Animating Science: Beyond Illustration

There is a purely explanatory-illustrative role for animation in teaching and popularization of science: animation is flexible, able to switch between scales, emphasizing aspects of phenomena that might be obscured in live-action film.  My interest in animation is, however, entirely other than illustrative—I’ve put it front and center in my films for quite different reasons.  One way I’ve used it—working with the animator Ruth Lingford, for example—is to extend live action film into an imaginative realm, making the animated a kind of unconscious of the film. A second, equally important place of animation in my work has been by re-purposing and recontextualizing scientific simulations (animations that function within the science itself).  Finally, I am fascinated by the possibility of adapting and putting into (sometimes limited) motion a variant of still images including graphic novels, court drawings, and noir-lit scenes to get at historical and scenario-imaginative developments in science—I’ll speak about my work with graphic novelist Peter Kuper and Indian animator Shiv Kachiwala, among others.  Throughout, my aim has been not to gloss over the animation, but to make it a central, deepening dimension of the human, affective world of science that extends and deepens how science moves in a complicated and contested world.