Serrazina, Universidade Lusófona De Lisboa, Portugal