{"id":124,"date":"2019-04-24T17:37:26","date_gmt":"2019-04-25T00:37:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ruthhayes\/?page_id=124"},"modified":"2019-05-08T15:14:48","modified_gmt":"2019-05-08T22:14:48","slug":"teaching-animation-in-an-interdisciplinary-context","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ruthhayes\/teaching-animation-in-an-interdisciplinary-context\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching Animation in an Interdisciplinary Context"},"content":{"rendered":"

Below is an essay I wrote for the Animation Journal in 2007 describing three different interdisciplinary programs I\u2019ve collaborated on at Evergreen: Emerging Order; What to Make of It?, Animated Visions: Allegories of Resistance, and Marking Time: Rituals, Gestures and Languages of Movement. See Paul Ward\u2019s contextualization of \u00a0my work in his essay \u201cAnimation Studies as an Interdisciplinary<\/span>\u00a0Teaching<\/span><\/span>Field\u201d in\u00a0Pervasive Animation (Buchan, ed, 2013).\u00a0<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n

In the past ten years of teaching animation as part of the interdisciplinary curriculum at the Evergreen State College, in Olympia, Washington, I\u2019ve observed two patterns among students when given the opportunity to enroll in one of my courses.\u00a0 The first is that those who have an affinity for the most traditional and culturally accessible forms of animation are the ones most likely to consider learning to animate and\/or pursuing careers in animation.\u00a0 As they develop their skills as animators, these students are inclined to attempt works echoing these popular forms.\u00a0 This may include imitating tried and true linear, romantic or comic narrative formulae, avoiding difficult or complex content or, conversely, resorting to taboo-violating social satire to address it, employing clich\u00e9d characterizations and stereotypes and perpetuating other problematic tendencies of mass culture.\u00a0 They may adapt their work to newer platforms\u00a0[1]<\/a>\u00a0for distribution, but their choice of genres won\u2019t fully explore what those platforms can provide.<\/p>\n

The second pattern is that students with different sensibilities, those who don\u2019t have affinities with the animation they see in the United States mainstream media, are not likely to think that learning to animate will benefit their creative, intellectual or professional pursuits. If they have not seen oppositional works like Trnka\u2019s The Hand<\/em> or Joanna Quinn\u2019s Britannia<\/em>, tried to decipher enigmatic, poetic works such as Amy Kravitz\u2019Roost<\/em> or Lorelei Pepi\u2019s Grace,<\/em> navigated thematically and structurally complex pieces such as Yuri Norstein\u2019s Tale of Tales<\/em>, or experimented with time-based forms of scientific visualization, they don\u2019t know about animation\u2019s\u00a0 great potential for exploring abstract or philosophical concepts through images and sound.\u00a0 If they are not aware of various artists\u2019 use of animation in performance or installation, they are less likely to think of it as another strategy of fine arts expression.<\/p>\n

Since I began teaching at Evergreen,\u00a0 I\u2019ve observed the benefits of embedding animation education in interdisciplinary courses.\u00a0 Rooting animation practice and study in the context of thematic lines of inquiry and making animation training available to a diverse group of students that includes both arts- and non-arts concentrators opens up the possibilities of the discipline for all.\u00a0 For those who want to go into animation, media or the arts as a career,\u00a0 interdisciplinary study can sharpen their critical thinking skills as well as their senses of ethics and responsibility.\u00a0 Issues of representation, negative stereotypes, cultural blindness, appropriation or exploitation can be more easily addressed in animation if course syllabi are structured to include wider perspectives that question them in the first place.\u00a0 Learning about animation as they learn about other arts such as poetry or performance can strengthen students\u2019 abilities to structure time and pace their own animated pieces.\u00a0 It can introduce them to other ways to present animation besides the traditional single channels of television and film.\u00a0 This investment in students\u2019 intellectual and creative development pays off in the breadth and depth of the work they produce in the future.<\/p>\n

For those students headed into non-arts fields, the opportunity to gain animation skills in the context of various humanities, social sciences or science studies deepens their interpretive abilities, increases their visual and media literacy, opens their eyes to the possibilities of animation as an art form and widens their knowledge of culture at large.\u00a0 It also frequently helps them better learn and retain the humanities, social science or science knowledge they are engaged with.\u00a0 For all of my students, access to animation learning as part of their liberal arts education gives them another communications tool, along with writing, public speaking and critical thinking, to more effectively contribute to the wide variety of public discourses necessary to a functioning democracy.<\/p>\n

Recent\u00a0 discussions at the 2007 Society for Animation Studies Conference focused on the multiplicity of forms, strategies, venues and purposes of animation in contemporary culture.\u00a0 At the SAS opening session, Suzanne Buchan talked about \u201cpervasive animation\u201d transcending its ghetto of entertainment television and film through integration into installation and performance art as well as the output of engineers, architects, scientists and others.\u00a0 She asserted that animation scholarship has not kept pace with this development and that animation scholars have the responsibility to help the public develop the literacy skills necessary to engage with it.\u00a0 As animation forms and formats proliferate, one way for animation scholars and teachers to help cultivate the public\u2019s visual and animation literacy skills is to embed the teaching of animation history, theory and practice into interdisciplinary courses.\u00a0 Animation is one of the most interdisciplinary art forms.\u00a0 It makes sense to teach animation in a way that connects it to the other disciplines that inform it and that it attempts to address.\u00a0 In this paper I describe some of the work I\u2019ve done in this arena and what I believe students have gained from it.<\/p>\n

Evergreen\u2019s Curricular Model<\/p>\n

The Evergreen State College is a liberal arts, four-year public college founded in the late 1960s to pursue an experimental curriculum based on \u201cFive Foci,\u201d which are interdisciplinary teaching and learning, collaboration instead of competition, working across significant differences among people, integrating theory and practice, and being personally engaged with one\u2019s education.[2]<\/a>.\u00a0 We have about 4500 students and about 200 faculty.<\/p>\n

Evergreen\u2019s only requirements for graduation are that students must earn 180 quarter-hour credits. We have established \u201cSix Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate\u201d that address a range of skills important to the practice of most disciplines and that we refer to when designing our curriculum[3]<\/a>. There are no requirements for distribution, so a good liberal arts foundation has to arise from very broad interdisciplinary courses.\u00a0 In general, two or more faculty design and teach what we call \u201cprograms\u201d, around themes, not necessarily disciplines.\u00a0 Programs are fulltime (12-16 credits per 10 week quarter), range from one quarter to three quarters in length, and enroll 20-25 students per faculty to form a \u201clearning community.\u201d\u00a0 Faculty may establish pre-requisites for entry to a program to insure that participating students have developed some academic breadth or specific areas of knowledge before attempting more advanced work.<\/p>\n

