Animated Wonderworlds / Animierte Wunderwelten Exhibition

Mythical creatures built of pixels inhabit fantastic worlds, flight simulators let us soar like birds and media facades transform entire buildings. Animated images like this are pervasive in our visual culture and define everyday life to such a degree that we hardly are aware of them. Hyperrealist feature films blur the boundaries between reality and fiction. Interactive applications like games or motion comics offer amazing bodily and spatial experiences. Animation also is used to give abstract data and information visual form and to make events at nanometer scale visible. The exhibition presents definitive works and the creative processes behind them, providing insights into the diverse worlds of animation in the digital era. The Museum für Gestaltung has presented a number of exhibitions on animation, including Animation – Der getrickte Film und seine Möglichkeiten (Animation: The Trick Film and Its Possibilities, 1972), and more recently Bewegte Schrift/ Type in Motion, which has been touring internationally since 2011. After to co-curation of Spacetricks (2005), in which co-curators Suzanne Buchan and Andres Janser focused on the profilmic materials used by contemporary animators to make their films, our current collaboration Animated Wonderworlds explores a set of themes in a heterogeneous selection of mainly digital and contemporary, often non-narrative animation, from data visualization and interactive apps to art, games, science, and consumer culture. The curatorial and editorial concept has a central aim: to enlighten visitors and readers about the origins and development of animation they encounter in everyday life. Animated Wonderworlds promotes interdisciplinary knowledge about animation design, production, distribution, and consumption. With its five thematic chapters of over 40 exhibit elements parenthesised by a photo essay, it encourages public interaction with a continuum of artworks, consumer goods, and moving images, allowing audiences to engage with ideas and artifacts simultaneously. They are complemented by Fischli (Fishies), a delightful, interactive “waterplay” with animation and sound, commissioned by the Museum für Gestaltung