No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Introducing the Technology of Animation in Classical Antiquity
Abstract
The desire to animate inanimate objects has been a recurring theme in European culture dating back to Greco-Roman times. This volume aims to establish, for the first time, the significance of this aspiration and its practical realization within Greek and Roman societies. While certain aspects have been explored previously, such as the role of automata in myth or their use in philosophical thought experiments, this study places technological animation as a phenomenon front and centre by examining technological devices across various media and their roles in diverse contexts. The study delves into the reciprocal relationship between technological and material realities, investigating how they influenced the concept of animation and vice versa—a cultural dialogue that has long been neglected. Foregrounding technological animation not only provides a new understanding of the processes behind animation, but also lends a fresh perspective to the discourse of the animated artifact. Whereas ancient animated artifacts are often explained away as a perceptual error induced by rhetoric, magic, theurgy or divine intervention, this study takes technological animation seriously by focussing on a subset of artificial animation produced solely through technical procedures. Together, the papers in the volume explore how various motive forces, such as water and air, pulleys, and other instruments, actively contributed to giving objects agency and impacting their viewers. Further, it examines how the material conditions of the artifacts themselves played a role in the process of technological animation, whether through the distinctive materiality of bronze or the design of a statuette’s hinge.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
This collection of essays on anthropological approaches to art and aesthetics is the first in its field to be published for some time. In recent years a number of new galleries of non-Western art have been opened, many exhibitions of non-Western art held, and new courses in the anthropology of art established. This collection is both part of and complements these developments, contributing to the general resurgence of interest in what has been until recently a comparatively neglected field of academic study and intellectual debate. Unlike some previous volumes on `primitive art' this collection is resolutely anthropological. The contributors draw on contemporary anthropological theory as well as on analyses of classic anthropological topics such as myth, ritual, and exchange, to deepen our understanding of particular aesthetic traditions in their socio-cultural and historical contexts. In addition, the cross-cultural applicability of the very concepts `art' and `aesthetics' is assessed. Each essay illustrates a specific approach and develops a particular argument. Many present new ethnography based on recent field research among Australian Aborigines, in New Guinea, Indonesia, Mexico and elsewhere. Others draw on classic anthropological accounts of, for example, the Trobriand Islanders of Melanesia and the Nuer of the Southern Sudan, putting this material to new uses. Sir Raymond Firth's introductory overview of the history of the anthropological study of art makes this volume particularly useful for the non-specialist interested in learning what anthropology has to contribute to our understanding of art and aesthetics in general. With its wide geographical and cultural coverage and plentiful illustrations, many of which are in colour, Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics will be a valuable resource for all serious students of the subject.
Mention of the wonder a work of art arouses regularly recurs in ancient literature, as the frequent expression of an aesthetic judgment. But as the representation of wonder in Greek literature generally develops down two paths that bear on the appropriateness of this emotion, on a “proper usage” of thaumazein, between astonishment as a vehicle of inquiry, and blind stupidity, the evaluation of aesthetic wonder is equally twofold: wonder at art's representational power is either considered as the completely reliable access to another world, which presents itself with all the characteristics of a living reality and incites a constantly renewed visual pleasure, or it is perceived as a lure, a snare for a suspicious mind.
We can identify social agents in our environment not only on the basis of how they look, but also on the basis of how they move—and even simple geometric shapes can give rise to rich percepts of animacy and intentionality based on their motion patterns. But why should we think that such phenomena truly reflect visual processing, as opposed to higher-level judgment and categorization based on visual input? This chapter explores five lines of evidence: (1) The phenomenology of visual experience, (2) dramatic dependence on subtle visual display details, (3) implicit influences on visual performance, (4) activation of visual brain areas, and (5) interactions with other visual processes. Collectively, this evidence provides compelling support for the idea that visual processing itself traffics in animacy and intentionality.
The Extended Artifact and the Monumental Economy: A Methodology for Material Agency
- J Robb
‘Towards a Theory of Material Engagement
- Ch Gosden
Current Approaches to Religion in Ancient Greece. Papers Presented at the Swedish Institute at Athens 17-19
- N Papalexandrou