Evergreen has no departments and students do not declare a major.\u00a0 Instead, faculty affiliate with different curricular planning areas that are loosely organized around related disciplines. \u00a0Humanities faculty affiliate with \u201cCulture, Text and Language.\u201d\u00a0 The math, biology, physics and chemistry faculty affiliate with \u201cScientific Inquiry.\u201d\u00a0 Other faculty affiliate with the \u201cSociety, Politics, Behavior and Change,\u201d or \u201cEnvironmental Studies,\u201d or \u201cNative American and World Indigenous Peoples\u201d planning units.\u00a0 There are about 25 faculty affiliated with the \u201cExpressive Arts\u201d planning unit and within that, five faculty, including myself, are trained in some branch of the media arts, with an emphasis on non-fiction and\/or experimental forms. We generally do not teach narrative fiction\u2013visual storytelling is practiced in the context of documentary, autobiography and animation.<\/p>\n

The faculty rewrite the Evergreen curriculum every year, two years in advance of when we will teach it.\u00a0 Faculty are free to design new programs or repeat ones taught in previous years.\u00a0 We are encouraged to think in broad interdisciplinary terms, and to design programs that create linkages across the academic divisions of arts, sciences, humanities and social sciences.\u00a0 We have programs such as \u201cMolecule to Organism\u201d which is interdisciplinary within the sciences (biology, physics, chemistry), and \u201cMediaworks,\u201d the foundation program in media.\u00a0 The latter,\u00a0 taught by two media faculty, usually integrates non-fiction and\/or experimental film and digital video production into learning media history and theory.\u00a0 Animation, sound design, performance or installation may also be included depending on which two of the media faculty are\u00a0 teaching it.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n

The quintessential Evergreen programs are much more broadly interdisciplinary. A botanist and an American studies scholar taught \u201cJefferson\u2019s American West.\u201d \u201cIslands\u201d was taught by an experimental filmmaker with a background in visual anthropology and a literature\/humanities scholar. The team that taught \u201cCalculated Fiction\u201d consisted of a mathematician (who moonlights in an improv group) and a creative writer\/book artist. There are many similarities in terms of research, practices of observation and strategies of communicating complex ideas between art and science, so we tend to have a good number of programs every year that combine faculty and disciplines from each.<\/p>\n

One of the benefits of this approach to teaching is that faculty are \u201dco-learners,\u201d constantly encountering skills and knowledge outside of our own expertise.\u00a0 Some days I am the expert and I am teaching both students and my faculty partner.\u00a0 Other days I am on the same level as the students, as my faculty partner lectures or leads a workshop on subject matter I know very little about.\u00a0 We commonly structure programs so that they begin with intensive instruction and guided assignments that lead to more open ended independent project work arising from the students\u2019 particular interests.\u00a0 This model makes faculty work harder at the beginning of the program to bring students up to speed in our own disciplines, but it allows us to coast a bit later on as students bring their own influences to bear on program content.\u00a0 That\u2019s when students frequently venture into\u00a0 research or creative work that is beyond faculty expertise.\u00a0 In those times, faculty become \u201cco-learners\u201d again, but with the students as teachers.<\/p>\n

I try to keep a few goals in mind when developing my teaching plans. One is to design programs that facilitate my own creative work and intellectual interests. Another is to explore how I can use animation to teach visual literacy skills to the majority of students who are not necessarily interested in future careers in media. These skills are necessary for an educated and engaged citizenry.\u00a0 In addition, many fields depend on visual media for communication purposes, so being able to explain phenomena or ideas using images is as important as being able to write clear and concise prose.\u00a0 A third goal is to teach animation principles and practices to students who want to become animators or media\u00a0 producers\u00a0 in a way that increases their versatility with different technologies and platforms and their career opportunities. A fourth goal is to build in aspects of the Five Foci as well as incorporate activities that will support students achievement of the Six Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate.<\/p>\n

Balancing these three goals is tricky, but the practice has led me into some very rewarding programs.\u00a0 Below, I describe three of the most interdisciplinary ones I\u2019ve taught at Evergreen.\u00a0 \u201cEmerging Order\u201d integrated science with animation and arts and as a consequence exposed students to basic animation principles and tools, helped them develop visual and technological literacy and gave them a broad foundation of academic experience on which to base the rest of their college work.\u00a0 \u201cAnimated Visions\u201d focused on the role of artists in society, specifically Soviet era Russia and Eastern Europe, and the visual, literary and practical strategies they use to communicate with their audiences.\u00a0 Students developed interpretive and analytical skills appropriate to the arts, humanities and political theory, produced creative or scholarly work and engaged with the moral and ethical questions raised by program content.\u00a0 \u201cMarking Time\u201d explored basic human relationships with time evident in the arts, and the study of\u00a0 history and religion.\u00a0 Students explored animation and a variety of performance modes in the context of this program, developed appreciation for the complexities of human cultures and made deep connections between the arts and human religious practices.<\/p>\n

Emerging Order<\/p>\n

During fall and winter quarters of 2005-06, I taught \u201cEmerging Order; What to Make of It?\u201d with a theoretical physics and math scholar. [5]<\/a> We structured the program around the question, \u201chow do artists and scientists recognize and express order in the universe?\u201d\u00a0 Our approach was in part a response to a college wide effort to satisfy general education needs by exposing arts students to math and science, and science students to the arts.\u00a0 It was also a response to our own questions about what artists and scientists have in common.\u00a0 I wanted students to explore the relative values of realism and abstraction and understand when and how to use those approaches effectively.\u00a0 I also wanted to give them\u00a0 permission to be amazed by the physical world and opportunities to express their amazement creatively.\u00a0 My teaching partner was interested in exploring and developing applied math concepts in his teaching, and teaching students to recognize those concepts in the physical world.\u00a0 We tailored our syllabi to first year students, although several upper division students also enrolled.\u00a0 This meant that we included a focus on building college level skills in reading, writing and research, and computer literacy. The program was two quarters long.\u00a0 In the fall we focused on applied math, animation and critical reasoning. \u00a0In winter we explored the nature of motion, sound and light waves and chaos theory and ways of expressing these\u00a0 scientifically and creatively.\u00a0 Students finished the program with research projects that integrated program concepts with their own individual interests.<\/p>\n

