Spaces of wonder: animation and museology

When animation leaves behind the limited confines of the cinema screen to surface in the white cube, artists and musea no longer simply offer the viewer something to look at, but place him or her inside a space that incites exploration. More than purely a filmic practice, animation needs to be understood as the staging of an agency: the manipulation of intervals, not only between film frames, but also between images and objects in space. As optical toys already demonstrated, the animated image can only occur thanks to physical action and physiological response, always mediated by the observer. The history of animation should therefore not be dissociated from larger developments within twentieth century avant-garde art, just as the genealogy of the museum, the parallel evolution of both architectural and technological strategies of visualization and presentation is also part of the history of animation. The question then imposes itself to what extent the practice of animation brings in it’s own set of ‘problems’ or paradigms, and whether these are really new paradigms, or rather rooted in the past