Siting animation: the affect of place

Goosebumps, hairs stand on end, a knot in the stomach, an inexplicable feeling of chill or even panic… walking through an unfamiliar place can have a visceral impact on the human subject. This chapter considers non-narrative animation that has been created to be part of an expanded or site-specific experience in which the viewer must visit a particular location and walk around to experience the work. Conventionally, the primary viewing context for animation involves the viewer being seated in a fixed position that she stays in for the duration of the viewing experience without significant change in her angle of view of the images on the screen before her. How does the viewing experience of animation differ if the work is installed in three-dimensional space as part of an art exhibition, museum display or visitor attraction rather than from a fixed seating position in a cinematic set-up? Through reference to examples of works by artists, Rose Bond, Birgitta Hosea, Pedro Serrazina and Xue Yuwen, in which contemporary animations are displayed as an intervention in historic spaces, the affect of site and the impact of the communal viewing context on the embodied perception of an animation is investigated. Hosea proposes a number of spectatorial positions that are inhabited by the visitor as well as exploring the notion of viewing as being sited. She argues that animation installation is not purely audiovisual as an experience, but also social, kinaesthetic, transcendental, subjective, material, spatial and discursive