Our weekly schedule was divided as follows:\u00a0 On the first day we had lecture\/screenings and seminar.\u00a0 On the second day we held math\/physics workshops in the morning and art\/animation workshops in the afternoon.\u00a0 On the third day we had computer labs.\u00a0 We wrapped up the week with a general meeting that accomodated writing workshops, extra screenings, presentations of student work, and general team building and social activities.<\/p>\n

We began the program by practicing ways to observe order in the environment through drawing, audio and video recording, and taking scientific measurements.\u00a0 Early\u00a0 fall quarter we took students on a three day field trip to the Olympic National Park beaches that served several purposes.\u00a0 One was to give students a chance to bond with each other to better enable collaborative learning.\u00a0 Another was to use the outdoors as a lab for learning and making art.\u00a0 Finally, we wanted to totally immerse them in a magnificent and highly complex natural environment and then ask them to respond to it.\u00a0 At the coast, students used time lapse and stop motion digital photography to document tidal fluctuations and other changes.\u00a0 They drew in sketchbooks and on the beach itself to document patterns and numerical sequences in natural forms, movements of the sun and other phenomena.\u00a0 They created mazes and Fibonacci spirals and sculptures of drift wood and other detritus.\u00a0 Students also completed listening exercises in conjunction with\u00a0 making field recordings for winter quarter\u2019s work analyzing frequencies, and composing soundtracks.<\/p>\n

Back on campus we made use of data and images collected on the coast in weekly applied math and animation workshops and in computer labs.\u00a0 Students completed exercises\u00a0 in Excel and NetLogo that supported their learning of number sequences, symmetry, tiling and branching patterns.\u00a0 In winter quarter they learned to create sounds in Mathematica by writing equations that resulted in specific combinations of frequencies.\u00a0 They also converted field recordings to sonograms to analyze their frequencies and rhythms.\u00a0 To maximize their computer literacy, we had students work on PCs for scientific applications and on Macs for audio, graphics and animation using Photoshop,\u00a0 iStopmotion, iMovie, Peak and Digital Performer.<\/p>\n

Required readings ranged from non-fiction and scientific texts to fiction, averaging a book every two weeks.\u00a0 Annie Dillard\u2019s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek provided a context for observational work, and license for students to respond with awe to the miracles of life and order they witnessed on the field trip.\u00a0 Richard Verdi\u2019s Klee and Nature traces that artist\u2019s development from scientific illustration to abstraction and served as an example of how artists adapt the forms they see according to the development of their own worldview. \u00a0David Wade\u2019s Crystal and Dragon relates the physics paradox of particle and flow to cultural responses in Islam and Zen Buddhism.\u00a0 K. C. Cole\u2019s First You Build a Cloud introduces basic physics in lay terms while Paul Davies\u2019 The Cosmic Blueprint and Richard Dawkins\u2019 The Blind Watchmaker took students through headier discussions of natural phenomena and the human need to make sense of it all.\u00a0 John Van Eenwyck\u2019s Archetypes and Strange Attractors stretched that theme further by using chaos theory as an explanatory metaphor for how symbols and archetypes emerge from and operate on the mind.\u00a0 Edwin Abbott\u2019s Flatland and stories from Jorge Luis Borges\u2019 Collected Fictions challenged students to relate what they\u2019d learned in all the workshops, both creative and scientific, to narrative works of imagination.\u00a0 The readings prompted wonderful weekly seminar discussions of satire, other dimensions, the nature of time, perception, reality, chaos and complexity.<\/p>\n

The animation I screened served two purposes.\u00a0 The first was to illustrate techniques.\u00a0 The second was to show how artists used animation to explore our program themes.\u00a0 Al Jarnow\u2019s Shorelines<\/em> (1977) plays with natural forms of rocks and shells using rhythms and patterns that seem to emulate fluctuations of tides and daylight through the seasons.\u00a0 Jane Aaron\u2019s Traveling Light<\/em> (1985) recreates a sunbeam\u2019s movement across a room, in the process illustrating light\u2019s effect on color and it\u2019s trajectory.\u00a0 Daina Krumins\u2019 Babobilicons<\/em>(1982) employs layers of optically printed time-lapse film to reveal and juxtapose processes of growth, decay and dispersion. Chris Stenner and Heidi Wittlinger\u2019s puppet animated Das Rad<\/em> (2003) compares human and geologic time in the story of two rock characters watching civilization rise and fall in a valley below.<\/p>\n

I screened a good number of drawn animation films that explore or express math and physics concepts.\u00a0 These include Steve Hillenburg\u2019s Wormholes<\/em>(1992), an illustration of the theory of relativity using a cartoon iconography of southern California strip culture, Adam Beckett\u2019s Sausage City<\/em> (1974) and Michaela Pavlatova\u2019s Repete<\/em> (1994), both of which build complexity through iterative processes.\u00a0 Joanna Priestley\u2019s Utopia Parkway<\/em>(1997) and Surface Dive<\/em> (2000)\u00a0 combine simple drawn and object animated cycles to build complex reflections of natural and man-made phenomenon.\u00a0 Jonathon Hodgson\u2019sFeeling My Way<\/em> (1997) uses rotoscoped and drawn sequences to explore perception, direct experience and semi-conscious responses to it.\u00a0 To support our study of the physics of light and sound in the winter, I screened a number of visual music films by John and James Whitney, Oskar Fischinger and Baerbel Neubauer.\u00a0 I also invited local artist Devon Damonte to conduct a direct animation workshop.<\/p>\n

Emerging Order Animation Workshop Activities<\/p>\n

In the fall art\/animation workshop I focused on getting all students to a basic level of drawing as well as a basic level of animation and technical literacy.\u00a0 Daily sketchbook and zoetrope animation exercises (bouncing ball, walk) and time lapse and stop motion assignments given in the form of \u201cdesign problems\u201d (narrow parameters, short turn around time) got students up to speed on the fundamentals and helped them further integrate some of the mathematical and physics concepts we were studying.\u00a0 These also prepared them to do two more complex assignments involving metamorphosis, tiling and the uses of realism and abstraction.<\/p>\n

During the weeks that we studied symmetry and tiling, we looked at a lot of M.C Escher\u2019s work before each student designed their own tessellation tile.\u00a0 Using zoetrope strips, each animated a short metamorphosis from the tile design to its basic geometric shape (square or triangle).\u00a0 In a Photoshop workshop, they scanned these images, and composed them into a sequence for eventual export as animated GIF files.\u00a0 They posted the GIFs to pages on the Emerging Order website where my teaching partner had written the code to transform them into tiled backgrounds, creating an animated Escheresque tessellated field.\u00a0 Not all students completed this work successfully, but all gained some fundamental digital imaging skills and experience designing animation for the web.<\/p>\n

