ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a theory of fantastical empathy by exploring potential embodied encounters with experimental animator Bret Battey's abstract computer animation Sinus Aestum (Brett Battey). It illuminates an under-examined intersection of animation and fantasy that is located in the nebulous psychosomatic spaces between the screen, the body and the imagination. The animation calls on cross-modal perception and a combination of sense memory, background knowledge and fantasy to assimilate its audio-visual information in ways that the body can understand sensually, regardless of the experiential alienness of its imagery. While all forms of animation and live-action film engage the embodied imagination, the concept of fantastical empathy suggests that different forms do so to different degrees. Although the theorization of fantastical empathy that has elaborated here applies specifically to a form of experimental animation that exists on the far end of the spectrum of figuration.
