Anonymous backgrounds. A matter of re-ordering weather modifications

  • Gfader, Verina (Researcher)

Project: Research

Project Details

Description

This art research (book) project investigates in (Re)thinking Landscape and Ecologies through anime backgrounds; including studies at Asia Art Archive and Videotage, Hong Kong.

Research conducted at Asia Art Archive and Videotage, Hong Kong (and relevant Japanese film archive in case of travel arrangement across Asia).
Asia Art Archive, 11/F, Hollywood Centre, 233 Hollywood Rd, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong. (AAA is a longterm collaborator)
Videotage, Hong Kong, Ma Tau Kok, Ma Tau Kok Rd, 13 , Cattle Depot Artist Village, 13.
Part of the trip to Hong Kong is a consultation with Prof Max Hattler, City University of Hong Kong, who will be a mentor and will share some expertise on artistic Asian animation.

This artistic research project has received two grants: One by Stiftelsen Malmö Stads jubileumsfond and the other one by Stiftelsen Landshövding Per Westlings minnesfond,


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OUTLINE.

Anonymous backgrounds. A matter of re-ordering weather modifications.

The plain film landscape appears to be most inhabited and illuminating when it withdraws into the background, is a backdrop of an action and scene. In this backyard state, the landscape–similar to dust particles–achieves a strange cloudy neutrality or anonymity and is able to “express particulars of different fields and territories in terms of universals.”

Over the past two years I have been studying anime backgrounds found in The Watanabe Hideo Collection at Archive Center for Anime Studies, Niigata University (see previous grant from Stiftelsen Landshövding Per Westlings minnesfond). The backgrounds are painted with watercolours in both delicate and sometimes rough, wild ways. As a backdrop to the scene, action, story to unfold, those fascinating land- and cityscapes disclose a sense of place without denoting a place. In their peculiar neutrality or anonymity, the land- and cityscapes–also cosmic spheres– feel like apparitions. Something, some information, atomic kernel is missing or blocked, is still to be incorporated. In ‘The Fog Medium: Visualizing and Engineering the Atmosphere’ Yuriko Furuhata highlights the genealogy of the fog and how strategies of weather modifications form an extensive history and narrative around ‘atmospheric explication,’ the transformation of the environment into an object of manipulation, often to disastrous ends. The disaster’s ghost in that sense is manifest in the cloud/fog, and is most visible in how the cloud/fog transposes us to another reading of our environs.

In this larger research project I speculate upon the durational anonymous landscape both in anime (past and present) and landscape film of the 1960s Japan/East Asia, and how this landscape is expressive of a shared question around the mechanisms at play in ways of seeing and perceiving the manipulative quality in film landscape and its environs. A second, interrelated question of particles (fog, smoke, dust, clouds) that appear in anime as a particularly estranging and blocking effect/affect on screen, and that speak to us, is part of this thinking beyond technological (weather) manipulation and withdrawn obfuscating visibility, our capacity for imagination, and ultimately the landscape’s symbiotic relation with us. What does the (filmic) landscape and the material politics of the present tell us about temporality, endurance, disappearance, emergency, and disaster?

When dust particles are composed, they combine countless terms, languages and materials belonging to entirely different kingdoms...*

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Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan ( ) and its hand-painted backgrounds, sets. Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes ( ) / comment by Toshiya Ueno.
Akira’s opening scene of a nuclear event (missing sound).
Dario Lolli, 'On Shinkai Makoto, Spiritual Imagination and Animation Ecologies,' 2021.
Yuriko Furuhata, 'The Fog Medium: Visualizing and Engineering the Atmosphere,' 2019.
Landscape film and theory (fûkeiron) of the 1960s.
Kiu-wai Chu, ‘Animating Shanshui: Chinese landscapes in Animated Film, Art and Performance.’ In Chris Pallant (ed) (2015) Animated Landscapes: History, Form and Function.
*Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials, 2008.


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Study unique and not yet distributed material at relevant East Asian Archives, thereby revealing 'new narratives around anime and the present' as well as enhancing the institutions' visibility and significance.

Collate material toward a discreet publication. On the basis of both archival studies and also by staging a Micro- roundtable with relevant collaborators in Hong Kong.

Contribute profoundly to a current discourse around 'Ecology,' here deeply linked to filmic visuality in anime, which arguably forms a a natural, symptomatic relation to the very present.

Foster trans-disciplinary collaborations across diverse geopolitical terrains (Europe–Asia) and in particular, contribute to the expansion of a de-colonial movement through (art) research with its unique epistemological claims.

Establish a longterm relation between Malmoe Art Academy and relevant artistic research driven Archives/Agencies in Hong Kong as well as with Prof Max Hattler.


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OUTCOME

_Artist book / printed matter.
_Micro-roundtable (meeting without walls) in Hong Kong.
_Continuation of a semi-fictional story. chapter 6 of this ongoing story.
chapter 1, extract from a performance lecture, titled Wild Iconographies, Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, December 2017.
https://aaa.org.hk/en/programmes/programmes/verina-gfader-wild-iconographies
chapter 2: Contribution ‘Mis/print Paris’ (text and insert: limited edition riso print), in Journal de l’Université d’été de la Bibliothèque Kandinsky n°5, Publications d'artistes: de l'atelier à la bibliothèque (et vice-versa) / Artists’ Publications: From the Studio to the Library and Back Again. Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2019. 305–08.
chapters 3, 4; Como–Tokyo 2019.
chapter 5: SADO epiphany. The Watanabe Hideo Collection at Archive Center for Anime Studies, Niigata University.















StatusActive
Effective start/end date2023/01/012028/12/31