Bibliographic record
Abstract
THE SHARPEST POINT: ANIMATION AT THE END OF CINEMA Edited by Chris Cehman and Steve Reinke Toronto: YYZ Books and Images Festival/Ottawa: Ottawa International Festival, 2005, 288 pp. In his essay World Is a Cartoon: Stray Notes on Animation, video artist Steve Reinke makes it clear that defining something as slippery as animation does not interest him. The Sharpest Point, co-edited by Reinke and film programmer/curator Chris Gehman, is likewise a multiform collection of diverse texts on animation topics rather than an attempt at laying the groundwork for a discipline. Gehman and Reinke offer animation as the leading edge, the sharpest point of moving image culture in the digital age. Through its proliferation both on and off screen, from the web to the digitization of the cinema, animation has been theorized of late as a malleable, post-cinematic, audiovisual, meta-medium capable of encompassing all preceding forms of moving image-making. (For some, making any film with CGI is a work of animation.) As the co-editors put it in their introduction, Animation has become a kind of black hole or singularity through which all of cinematic practice must now pass, emerging forever changed on the other side. Whether or not this formulation survives, it has thrown up a challenge which existing theories of the moving image, traditionally organized around questions related to the characteristics of the photographic image, can scarcely ignore. Reinke's essay offers a concise and intellectually invigorating summary of several major theories of animation (Manovich, Deleuze, Cubitt), while also emphasizing the medium's elusiveness and mystery. He suggests that animation has the potential to signal the death knell of cinema's century-long dependence on not only narrative but on representation tout court. As Cubitt has before him (in his 2005 book EcoMedia), Reinke also connects animation to recent theorizations of the animal in visual culture by focusing on the ontological conundrum posed by a mosquito in Richard Linklater's 2001 film Waking Life. What existential status does the pesky insect have? Did it exist in the indexical reality recorded by Linklater or was it added in post-production? In suggesting that this mosquito-which is quickly exterminated-throws Waking Life into a liminal state between live action and animation, Reinke asserts that animation has yet to be treated as possessing a moral or ethical dimension the way live-action fiction and particularly documentary have been. Reinke's essay foreshadows many of the productive tensions that will arise as themes of the anthology. On first reading The Sharpest Point, I was put off by the eclecticism of the selection, with dense essays rubbing shoulders with short descriptive texts by artists. In addition, there are several scripts and excerpts, accompanied by illustrations and synopses, of animated works by practitioners Libby Hague, Jude Norris, Percy Fuentes, Daniel Barrow, and Jim Trainor. There is also a transcribed oral presentation (Pierre Hebert on animation's relation to other art forms), a journalistic piece on a computer-imaging subculture (John Sobol on the demoscene), and a short essay on a single title, Eric Henry's 1997 video Wood Technology in the Design of Structures (by Daniel Cockburn), thrown into the mix as well. On further reflection I came to accept that the anthology's heterogeneity is necessary, reflecting as it does both the untidy proliferation of the medium into so many different forms and the chaotic state of writing on the subject. Due to the antiquated stigma of animation's near-exclusive association with child audiences, texts that advance a theoretical view have been late in coming. It is a truism to state that the field of academic animation studies is still in its early stages, despite several books, a couple of peer-reviewed journals, a few scholarly anthologies (though The Sharpest Point follows The Illusion of Life: Essays on and A Reader in Studies in being narrowly distributed), and a number of conferences and festivals. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".