Speculative Animation: Digital Projections of Urban Past and Future
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores the growing presence of digital animation within the work of contemporary visual artists, architects and designers concerned with urban geography. While contemporary theorists such as Bernard Stiegler and Mark Hansen have emphasized the ways in which digital media technologies have colonized cultural memory and foreclosed access to a collectively envisioned future, socially engaged architects and artists have turned to animation as a medium that retains an important aesthetic potential. Digital animation has thus become a primary method for both envisioning alternative urban futures and reconstructing the traumatic past within politically engaged work. This article focuses on four examples, two past and two future-oriented. The conceptual artist Stan Douglas has recently, and uncharacteristically, adopted digital animation and gaming technologies in his Circa 1948 collaboration with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB). The interactive app allows Douglas to re-activate a repressed period of Vancouver’s past, thereby questioning the narratives of progress and property speculation that dominate the contemporary city. The work of Eyal Weizman and the Forensic Architecture project has increasingly involved the use of digital animation techniques to both reconstruct and visualize key dates or events within moments of humanitarian crisis. In the Rafah: Black Friday case study, for example, digital animation and 3D modelling are used to reconstruct a particularly intense four days of bombing during the 2014 Israeli military offensive in Gaza. The artist Larissa Sansour merges live action and digital animation to visually depict bleak and disturbingly convincing Palestinian futures, and the ‘speculative architect’ Liam Young has been employing animation techniques to present urban scenarios that teeter between the technologically utopian and dystopian.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 it