OPENINGS

09 Beyond, AI & Animation

In collaboration with Lugano Animation Days

Teatro Foce

Thursday 13th November

20:00

“We are all robots when uncritically involved with our technologies.”
— Marshall McLuhan

The rapid transformation of technology through Artificial Intelligence affects every layer of society, and all professions seem to be in a process of redefinition. This provokes reactions, denial, anger, fear, lawsuits. Information is deployed and crisscrossed to serve personal or corporate agendas. One thing seems to be certain, the genie is out of the bottle and many of our work habits will be redefined, new professions will emerge, and a deep analysis of our human understanding needs to be addressed.

Arguments such as the ethical issue to scrapping online material and the ecological impact of machine learning training (CO2 emission comparisons), are immediately and loudly invoked as infringement to human rights. But we find it important to raise the questions: is it not perhaps time for a shift in the understanding of proprietorship? When calling for ecological consciousness, are we not all invited thus to dig into our own personal behaviour? How do we personally use social media? Do we not constantly consume images from others and feel the urge to constantly share our photos, reels, thoughts, fleeting moments? When does ecology start? Who is to judge?

Kate Crawford’s analysis of AI and mechanization, takes us to the depth of our tech driven world today rooted in the birth of industrialization, dehumanising labour conditions and the birth of the mining industry. Her book “Atlas of AI” is an imperative read for anyone who feels the urge in setting a pace with references, ethical considerations and economical circumstances driving our world. In short, AI is nothing but a continuation of our craze for extraction and production. Not to minimize the issue that we come to the age of AI through decades of intense social media attention harvesting, internet scrapping for the benefits of corporations, and generations of youngsters completely dependent on slot retribution “likes” screenlighting faces and souls to oblivion.

Within the filmmaking industry, the animation sector appears to be the most directly impacted by this upheaval. Although we will make the point that AI generated videos, images or sequences, should not necessarily be defined as animation (perhaps it's best to treat it as simulation), most media, funding sectors, or known professionals such as Hollywood's Guillermo del Toro, seems hellbent on attaching AI work as a substitute for animation. Thus, by this analogy, the process of animation seems to be reduced to prompts, reference images, a defined style, all applied through generative AI models to produce animated sequences.

There is a pronounced sense of loss, a feeling that an entire craft might be swallowed by automation. Historically, artistry is to animation what film stock is to traditional cinema. Yet what may appear to be the first casualty of this generative age could, paradoxically, lead to a renewed awareness of process itself, and the key to finally see things differently. We are, nonetheless, entering a new dimension of existence in our marriage to virtuality.

We have become accustomed to a product-oriented world, in which we consume finished outcomes rather than live through formative experiences. We equate virality with success; clicks have become currency. Time, displaced. Yet in art, as in life, it is the process that shapes our reality — the product merely serves as the outcome that can, in turn, feed new processes.

In collaboration with Lugano Animation Days festival, we propose an open and participative round table: an invitation to reflect collectively on generative AI through the lens of animation and filmmaking. Participants and guests will be guided into an open discussion that is technical, existential, philosophical, ethical, and political and, hopefully, thought-provoking.

Jürgen Hass will share his lifelong experience in animation, having helped establish and lead the BA in Animation at HSLU (Hochsule Luzern). His experience, vision, doubts and reflections will serve as a vehicle to open debate.

The word animation comes from the Latin animatio, rooted in the Greek anemos, literally “breath” or “wind”: to breathe life into. When applied to images, this vital energy takes on a technical and aesthetic sense: an illusion of life. While the motion picture implies recorded movement, an indexical relation between the moving world and its reproduction on screen, and cinématographe (coined by the Lumière brothers, from Greek kínēma, “movement”) relates to the perceptual experience of movement, animation does not record life; it simulates it. It introduces a mythic or demiurgic dimension: the animator acts as creator, bestowing anima upon drawings, clay, pixels and algorithms.