This first exercise in drawn metamorphosis warmed students up for a more ambitious one, an Exquisite Corpse assignment designed to give students the opportunity to practice essential drawn animation techniques and further play with transformation. The Exquisite Corpse is a Surrealist game in which artists add to a drawing on paper without being able to see what others have drawn.\u00a0 In an Exqusite Corpse animation, participants design a key pose and then create a metamorphosis sequence linking it to the key pose made by a neighboring participant. I like to do this exercise in the first quarter of a program because it helps foster group cohesion and teaches some basic principles of drawn animation.\u00a0 As one of our aims was to help students understand how artists and scientists develop abstract ideas from concrete observation, I adapted a few of Paul Klee\u2019s ideas from The Nature of Nature and asked students to redraw some of the naturalistic field trip images in their sketchbooks as he might have.\u00a0 Each student\u2019s original image and the second image drawn after Klee formed a pair of key frames in a sequence for \u201cRealism to Abstraction.\u201d\u00a0 Students had to make a third keyframe, a geometric breakdown, based on the Klee image and then trace a copy of the geometric breakdown and pass it to a neighbor.[6]<\/a> Finally, they had to animate from their own geometric breakdown through the other two images to the geometric breakdown received from another neighbor.[7]<\/a> An interesting thing happens when students learn to animate in the context of discussions about math, physics, numerical sequence, complexity, order, light and space: animation becomes a sort of quantitative reasoning .[8]<\/a> Constructing movement from distinct units (frames) of time is a process very much like counting.\u00a0 Drawing and other analog practices of creating motion yields spatial understanding that can help enable a student\u2019s understanding of math and physics concepts.<\/p>\n

In the first half of winter quarter, students further developed animation skills, and their understanding of the role physics plays in motion by working through a series of exercises based on Richard William\u2019s The Animator\u2019s Survival Kit and doing a rotoscope project to analyze motion.\u00a0 During the physics workshops on particles and waves students learned basic digital audio composition..\u00a0 Pairs of students composed 3 minute soundtracks using audio recordings and sounds they had synthesized in the Mathematica computer labs while learning about frequencies.\u00a0 Then the pairs joined into groups of four to create a 3 minute stop motion animation.\u00a0 The soundtracks and animation sequences had to be structured to establish order, disrupt it and then reestablish it, or conversely, start in chaos, evolve into order and then fall into disorder.<\/p>\n

At the critique for these works, we randomly paired each 3 minute animation with two soundtracks.\u00a0 This gave us the opportunity to talk about how sound and image interact or, to be more accurate, how we perceive they interact, supporting previous discussions about the importance to scientists of knowing how their perceptual apparatus can distort their findings and how, while simultaneous events don\u2019t necessarily indicate causality, we tend to read them that way.<\/p>\n

Around the middle of winter quarter, students began work on their final projects.\u00a0 The criteria for these were fairly open.\u00a0 Projects had to have both scientific content and some creative element, but students were free to tilt the balance towards one or the other.\u00a0 Naturally, with forty or so students there was a wide variety of work produced.\u00a0 Some were animated explanations of basic scientific concepts we\u2019d discussed.\u00a0 Some were non-objective attempts using a variety of experimental animation techniques to express similar concepts.\u00a0 One beautiful piece incorporated drawings and puppet animation to connect biological rhythms such as the heartbeat, to planetary rhythms of day and night and seasonal change.\u00a0 A number of students further explored sound, for example using synthesis software to play in the gray area between randomly generated tones and complex melody, exploring simple object-oriented programming to manipulate frequencies, analyzing water sounds for subtle patterns and rhythmic textures, and creating an interactive sound installation. Most all the projects were surprising and enlightening responses to the mix of content and ideas in which students had immersed themselves for over twenty weeks.<\/p>\n

Animated Visions<\/p>\n

For a long time I\u2019ve wanted to learn about the cultural conditions out of which have come the wonderful animated films of Russia, Eastern and East Central Europe.\u00a0 In spring of 2006 I finally had that chance when I taught \u201cAnimated Visions: Allegories of Resistance\u201d with a Russian language\/literature scholar and an experimental formalist poet who has a good amount of experience working with Russian and East Central European poetry in translation. We designed the program to explore, in ten weeks, Soviet era animation, poetry, literature and film and the strategies that artists use to circumvent censorship in totalitarian societies.<\/p>\n

The students who enrolled solely to do animation learned a significant amount of 20th<\/sup>century European and Russian history particularly relating to the Russian Revolution, Stalinism and the post WW2 era through Perestroika.\u00a0 Context for the works they viewed was provided by lectures and documentaries on Russian, Czech and Estonian history, discussions of Dada, Futurism, Modernism and, of course, Marxism and Leninism.\u00a0 Poetry helped develop an aesthetic and interpretive framework for understanding more complex animated works such as those by Norstein, Svankmajer, Lenica and the Estonians.\u00a0 Films by Jove\u2019s fabulous collections of Russian animation provided lots of examples of different animation styles and techniques that I used in my lectures on animation history and appreciation.\u00a0 Of particular use, in addition to Norstein\u2019s films, were those of Nina Shorina, Fyodor Khitruk\u2019s Man in the Frame <\/em>(1966), and Andrei Khrjanovsky\u2019s Armoire<\/em>(1970).<\/p>\n

We began the program with films by Andrey Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov to explain approaches to cinema and by extension, animation under Soviet rule.\u00a0 These three directors had very different relationships with their government and it was instructive to compare Eisenstein\u2019s staunch dialectical approach to Tarkovsky\u2019s veiled poetics.\u00a0 Vertov\u2019s exuberant and experimental Man With a Movie Camera<\/em> (1929) contrasts remarkably with his later propagandistic tribute in Three Songs of Lenin<\/em> (1934).\u00a0 Mikhail Bulgakov\u2019s novel The Master and Margarita with its carnivalesque and Faustian motifs, echoed the theme raised by Vertov\u2019s work, of pressures on artists to compromise their vision.\u00a0 Eugenia Ginzburg\u2019s memoir of her time in the Gulags in Journey into the Whirlwind, Vaclav Havel\u2019s \u201cThe Power of the Powerless,\u201d and Alexandre Kojeve\u2019s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel which explicates Hegel\u2019s Master and Slave Dialectic gave substance to our discussions of Soviet realism, samizdat<\/em> strategies of disseminating contraband ideas, the nature of propaganda and of the pornography of suffering (the danger that representations of torture, oppression, brutality, become a source of voyeuristic pleasure).\u00a0 These fleshed out our historical and artistic focus and gave students lots of food for thought in relation to their own creative goals.\u00a0 In particular, our exploration of the Stalinist era resonated with what students already knew about the Third Reich, and, in the context of the ongoing US war in Iraq, raised provocative questions about freedom of expression and the responsibilities that come with it.[9]<\/a><\/p>\n

