Art and science are different ways of exploring the world, but together they have the potential to be thought-provoking, facilitate a science–society dialogue, raise public awareness of science and develop an understanding of art. For several years, we have been teaching an astro-animation class at the Maryland Institute College of Art as a collaboration between students and NASA scientists. Working in small groups, the students create short animations based on the research of the scientists who are going to follow the projects as mentors. By creating these animations, students bring the power of their imagination to see the research of the scientists through a different lens. Astro-animation is an undergraduate-level course jointly taught by an astrophysicist and an animator. In this article, we present the motivation behind the class, describe the details of how it is carried out and discuss the interactions between artists and scientists. We describe how such a programme offers an effective way for art students, not only to learn about science but to have a glimpse of ‘science in action’. The students have the opportunity to become involved in the process of science as artists, as observers first and potentially through their own art research. Every year, one or more internships at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center have been available for our students in the summer. Two students describe their experiences undertaking these internships and how science affects their creation of animations for this programme and in general. We also explain the genesis of our astro-animation programme, how it is taught in our animation department and we present the highlights of an investigation of the effectiveness of this programme we carried out with the support of an NEA research grant. In conclusion, we discuss how the programme may grow in new directions, such as contributing to informal STE(A)M learning.

The typical research project ostensibly begins with a question. The notion of establishing ‘questions worth answering’ which can be satisfied with confirmable answers is an orientation originally adopted from the sciences, and highlights the practical imposition of the academy to create rigor and consistency. Brad Haseman has suggested that an alternative to the posing of questions for those pursuing practice-based research in the creative arts is to begin with an ‘enthusiasm of practice’ from which useful knowledge may be generated, but returns to the need for the researcher to ultimately articulate a problem (if not a question) to pass the research credibility test. Is the illocutionary act of this retrospective ‘probleming’ not the same as a question? As the question demands an answer, the problem demands a solution. Perhaps this is the defining edge between practice as research and, simply, practice. The alignment of problem and solution (or question and answer) is suspiciously neat, and the form of language demands that they match neatly. Leaning on the experience of my own practice-based Ph.D. in creative media, this article will describe the positioning of improvisational animation production as a mode of practice-enthusiasm that can serve both as methodology and as epistemology for knowledge production in animation research (and related practices). I will discuss potential research questions related to improvisation for animator-researchers, and suggest that this mode of practice can yield useful, verifiable knowledge without recourse to the question–answer or the problem–solution formulation. In fact, the imposition of these, even post hoc, may undermine the research value of improvised practice and its epistemological clarity. The enthusiasm in this case may be the lack of answers or solutions that (at least linguistically) terminate the very origin of the enthusiasm for the practice.

This article reflects upon the recent intersection of two prominent figures in contemporary American culture, namely the celebrity and the animated animal. Historically, animated animals have achieved celebrity and stardom (e.g. Mickey Mouse), and, in turn, movie stars have made appearances in animated film (e.g. in Hollywood Steps Out (Tex Avery 1941)). But there is a novel convergence that occurs with the recent popularization of celebrity voice-acting in American feature animation. With celebrity voice-acting, the celebrity voice is disembodied and reassigned to an animated body, often that of an animal, and this concurrent vocal presence and physical absence allows celebrities and their animated animal counterparts to engage in a symbiotic relationship, relieving both the star and the animated animal of some aspect of their bodily confines: the star has the opportunity to dissociate his or her performance from the constant scrutiny of extratextual media representations of his or her body along with the personal fallibility implicit in those images; reciprocally, the animal character, often viewed in western traditions as a commodity or resource for consumption and ridicule, can transcend its bodily containment and linguistic impotence and participate in a social, cultural and political discourse by means of its borrowed celebrity voice.

