ABSTRACT
WE WOULD DO WELL TO INSIST that movement is implicit and not explicit
in animation, if only to remind ourselves that even with the apparent radi-
calism of Walt Disney, movement is an illusion. Even as the technical means
become available to fl irt with dynamic possibilities of form, such as those
deployed in our Aegis Hyposurface,3 we should continually refl ect on the
latent or virtual dynamism that seems to be the essential kernel of anima-
tion. Rodin, we remember, decried Muybridge in his claim to having captured
movement in his freeze-frame sequencing, accusing that he had instead frozen
it, pinned it like a dead moth.4 We might then ponder the animate frenzy of
his bronzes, wrought by hand, which seem much more powerfully to be ‘actu-
alizing the virtual’,5 capturing the cinematic moment, than the literal capture
of movement affected by a new technology. Perhaps one might consider this
as the difference between the creation of an image of technological poten-
tial and the capture of a technic affect, the pursuit of a displaced cognitive
desire. For technological change becomes interesting only (really) insofar as
it infi ltrates cultural psychology and suggests new patterns of behaviour and
expectation. In the story of the monkey with the stick wiggling ants from an
ant hill, technology does not reside in the inanimate prosthesis, but fi rst in
heightened technical potential with the desire for ants that it propagates.6