Also included in our syllabus was Clare Kitson\u2019s Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales.\u00a0 This case study of one animator\u2019s career helped explain day to day struggles that artists might encounter and the \u201cAesopian\u201d language that many employ to communicate their ideas. Kitson\u2019s description of the obstacles Norstein has faced in making his films was vividly brought to life for us by guest animator Nina Shorina.\u00a0 She screened both her animated and live action works and, through a translator, talked about her own experiences as a Russian producer and answered many student\u2019s questions about the politics, culture and working conditions of artists in Russia both before and after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc.<\/p>\n

Our typical weekly schedule included large group activities such as lectures and screenings and smaller workshops and seminars.\u00a0 Mondays we began with a session that framed the week\u2019s focus through a lecture, screening of short films, or a guest speaker.\u00a0 Monday afternoons each faculty met with a smaller group of students in seminar to discuss the week\u2019s readings.\u00a0 Monday evenings we had an Artists and Poets Series during which we screened longer films, collections of short animation, and hosted visitors Nina Shorina and poet and translator Genya Turovskaya.\u00a0 We began each Tuesday morning with a debriefing session that allowed students and faculty to respond to the previous evening\u2019s presentation.\u00a0 This became the conceptual heart of the program as it was the time when the three of us faculty could discuss the material from our different perspectives, and when students could ask questions that helped them integrate concepts and information. \u00a0For the balance of the week, students participated in one of three disciplinary workshops led by faculty.\u00a0 Some did more intensive work with the history and literature of Soviet era Russia and Eastern Europe.\u00a0 Some explored creative uses of language in the poetry workshop. A third of the students worked with me in an intensive animation workshop.<\/p>\n

Animated Visions Animation Workshop Activities<\/p>\n

Some of the students in the animation workshop had previous animation experience, a few had none.\u00a0 Many had significant art or performance work under their belts from programs integrating theater, puppetry, drawing, painting and sculpture.\u00a0 Others had studied literature extensively, but very little art.\u00a0 As in other programs I\u2019ve taught, teaching to students with such a broad range of skills is a challenge, but emphasizing close viewing of films, concept development and simple analog production techniques led to some wonderful work.<\/p>\n

Students were required to maintain a sketchbook and film journal throughout the quarter. They were expected to write a response to each film screened\u00a0 that included salient information (the artist, title, year, brief synopsis and whatever historical or national context we knew) as well as observations about aesthetic or stylistic choices made in its production. They were also required to take visual notes on what they saw, sketching character designs and thumbnails of scene composition or other details. A major assignment was to do a close reading of one animated film chosen from a list that I prepared based on what we had in our library and I had in my own collection.\u00a0 The close reading\u00a0 included drawing a reverse storyboard of the film (drawing frames as the student viewed the film shot by shot) and researching to find out as much as possible about the animator and the context of the film.\u00a0 In cases where there was limited information about the animator or film available, I encouraged students to speculate based on what we knew already from our readings, viewing other works and talking about them in class.\u00a0 Each student did a short oral presentation that included a screening of\u00a0 the film they\u2019d studied and these often triggered good discussions about technique and meaning.<\/p>\n

To learn basic animation principles, students made zoetrope strips of a bouncing ball and then a walk cycle.\u00a0 For a second walk cycle done on animation paper, students had to design a character drawn from one of the readings.\u00a0 I then asked them to animate a metamorphosis from another student\u2019s character to their own, without disrupting the walk.\u00a0 The result was \u201cRussian Character,\u201d an Exquisite Corpse composed of a sequence of walking characters who suffer abrupt and frequently hilarious transformations.\u00a0 The students\u2019 widely differing drawing styles contributed to the individuality of the character designs.\u00a0 For example, a robust but tightly drawn fat aristocrat struts across the frame before dissolving into an elongated loosely charcoal drawn Anna Akhmatova, who drifts back in the other direction.<\/p>\n

For the quarter\u2019s final project, students had to choose some theme or element from the syllabus to visualize.\u00a0 The goal was not for them to recreate examples of the animation we\u2019d been viewing, or tell the same stories, but to adapt the ideas to their own understanding of history, politics or the human condition in general.\u00a0 Parameters for this assignment included collaboration with at least one other student, use of an intentional style in both art direction and movement, combining 2d and 3d animation somehow, and a minimum 30 seconds of animation with a maximum of 3 minutes.\u00a0 Sound was optional. They had to first develop the concept in a written treatment, accompanied by sketches and a storyboard.\u00a0 I showed them a variety of techniques to employ, emphasizing under-the-camera work, including cut-outs and paint-on-glass.\u00a0 Some chose to work with puppets and objects in our 3D stop-motion lab.\u00a0 Of course the quality of the resulting works ranged widely as did the efforts students made to adhere to the assignments\u2019 parameters.<\/p>\n

In any case, it was interesting to see in the results how students were integrating the program\u2019s themes into their own creative practice. A couple of pieces responded to the theme of the pornography of suffering.\u00a0 Two students found a web audio clip of Paul Celan reading his Death Fugue and animated to it using his metaphors and obscure images to express the horrors of the Holocaust.\u00a0 This featured a mixture of under the camera techniques including drawing, cut-out, paint-on-glass and clay on glass lit by flashlight to emphasize shadows and the dark nature of the subject.\u00a0 Another group developed a narrative of cavemen observing and enjoying one of their fellows being attacked by a lion.\u00a0 This was done with clay puppets and a fairly detailed set.\u00a0 The animation was rough, but as the team had storyboarded the piece carefully, the story came across.\u00a0 A third project involved beautifully designed articulated puppets and drawn backgrounds to explore the desire for spiritual connections in the context of state enforced atheism.\u00a0 The students creating this piece made good use of a combination of Russian Orthodox and constructivist design elements to heighten the conflict.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnimated Visions\u201d was a one quarter program and the three of us faculty agreed that if we teach this again, we will extend it to at least two quarters, both to enable better coverage and deeper learning of the common parts of the syllabus, but also to allow students to develop collaborative projects between the workshops.\u00a0 The possibilities of allowing cross-pollination between the discipline specific workshops were suggested by one of the final projects created in the poetry workshop.\u00a0 The major assignment there was to create a language, write a poem in it and then translate the poem into English.\u00a0 Two students who had taken animation from me the previous quarters in Emerging Order were in that workshop and joined another two students to work on this assignment, teaching them some basic animation in the process.\u00a0 They presented a video inspired by a scene from (Russian immigrant) Maya Deren\u2019s Meshes of the Afternoon<\/em> (1943) and the idea of the necessity of having to communicate surreptitiously and non-verbally.\u00a0 In it the four sit around a table as if playing a game.\u00a0 In pixilated close-ups shot in reverse, one pulls a piece of origami from her mouth.\u00a0 When the paper is unfolded the image drawn on it animates to become part of the poem.\u00a0 The next person\u2019s drawing and mode of unfolding responds to and builds on that.\u00a0 The resulting video was a playful and enigmatic representation of how personal vocabularies of images can develop into a common, hidden language.\u00a0 It was also a wonderful example of the coming together of all the disciplinary influences of the program into a surprising and inventive collaboration.<\/p>\n

