Talk Geometries: Towards Anime's sensorial vocabularies

Talk Geometries is a meditation on animation as an 'animating force of any kind' (Timothy Morton), that both establishes and maintains a peculiar relation to knowledge production in art due to its malleable character and dedication to reproduction and life-ness. The life-ness, reproductive capability, and inherent malleability reveal a resistance to structural coherence, hence generate a complex and challenging terrain for rationalising animation, that is, to formalise a persistent, linear vision. Specific forms of knowledge production, particularly the phenomena of idle talk or non-referential curiosity, link to animation in specific ways, and as such create the condition for 'futuring' animation's geometries. Animation's proximity to text and discursive constructions conditioned by specific politics of knowledge, social production, and the status of theory disclose what is at stake in the fundamental structural coherence between animation and forms of knowledge production as linked to socio-politically unsettling times. Tranquil hills initiates a double actualisation-conceptual, concrete-of film and/ as revolution taking account of three interrelated subjects: the relation between visual homogeneity and heterogeneous thought; the mapping of non–histories and apparatuses; the status of the collective character of a particular landscaping of film. Identifying these dynamics in two geopolitically distinct film works from 1969 and 1982, the diagrammatic meditations enact the definition of a time-space-politics, disclosing a material connection to quests for experimental analytical models-a future form of text. Tranquil hills links to the phenomenon of strategies in art to appropriate and subsume 'the political' without embedding its flattened understandings. The study aims to grasp a de-political moment in this saturation (overwhelming amount of political art and fictional collectives) with an economy of 'withdrawal by accumulation'-political shrinking. Two dynamics are at play: a politics of revitalisation without return, therefore a statement on historicity and its status in how we relate to linear time; a de-political moment which populates artistic practice. The exploration is dedicated to early landscape film as material agent in this process. This two-fold discussion paper traces research on 'futuring animation' presented at the Kinema Club Conference for Film and Moving Images from Japan XIII, January 17–18, 2014, Reischauer Institute, Harvard Univers