Humanity has always been fascinated by artifice and, in many ways, by automation. To reference but one example, Heron of Alexandria (10–70 CE), known as Mechanicos, staged automata and three-dimensional performances, producing temple statues with nodding heads and complex theatrical devices. Figures moved, doors opened, and fire appeared, all controlled by hidden systems of pulleys, weights, and air pressure. The sense of illusion produces feeling, connection to the unknown and creative structures. This is something our current vertical growth in technology is very much imbued in. The feeling of unprecedented prowess in the air.

When using AI generative tools and models it is clear that there is an underlying intention in the produced outcome. In the course of a generation, looking up information stepped from physically walking in a library finding and opening books, to digitizing information to a server, to relating this information through algorithms and guided research, and through AI to a relationship seemingly crushing process into seconds. However, reality is, as Alfred North Whitehead thoroughly proposed, is process in time. Physical spaces lost to automation must open new spaces within our own selves.

Carl G Jung used “enantiodromia”to describe the emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time. Enatiodromia literally means "running counter to.” This principle, derived from the Greek philosopher Heraclitus (480 - 535 BC), suggests that when one tendency becomes too dominant, a powerful counter-tendency emerges from the unconscious to compensate for the imbalance.

As Erik Davis brilliantly notes and extensively explains in his book Techgnosis, “Technology is a trickster”, not a neutral tool. “It beckons us through the doors of innovation and traps us in the prison of unintended consequences.” Perhaps one of these consequences is the feeling that we are staring at ourselves through a distorted mirror. Like Narcissus captivated by his reflection, caught in a narcotic feedback loop, our constant pursuit of clicks and surface recognition may conceal a deeper impulse, a yearning for renovation. It is an igneous transformation. And “Fire” observed Heraclitus, “finds repose in change.” Nothing less than our soul is at stake. Renovation, unlike innovation, is rooted in our spiritual history.

Our psyche, or anima, strives for creative imagination — a shared feeling of being human, not devoid of surrender to the larger creative event that is life itself. It also yearns for love. Perhaps because nothing feels as certain and truer than the feeling and acceptance of love, as a God given talent for humanity.

In 1919, neurologist and psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud coined the term uncanny (das Unheimliche), literally “the unhomely”: that which becomes strange, estranged, or repressed. “That class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” The uncanny is not pure fear; it is recognition twisted, the sense that something should be alive but isn’t, or should be dead but moves.

To animate, to give life to the inanimate, is itself an uncanny gesture. It crosses the line between object and subject, between dead and living, mechanical and spiritual. Thus, in animation (and automata, puppetry, robotics, and AI art), the uncanny arises not merely from appearance, but from what it implies metaphysically: what is true? As artificial beings become more lifelike, empathy increases, until a threshold is reached where they are almost human, and the response drops into discomfort.

Taking this definition further, Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori (森政弘), recently deceased, developed the concept of the “Uncanny Valley”, one of the most influential ideas in modern aesthetics, robotics, and animation theory. In his article Bukimi no Tani Genshō (“The Uncanny Valley Phenomenon”), published in the Japanese journal Energy (1970), Mori plotted a graph of human likeness (x-axis) against emotional affinity (y-axis). As robots become more humanlike, empathy rises until a point where they are almost human, but not quite. At that threshold, emotional response plunges into discomfort: the uncanny valley. If perfect likeness is achieved, the curve rises again, a real human evokes full empathy.

The uncanny valley marks the failure of animation to fully animate: when the illusion of life becomes too accurate, it exposes its own artifice. Are we now surpassing this threshold through generative AI, reaching a full likeness that blurs the line between fact and fiction, between semblance and reality? How does this affect our understanding of truth, and of human-to-human connection? Fake and fact mash in a social and digital soup, an ontological demand to connect to what is present without the agency of profit. Humanity, once again and in the face of turmoil and contradiction, is called to separate what is important with that which is essential.