Marking Time<\/p>\n

A conversation I had with a faculty colleague in literature and performance studies about gesture and its function as a temporal phenomenon and a unit of non-verbal communication led us begin to plan a program that would combine animation with movement and studies of how artists structure and use time in their works.\u00a0 Simultaneously, another faculty of religious and Islamic studies sent a query looking for people interested in\u00a0 teaching a program about ritual.\u00a0 As dance and theater, and by extension film and animation,\u00a0 share historical roots in ritual practices, the three of us decided to collaborate on a year long program that we titled \u201cMarking Time: Rituals, Gestures and Languages of Movement.\u201d<\/p>\n

The three of us began to plan, not quite knowing where the planning would take us.\u00a0 Through many discussions and brainstorming sessions, we developed a central question:\u00a0 \u201cWhat are the relationships between and the implications of the various ways human beings in groups and as individuals construct and understand their experiences of time?\u201d\u00a0 From that question, we contributed ideas from our different backgrounds to build a syllabus that would explore personal and religious rituals, history, performance, cinema, literature and other art forms.<\/p>\n

In fall quarter we focused on the dichotomy of the sacred, cyclical ideas of time as opposed to profane, and linear or historical approaches to it. \u00a0Books by Marie von Franz and Mircea Eliade presented Jungian and anthropological studies of time while a number of texts on Jewish, Buddhist and Confucian traditions contrasted the practices of those religions. Alison deVere\u2019s Black Dog<\/em>(1987), Priit Parn\u2019s Breakfast on the Grass<\/em> (1987) and Amy Kravitz\u2019 The Trap<\/em> (1988) were screened to illustrate the idea of art as a reprieve or interior journey.\u00a0 Stephen Kerns\u2019 Culture of Time and Space: 1890-1918 introduced modern western culture by examining how the Industrial Revolution and World War I transformed previously agrarian people\u2019s perceptions and understanding of space, time and memory.\u00a0 Kern\u2019s descriptions of new concepts such as standarized time, simultaneity and collapsed space set a context for students\u2019 encounters with works by Virginia Woolf, William Bulter Yeats, T.S. Elliott, the Cubists, Dada photomontages artists John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch, early animators and filmmakers such as George Melies, Winsor McCay, Edwin S. Porter, Emil Cohl, Rene Clair, Man Ray and Dziga Vertov and other modernists who developed narratives and themes in non-linear or spatially disruptive ways.\u00a0 Kern\u2019s focus on the beginnings of mass culture also provided a context for me to teach students about the beginnings of mass media.<\/p>\n

We taught this program in the 2001-02 academic year.\u00a0 In the fall the shadow of September 11th<\/sup> loomed over us.\u00a0 The media\u2019s response, which included endless replays of the twin towers falling, communicated the idea that a single historical moment means more than the processes that may have led up to it.\u00a0 I screened McCay\u2019s The Sinking of the Lusitania<\/em> (1918) one day, and we discussed how beautiful and fascinating his images of the boiling smoke, rolling waves and doomed ship were.\u00a0 It was easy to associate McCay\u2019s earnest, voyeuristic and virtuoso portrayal with contemporary media\u2019s equally earnest obsession with 9\/11.\u00a0 Both transform visualizations of a tragic event into spectacle, at the expense of a deeper understanding of history and the conditions of the people involved.\u00a0 Both use tragedies as opportunities for displaying technological artistry.\u00a0 McCay ends his film with portraits of distinguished, predominantly upper class men who died in the attack, and the comment \u201c..and they tell us not to hate the Hun!\u201d\u00a0 This sensationalism forecast that of our own media, which after 9\/11 contributed to stereotypes of all Muslims as terrorists and played into the Bush administration\u2019s use of fear to push its domestic and foreign policy agenda.<\/p>\n

In winter we began to deepen our explorations of creative and religious responses to time.\u00a0 Grimes\u2019 Deeply Into the Bone: Reinventing Rites of Passage<\/em> set an overall context for this work as he shows how rituals help humans navigate personal and societal transitions.\u00a0 The art and visions of Hildegard of Bingen and Black Elk combined with the poetry of Rumi brought students\u2019 attention to more personalized strategies of ritualizing, processing or recounting temporal events and the boundaries between linear profane time and cyclical sacred time. Arundhati Roy\u2019s The God of Small Things<\/em> allowed us to focus in particular on the ways that stories, films and other artworks can take us into \u201csacred\u201d time and facilitate healing after traumatic events.<\/p>\n

The spring quarter syllabus focused on readings and lectures that continued our exploration of themes discussed in fall and winter.\u00a0 Annie Dilliard\u2019s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,<\/em> Robert Lawlor\u2019s Sacred Geometry: Philosophy and Practice<\/em>, and Stephen Hawking\u2019s A Brief History of Time<\/em> contributed to our discourse about empiricism and human spiritual response.\u00a0 I accompanied these readings with screenings of Visual Music films by Oskar Fischinger, John and James Whitney and others.\u00a0 Audre Lorde\u2019s Our Dead Behind Us<\/em>, Olivia Butler\u2019s Kindred<\/em>, and Mary Oliver\u2019s Dream Work<\/em> provided students with poetic and fictional strategies of processing the impact of history on individuals.\u00a0 A series of films further highlighted the different ways artists can respond to or make use of historical events.\u00a0 These included Patricio Guzman\u2019s 1997 documentary Chile, Obstinate Memory<\/em>, Anna Deveare Smith\u2019s Fires in the Mirror<\/em> (1997), <\/em>and Hans Fischerkoesen\u2019sWeather Beaten Melody<\/em> (1942) in conjunction with clips from Leni Reifenstahl\u2019s Triumph of the Will <\/em>(1934) and Ray Muller\u2019s documentary The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Reifenstahl <\/em>(1994)<\/p>\n

