Simon Von Wolkenstein (Australia)
1 – University of Technology, Sydney
Simon Von Wolkenstein
Simon is an interdisciplinary animator and designer whose focus is on experimental story-telling and post-digital hybrid animation practice. He teaches animation across the PostGrad and Bachelor spaces at the University of Technology, Sydney in Australia. His studios guide students to develop their own voices in the creative application of digital and analogue making techniques. Through critical thinking they are encouraged to create cinematic visions that expand animation practice. Simon has extensive industry experience across film and television production as well as animation, print, typography, image making, model making and digital fabrication technologies. This includes cinematography, lighting, editing, directing and writing with a considerable body of work in motion graphics and 2D, 3D and hybrid animation projects. Simon is a graduate of Visual Communication (UTS) and Architecture (University of Sydney).
Abstract
The current generation of animation students in tertiary institutions evidence a growing desire to reach out for new ways to interact with animation storytelling and processes. They are a generation who have grown up immersed in a digital world and do not see novelty in digital techniques, as opposed to many of their mentors and tutors who are often from the first digital generation and still see ‘the digital’ as new.
This younger generation are developing new hybrid animation practices that combine the digital with the tangible, embodied production and the handmade, and previously silent voices. These developments incorporate diversified techniques, aesthetics, histories and processes and are tentative steps in a refreshingly speculative approach to animation and narrative that is more playful and less corporatized.
How do we foster these diverse voices that speak to stories and processes beyond mainstream pipeline concerns?
This paper looks at ways to approach this pedagogical post-digital future by folding in ideas and practices across disciplines. By taking a non-binary approach to the digital and the tangible and reinserting the physical into digital practice it may be possible to break the hegemony of the computer lab in tertiary education. It proposes that in re-embodying animation and reframing the digital as a waypoint and not the aim, we can bring a new relevance to animation education and practice and support a new generation of animators in their goals.
Palavras-chave: Hybrid Animation, Animation Education, Postdigital, Embodied Practice, Tangible
