Arturas Bukauskas
Creative part: ""Suddenly They Came to Life and Began to Crawl Inside, Intent on Eating My Brain". About Recursive Animation". Supervisor prof. Žilvinas Lilas
Theoretical part: ""Suddenly They Came to Life and Began to Crawl Inside, Intent on Eating My Brain". About Recursive Animation". Supervisor dr. Vilius Dranseika
I observe phenomena and experiences within living/nonliving boundaries. I study the systems that emerge there, where new modes of participation, self-organization and connections are established. The methods I use are hardware-enabled distortions of the perception of experienced time. I study human-nonhuman assemblages generated in an image. Within the totality of those states in which the manifestations of time are externally dynamized, I try to determine the forms of life and their activities. I introduce the term Animability, which describes the possibility of matter engaging in human-nonhuman interactions.
I suggest that changes in the state of systems under the influence of time-manipulating tools be called Animation.
In an attempt to problematize the concept of animation, I move in two directions – on the level of matter, where animation takes place in constant negotiations between living/nonliving, and on the level where animation takes shape as a cultural construct. Therefore, I try to construct the concept of animation as immanent for culture – cinema, memory culture, philosophy of time – and at the same time think about the animation of matter, in which the system establishes forms of common consciousness (bioanimation, animation of consciousness).
Another important element in my research is the concept of the tool. Animated approaches are instrumental approaches. I therefore observe the existence of the tools, their behavior outside their intended field, or how they move away in time from the tasks for which they were created and therefore expand the possible animation space for their current use. In other words, how their animability changes.
What is Animability. It is the inertia of the state of matter, the instability, the readiness to participate in possible human-nonhuman interactions. The performative ability of a tool to distort the linearity of time in interaction with a thing. All matter has animability, but I choose the tool as an artifact with an assigned scale of time.
The tool for me is, first and foremost, a time-distorting interaction with matter. Animability has all matter, but I choose the tool as an artifact with an assigned time scale exchange of matter. (Animability or what J. Bennet calls Thing-Power – “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle”).