Marking Time Animation Workshop Activities<\/p>\n

Fall quarter, students all took workshops in movement, animation and religious studies.\u00a0 Each of us faculty faced the challenge of how to engage students in a discipline they may not have thought was very interesting.\u00a0 I had to come up with strategies to involve non-art students who had not drawn since grade school in making animation.\u00a0 The dance faculty had to devise exercises and assignments that would hook some very self-conscious students into expressing themselves through movement.\u00a0 The religious studies faculty had to inspire art and dance oriented students into doing serious intellectual work.\u00a0 For my part, I focused on teaching the essentials of drawn and cut-out animation and getting students up to speed on the technology they would need to do more sophisticated works later.\u00a0 This included creating an encounter between a replacement animated cut-out and an articulated puppet, and several zoetrope and other drawn exercises based on John Halas\u2019 Timing for Animation<\/em>. Using selected readings from Vivian Sobchak\u2019s Meta-Morphing; Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change<\/em> students produced an Exquisite Corpse metamorphosis and considered metamorphosis both as a temporal process and as a performance device.\u00a0 I supplemented the animation workshop assignments with screenings of Priit Parn\u2019s Time Out\u00a0<\/em>(1984), Michel Ocelot\u2019s Prince and Princess<\/em> (1999), Gianini and Luzzati\u2019s Pulcinella<\/em> (1973), Yuri Norstein\u2019s Tale of Tales<\/em>(1979) and Hedgehog in the Mist<\/em> (1975), Michaela Pavlatova\u2019s Repete<\/em> (1994), the Fleischer Brothers\u2019 Betty Boop in Snow White<\/em> (1933) and Bimbo\u2019s Initiation<\/em> (1931) and many other\u00a0 films.<\/p>\n

By winter most all students had gained basic familiarity with each of our disciplines So we asked them to\u00a0 select one discipline based workshop to go to for the entire quarter. My faculty partners led workshops in movement and field study of religions (the latter focused on developing observational and interviewing skills so students could gather information about Northwest religious communities). I taught an animation workshop in which students expanded their basic skills to include composing soundtracks and learning how to break them down and animate to them.\u00a0 They also were introduced to rotoscoping, under the camera techniques such as sand and paint on glass animation, and storyboard and animatic production.\u00a0 These workshops were supplemented by screenings of a number of experimental works such as Mike Patterson\u2019s Commuter<\/em> (1981), Caroline Leaf\u2019s Two Sisters <\/em>(1990) and The Street <\/em>(1976), and my own films Eggs<\/em> (1977) and Reign of the Dog: A Revisionist History<\/em> (1994).\u00a0 I also asked them to independently view and respond to a selection of animation by artists including Oskar Fischinger, Joanna Quinn, David Anderson, Ladislaw Starewich, Jan Svankmajer, Otto Mesmer, Steven Subotnick, Jiri Trnka, Nick Park, Marjut Rimminen and Karen Watson.<\/p>\n

To bring the different workshops together students all worked in the \u201cExploration Lab,\u201d collaborating and experimenting with different ways to integrate their learning about time, movement and ritual.\u00a0 We asked them to use Grimes\u2019 book as a core text from which to investigate personal rituals or ritualized activities and use that experience to develop a 10 minute presentation in response to a global or community concern. Students from different workshops composed groups of four or five so that presentations would benefit from what all our disciplines could offer.\u00a0 They presented their works at the end of the quarter.\u00a0 These ranged from simple theatrical skits to more conceptually and technically complex multimedia performance artworks.\u00a0 A comedic performance about the cultural significance of hair, a multi-media piece showing personal resistance to a barrage of television images and a highly symbolic theater piece illustrating how an individual\u2019s personal ritual process enriches her community are examples of these works that engaged students in exercises of timing, performance, teamwork and conceptual design skills that are important for any animator.<\/p>\n

In spring, students spent about half their time on independent projects.\u00a0 These ranged from anthropological and religious studies research to creation of performance works and animated video.\u00a0 Students producing animation joined the animation workshop.<\/p>\n

As frequently happens in Evergreen\u00a0 programs that are as broadly interdisciplinary as this one was, faculty and students discover larger themes and questions arising out of their initial inquiries.\u00a0 In Marking Time, a theme that came to dominate, that we only partially anticipated, was the nature of self-discipline and how different practices in the arts and in religion require us to put aside our immediate impulses or desires to follow a schedule or routine designed by someone else or that we\u2019ve inherited from a particular tradition.\u00a0 This idea became very important in the spring quarter animation workshop. To accommodate student\u2019s production goals, I structured the workshop by dividing it into a few weeks each for pre-production, production and post-production. Students were given deadlines by which to produce treatments and storyboards for the first section, animated footage for the second and completed works for the third.\u00a0 They presented work in progress in critique sessions that allowed them to air ideas, brainstorm solutions to conceptual and design problems and share tips on techniques.\u00a0 Many of them resisted this schedule as it interfered, they thought, with the free, unstructured pattern of working they assumed was the nature of artistic creation.\u00a0 As the quarter unfolded, it quickly became clear to them that imposing structure on one\u2019s creative work is not only a good thing, but frequently a necessity.\u00a0 Students realized the multiple meanings of the word \u201cdiscipline\u201d in relation to their creative aspirations and their understanding of the time commitment of animation. The students who effectively applied time management skills to their work finished on time, got more useful feedback from critique sessions and were better able to integrate that feedback as they completed their piece.<\/p>\n

Students\u2019 films ranged from abstract to narrative and autobiographical animation, making use of\u00a0 a wide range of\u00a0 techniques, including drawing, collage, paint on glass, stop-motion and live-action trick film effects.\u00a0 Most fully explored animation\u2019s potential for metamorphosis, dream imagery and associative thinking.\u00a0 Memorable pieces that came out of this workshop include a circular tale of a man who dreams of becoming a zombie designed after early 20th<\/sup> Century trick films, one student\u2019s retelling of a coming of age dream that she had had using drawing techniques inspired by John and Faith Hubley, and a piece about the interior states achievable through meditation that involved multiple layers of torn paper and drawn animation. All the works that students produced\u00a0 benefited from the broad range of ideas we had discussed in the larger program throughout the year.<\/p>\n

