Rose Woodcock

Animation pedagogy often focuses on preparing students for work in the creative industries. As such, story and character development are emphasized over other possibilities of animation practice. However, I argue that movement – as a somatic practice – is fundamental to the task of teaching and learning animation. What better material to work with than the moving body with which we have all been practising since infancy? Yet movement is itself prone to fetishized imagery of hard-bodied frenetic motion that endangers its own body/bodies and habitats. This article explores the image of the soap bubble for thinking about the precarity of creative practice. To imagine the soap bubble as a practitioner of somaticity is to take on an ethics of the moving body that recognizes the precarity with which all bodies move while holding their form. I employ the inherent tensile ‘stretchiness’ of language to imagine what it would be to ‘move like a practising bubble’.

Amblyopia is a childhood condition in which best-corrected visual acuity in one eye is poorer than the other. Current treatments involve forcing the brain to privilege the affected eye, usually by blocking vision through the better one. Few studies have considered the binocular affordances provided by virtual reality (VR) headsets and the engaging qualities of electronic games as a treatment. To explore these opportunities, we introduce AmblyopiaVR. The system calibrates a user's VR view separately for each eye and engages them in play experiences. The objective is to encourage prolonged exposure to the treatment and improve vision in the weak eye. Specific aspects of the VR image can be altered in real-time, enabling researchers to investigate driving factors in amblyopia treatment. This paper presents the conceptualization and design of the system and its implementation, prototype-game ideas, and future user testing plans.

The design, and accompanying rhetoric, of stereographic '3D'virtual reality (VR) both draw significantly upon natural realism as a selfevident mode for imaging 'reality'. This rhetoric is taken up–uncritically–in a New York Times article on technology, in which a short film Star ...

The ambiguous representation of spatial depth in Thornton Walker’s painting The Homage creates a peculiar sense in which the ‘whereness’ of depicted objects and atmosphere cannot be ascertained by, either perspectival convention or perceptual strategies. This visual-spatial ambiguity resonates with my interested in ‘broken’ stereography. Hence, ‘duoscopy’ refers to the limitations of binocular vision when the object of perception is itself duplicitous

Animation is nothing if not visual, and the screen presupposes this defining mode. Yet, interdependent of it being visual, animation is nothing if not movement. The moving image first emerged in devices like Plateau’s 1832 phenakistoscope and Horner’s 1834 zoetrope, both succeeded by Reynaud’s praxinoscope in 1872. The magic lantern slide shows of the later 1800s employed limited animation techniques. Such devices helped ignite late Victorian fascination with movement and technology. For over a century, animation has found its form as projected imagery, leaping out from various technical apparatuses to animate screens large and small in fleeting frames of captured movement. By thinking outside the projection screen altogether we can draw from concepts and practices outside the Western canon of technologies of the moving image: a 5000-year-old Iranian vase that depicts frame-like images of a jumping goat, Palaeolithic cave drawings showing ‘movement’ through overlaid instances of ani...

Despite Wheatstone’s academic interests in the device, the stereoscope languished somewhat as an optical toy. Yet the advent of 3D screen-spaces for home and mass entertainment suggests today’s consumers and practitioners of screen culture hold the view that screen culture will be ‘improved’ through 3D imaging technologies. Like cinema and photography, stereoscopic 3D imaging has the potential to transform visual culture. But what is transformed, as optics and electronic imaging techniques deliver Alice in Wonderland in 3D? This paper links the advent of 3D cinema and TV to the notion that vision is itself a ‘technology of the visual’. As such, our innate binocular stereoacuity is ripe for exploitation by developers of 3D imaging technologies. I argue that contemporary 3D imaging marks an epistemological visual-perceptual shift: toward screenspaces becoming spaces for potential action. Such a shift entails seeing as doing rather than seeing as thinking. 3D imaging exploits binocular...

The acquisition of three-dimensional immersive space through advanced digitial imaging technology, suggests a profound shift from the relatively impoverished representational stratgies of two-dimensional pictorial imagery.  This entails an epistemological shift from pictorial representation, to the presentation of actual three-dimensional space through stereoscopic (3D) imagery.  Moreover, it suggests that visuality rather than 'virtuality' is the core issue in understanding the nature of the epistemological shift associated with stereo-immersive VR. A shift in visual epistemology from 'flat' pictorial representation to three-dimensional stereo-immersion suggests a gainful move toward a visuality imbued with spatial possibilities.  In quantitative terms, these visual-spatial gains may seem self-evident.  However, certain aspects peculiar to pictorial representation are missing from stereo-immersive imaging.  That is lost in stereo-immersive imaging, and how it can be...

Explores space and object relations in a digital 3-D animation production, "Moving-Image". The exegesis examines these relations through an analysis of pictorial realism in painting. The illusion of three dimensional forms in the space of the computer screen is contextualised by investigation of the work's underlying digital conditions.

Amblyopia is a childhood condition in which best-corrected visual acuity in one eye is poorer than the other. Current treatments involve forcing the brain to privilege the affected eye, usually by blocking vision through the better one. Few studies have considered the binocular affordances provided by virtual reality (VR) headsets and the engaging qualities of electronic games as a treatment. To explore these opportunities, we introduce AmblyopiaVR. The system calibrates a user's VR view separately for each eye and engages them in play experiences. The objective is to encourage prolonged exposure to the treatment and improve vision in the weak eye. Specific aspects of the VR image can be altered in real-time, enabling researchers to investigate driving factors in amblyopia treatment. This paper presents the conceptualization and design of the system and its implementation, prototype-game ideas, and future user testing plans.

In proposing an ontology of motion capture, this paper identifies three modalities — capture, hold, release — to conceptualise the peculiar affordances of motion capture technology in its relationship to a performer’s movement. Motion capture is unique among contemporary moving image media in its capacity to re-perform a performer’s recorded movement a potentially limitless number of times, e.g. as applied to innumerable different CG characters. Unlike live-action film or even rotoscoping (motion capture’s closest equivalent), the movement extracted from the captured performance lives on, but only by way of the inimagable (non-visible) domain of motion data. Motion data ‘holds’ movement itself in inimagable form, and ‘releases’ it in the domain of the digital moving image. This tri-fold conception relates an important dimension of (Heideggerian) Being to the idea of movement as fundamental to an ontology or ‘being’ of motion capture. At the same time, the proposed ontology challenge...

The design, and accompanying rhetoric, of stereographic '3D'virtual reality (VR) both draw significantly upon natural realism as a selfevident mode for imaging 'reality'. This rhetoric is taken up–uncritically–in a New York Times article on technology, in which a short film Star ...

Explores space and object relations in a digital 3-D animation production, " Moving-Image". The exegesis examines these relations through an analysis of pictorial realism in painting. The illusion of three dimensional forms in the space of the computer screen is ...