The period between 1994 and 2004 was a unique moment in time for the TV animation community. It was a time of transition, when the introduction of digital tools caused irreversible changes to long-established 2D animation production pipelines. These new digital pipelines altered the time-honoured traditional roles of ‘old timers’ (senior artists) and ‘new comers’ (junior artists) and caused unparalleled revisions to conven¬tional production models. This article uses Lave and Wenger’s concept of ‘legitimate peripheral participation’ and Basil Bernstein’s ideas on ‘trainability’ and ‘recontextualization’ to discuss the changes brought on by the introduction of digital applications to a community of practice in flux. It focuses on the Toronto animation community as a microcosm of a global experience and uses Nelvana – one of Canada’s most influential and successful animation production companies – as a case study. By means of an interpretive phenomenological approach it analyses and evaluates the crisis during this period of time and describes the animation artists passage from resenting change to directing change within their industry and community.

Pillow Girl was half of a two-part project demonstrating the use of digital technology to create new components for existing works. In the case of Pillow Girl this entailed the creation of a visual element to compliment an existing audio work. The projects' second part used this same process in reverse, creating a new audio component for an existing visual work (specifically, the production of a soundtrack for a silent motion picture). This article will focus on the first part of the project (Pillow Girl), the creation of a new visual component for an existing audio source.

The anamorphic cinema is a research/creation project that proposes new ways to engage with moving images by applying digital imaging and animation to catoptric anamorphosis, a perspectival technique from the seventeenth century that deforms pictures so they appear to re-form in the reflection of a curvilinear mirror. Culminating in Ghost in the Machine: The Inquest of Mary Gallagher, a looping fifteen- minute, site-specific video installation investigating the culpability of a working class woman in the 1879 murder and beheading of another, this project problematizes representation as re-presentation. Dramatic performances of witness testimonies and newspaper texts, layered with diverse archival images form a network of narratives that revise the case within a context of nineteenth-century spectatorship, visual culture and disciplinary discourses. Made for exhibition in the historic Montreal neighbourhood called Griffintown, the location where the events it depicts took place, Ghosts emplaces and embodies multi-perspectival views, encouraging mobile spectatorship and passive interaction. Audience members cannot alter the work directly but their experiences are dependent on their relative positions and angles of view. The anamorphic cinema literally re-presents partial perspective and situated knowledge, materializing theory into phenomenological practice.

Some animation scholars assert that framing animation in a formal definition would necessarily impose intellectual limits on inquiry, while others contend that any definition wide enough to encapsulate the full gamut of ‘all things animated’ must be too wide to be meaningful. International organizations of animation ‘experts’, who have taken on the responsibility of helping humankind to understand animation, fare poorly in terms of their commitment to the pursuit of a definition, citing ‘too wide a range’ of things qualifying as being animation, and that forcing a definition could create dissonance within the animation community of scholars. Despite being experts however, the group will not formally say what properties or commonalities unite the things that they consider to be animated. After a pointed and persistent effort at uncovering a definition through spirited queries and dialogue with these groups of animation experts, I was left with many unanswered questions. Why don’t international organizations of animation scholars believe that a definition of animation is necessary? Is a definition of animation necessary? If these organizations of animation scholars cannot define animation, who can? Who will? If an ‘animated thing’ is part of a distinct group of ‘things that are animated’, then what are the properties of the thing that makes it a part of the group of ‘animated things’? Moreover, who would benefit from a definition of animation, and who would not? The purpose of this article is to explore and discuss some of these questions, in the hope that knowledge and understanding will result from the central question: what is the core set of properties that makes a thing ‘animated’?

We live in a society not only dominated by the screen but increasingly colonized by multiple moving-image ‘screens’. This article investigates aspects of the phenomenon of viewing multi-channel animated work that coexists with architecture. Referencing historic projections, such as Glimpses of the USA by Charles and Ray Eames (1959) as well as my own animated installations, I raise questions on how the brain may be processing multiple images and explore the concept of light in a window from the perspective of Gaston Bachelard and Thomas Kincaid in order to suggest differences between projecting on or projecting from – a difference between emanation and reflection. The article closes with brief thoughts on the window – illusion and collapse of 3D space, the image and the archetype and the idea of spectacle with content.