Concluding Thoughts<\/p>\n

There are distinct costs and benefits, or to speak more positively, challenges and rewards that come with the interdisciplinary teaching we do at Evergreen.\u00a0 The challenges add to our workload.\u00a0 The rewards make it lighter.\u00a0 This work is demanding and labor intensive and requires constant re-invention.\u00a0 It can be stressful to rewrite the curriculum every year, on the other hand it allows us to adapt to current research interests or those of our students as well as responding to national and global issues fairly soon after they arise. For example in the 2007-08 edition of Mediaworks, we are planning a part of the syllabus around the Focus the Nation initiative (a nation wide effort among colleges and other organizations to bring climate change issues to the forefront in the 2008 presidential campaign).\u00a0 Introducing this theme as part of students learning of media will give them content to produce work about, challenge them to attempt to create persuasive media, find alternative platforms for it and in general emphasize media as a part of the public discourse that students have rights and responsibilities to participate in.<\/p>\n

Teaching animation in an interdisciplinary context means I have to develop teaching materials that speak to whatever disciplinary mix I\u2019m involved with at the time.\u00a0 That can be a stretch and may mean that I spend a significant part of my unpaid time reading and researching those connections.\u00a0 But inevitably the new content arising from this cross-pollination refreshes the way I approach animation as a teacher, scholar and as a producer.\u00a0 A reward of teaching \u201cEmerging Order\u201d was new insights into how aspects of chaos theory such as complexity and iteration relate to my own artistic practice as well as other artists and animators.\u00a0 \u201cAnimated Visions\u201d greatly expanded my understanding of the cultural forces that informed Soviet era Russian and Eastern European animation.\u00a0 Now I am much better able to talk about those works when screening them for students.\u00a0 Movement exercises I learned from performance faculty in Marking Time have helped me teach about expressing character through posture and walk cycles and feel more comfortable integrating performance elements into my programs.<\/p>\n

Team teaching can be logistically cumbersome, but it also reduces the amount of work I am responsible for.\u00a0 In a three-faculty program, I only need to do one out of three lectures.\u00a0 While I may not be able to go into the same depth as if I were teaching alone, shifting students\u2019 attention to content from a sometimes myopic concern for technology and technique is much easier when working across disciplines.\u00a0 The humanities, science and social science approaches that my faculty colleagues offer make it easier for me to incorporate issues of ethics and responsibility into teaching about animation.\u00a0 The ability to include these concerns in teaching animation creates a different sort of depth that enriches students\u2019 appreciation and understanding of the works they view and create.<\/p>\n

Animation, at its best, is one of the most interdisciplinary of the arts. It provides extremely adaptable tools for expressing complex ideas.\u00a0 Animators must have a broad foundation of knowledge and active, inquiring minds to use these tools to do effective work.\u00a0 As platforms for and purposes of animation increase, producers need to develop versatility and an ability to design for the limits of specific formats and for the goals of different projects.\u00a0 An interdisciplinary approach to animation education can help aspiring animators develop the intellectual curiosity, flexibility and vitality needed to feed their creative practice.\u00a0 Students who\u2019ve engaged with animation in this way may follow other career paths, but they carry with them an educated appreciation of animation as an art form arising from practical experience with it, as well as strong visual literacy skills that will help them navigate our increasingly image-oriented culture.<\/p>\n

\n

[1]<\/a>The inaugural Platform International Animation Festival highlighted the proliferation of ways that animation can now be viewed by including competitions and panels on animation for installation, internet, mobile devices.<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> http:\/\/www.evergreen.edu\/about\/fivefoci.htm<\/a><\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> The Six Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate are to articulate and assume responsibility for one\u2019s own work, participate collaboratively and responsibly in our diverse society, communicate creatively and effectively, demonstrate integrative, independent and critical thinking, apply qualitative, quantitative and creative modes of inquiry appropriately to practical and theoretical problems across disciplines, and as a culmination of one\u2019s education, demonstrate depth, breadth and synthesis of learning and the ability to reflect on the personal and social significance of that learning. http:\/\/www.evergreen.edu\/about\/expectations.htm<\/p>\n

[4] <\/a>Evergreen has no departments and students do not declare a major.\u00a0 Instead, faculty affiliate with different curricular planning areas that are loosely organized around related disciplines.\u00a0 Humanities faculty affiliate with \u201cCulture, Text and Language.\u201d\u00a0 The math, biology, physics and chemistry faculty affiliate with \u201cScientific Inquiry.\u201d\u00a0 Other faculty affiliate with the \u201cSociety, Politics, Behavior and Change,\u201d or \u201cEnvironmental Studies,\u201d or \u201cNative American and World Indigenous Peoples\u201d planning units.\u00a0 There are about 25 faculty affiliated with the \u201cExpressive Arts\u201d planning unit and within that, five faculty, including myself, are trained in some branch of the media arts, with an emphasis on non-fiction and\/or experimental forms. We generally do not teach narrative fiction\u2013visual storytelling is practiced in the context of documentary, autobiography and animation.\u00a0 We are committed to developing media literacy amongst students in the belief that our democracy urgently needs citizens who can effectively read and respond to the mass media.\u00a0 Consequently, we often use approaches that critique mainstream media content and practices.\u00a0 We rotate through teaching \u201cMediaworks\u201d and follow-up program for more advanced students to create independent work in media.\u00a0 Most of the rest of the time, we team up with other faculty in interdisciplinary programs.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Emerging Order evolved from a program we\u2019d taught three years earlier, \u201cPatterns Across Space and Time.\u201d<\/p>\n

[6] <\/a>I got the idea of having students make geometric breakdowns from observing one of Lorelei Pepi\u2019s classes at the California State Summer School for the Arts in 1999.<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> see the final movie athttp:\/\/academic.evergreen.edu\/curricular\/emergingorder\/Fall\/students\/realism_to_abstraction\/realism_to_abstraction.mov<\/a>.<\/p>\n

[8] <\/a>In a conversation with Yuri Norstein through a translator during his visit to Seattle in October, 2000, he used the Russian word \u201cmultiplicator\u201d for animator.<\/p>\n

[9] <\/a>see http:\/\/academic.evergreen.edu\/curricular\/animatedvisions\/home.htm<\/a> for the program syllabus and description.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Below is an essay I wrote for the Animation Journal in 2007 describing three different interdisciplinary programs I\u2019ve collaborated on at Evergreen: Emerging Order; What to Make of It?, Animated Visions: Allegories of Resistance, and Marking Time: Rituals, Gestures and Languages of Movement. See Paul Ward\u2019s contextualization of \u00a0my work in his essay \u201cAnimation Studies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3910,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ruthhayes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/124"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ruthhayes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ruthhayes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ruthhayes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3910"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ruthhayes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=124"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ruthhayes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/124\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/ruthhayes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}