ANIMAFEST PRO | ANIMAFEST SCANNER V | ANIMAFEST SCANNER V - Panel 1: Animation and Sports
Aesthetic, Affective, and Explanatory Functions of Animated Images in Sports Broadcasts – Erwin Feyersinger (University of Tübingen, Germany)
The closing ceremony of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang showed an effortless interaction of human performers with large-scale animated projections of revolving phenakistiscopes on the stadium floor. This combination of precinematic animation, digital display technologies, and actual bodies in motion is symptomatic for the strong integration of animation into contemporary sports broadcasts. The integration is two-fold: at the venue, LED screens and projections are used in various areas and are thus visible to both the audience on site and at home; in contrast, graphical overlays, animated transitions, abstracted replays, and virtual studios serve as extensions and augmentations of the televised images and are as such visible to viewers in front of the TV set or the computer screen (and to on-site viewers in mediated form on video walls).
In my paper, I will characterise sport events as highly aestheticised entertainment for global television audiences that showcase the versatility of animation. Sport events are prime examples for discussing the varied functions of animation because they are a meeting ground of several contexts animation has been used in. I will focus on three of its functions in this paper: animation as aesthetic experience, animation as emotional stimulus, and animation as information. For these three, I will trace trajectories from performance art, from VJing, and from data visualisation to sport events.
Dr. Erwin Feyersinger is a research associate in the Department of Media Studies at the University of Tübingen. His current research project focuses on theories of visual abstraction and dynamic visualizations. He is member of the editorial board of Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He is initiator and co-coordinator of the interest group AG Animation as part of the GesellschaftfürMedienwissenschaft (GfM). In 2017, he published Metalepsis in Animation: Paradoxical Transgressions of Ontological Levels (Winter) and co-edited two collections of German articles on animation: In Bewegungsetzen … BeiträgezurdeutschsprachigenAnimationsforschung (Springer VS) and ImWandel ... Metamorphosen der Animation (Springer VS).