ABSTRACT
The nature of digital ephemerality is explored in Aylish Wood’s writing, which constitutes an integral contribution to understanding digital materiality; her layered deconstruction ranges from the surface manifestation of the digital to its most fundamental ingredients and operations. Digital animation has the capacity, when viewed through Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of ‘remediation’, to reflect qualities commensurate with analogue avant-garde and experimental artistic expression: A materiality that engages the senses, reflexivity, aesthetics that range beyond seamless photorealism and literal representation, and a questioning of formal and narrative conventions. Manovich’s 2006 essay ‘Understanding Hybrid Media’ however, reveals a change of heart, an exponentially increased enthusiasm for digital animation’s creative capabilities. In spite of the generational divides, the question arises as to whether experimental digital animation – in the subversive spirit of previous avant-garde movements – might also critique political and cultural systems that are unreservedly accepted as normative.
