In/Animate Victims: Cultural Reactions to Animation

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Jonathan Watts (Tokyo), Kamal Ahmed, and Chris Mihill, “Cartoon Causes Fits in Young Viewers,” Guardian, December 18, 1997, 1.

2. Sheryl WuDunn, “TV Cartoon's Flashes Send 700 Japanese Into Seizures,” New York Times, December 18, 1997, http://www.nytimes.com/1997/12/18/world/tv-cartoon-s-flashes-send-700-japanese-into-seizures.html?pagewanted = all&src = pm. See also “‘Pocket Monsters’ Shock TV Viewers into Convulsions,” Japan Times, December 17, 1997, http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/nn19971217a9.html; and J. Snyder, “Cartoon Sickens Children”; and “Monster TV Cartoon Mystifies Japan,” Reuters Reports on ABC News, December 17, 1997.

3. For a comprehensive account of the physiological and cultural effects of the Pokémon episode, see Benjamin Radford and Robert E. Bartholomew, “Pokémon Contagion: Photosensitive Epilepsy or Mass Psychogenic Illness?” Southern Medical Journal 94, no. 2 (2001): 197–204.

4. “Denno Senshi Porygon” (“Computer Warrior Porygon”) Pokémon, season 1, episode 38, aired December 16, 1997. The sequence of flashes that triggered the mishap happened 20 minutes into the program.

5. Umberto Eco, “The Wolf and the Lamb: The Rhetoric of Oppression,” in Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism, trans. Alastair McEwan (Orlando, FL: Harvest Books, 2008), 56–7; and Joseph Tobin, ed., Pikachu's Global Adventure: The Rise and Fall of Pokémon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).

6. Watts, Ahmed, and Mihill, “Cartoon Causes Fits in Young Viewers,” 1, my emphasis.

7. Watts, Ahmed, and Mihill, “Cartoon Causes Fits in Young Viewers,” 1, my emphasis.

8. From George Grote, History of Greece, in Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, vol. 1, (London: John Murray, 1903), 286.

9. From George Grote, History of Greece, in Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom, vol. 1, (London: John Murray, 1903), 286.

10. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1, 477.

11. Aby Warburg, Ae.[sthetik], Warburg Institute Archive, Zettelkasten (unnumbered); and “Grundlegende Bruchstücke zu einer monistischen Kunstpsychologie,” Warburg Institute Archive III.43, 1–3. See also Horst Bredekamp, “Du lebst und thust mir nichts: Anmerkungen zur Aktualität Aby Warburgs,” in Aby Warburg: Akten des internationalen Symposions Hamburg 1990, ed. Horst Bredekamp, Michael Diers, Charlotte Schoell-Glass, Andreas Beyer, et al (Weinheim: Acta Humaniora, 1991), 1–7.

12. Ernst Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986), 71.

13. On the role of empathy theory in Warburg's early work, see Matthew Rampley, “From Symbol to Allegory, Aby Warburg's Theory of Art,” Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (1997): 41–55.

14. In one of his aesthetic aphorisms written on September 14, 1890, Warburg noted: “Two periods can be distinguished in man's perception of objects: 1. Anything alive is assumed to be hostile (Alles Lebende wird als feindlich angenommen) and capable of movement and pursuit, so that a position is taken up accordingly[;] 2. Anything alive is examined for the limitation of its movement, law, force. It turns out that man is not only a beast of prey but also a slothful creature.” Warburg, “Grundlegende Bruchstücke,” 39–40. Also cited in Gombrich, Aby Warburg, 76.

15. For a theoretical analysis of desire attributed to images, see W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005). For a collection of essays on the artwork as a “living being,” see Ulrich Pfisterer and Anja Zimmermann, ed., Animationen/Transgressionen: Das Kunstwerk als Lebewesen (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2005). On image and speech action, see Horst Bredekamp, Theories des Bildakts (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010).

16. Warburg, “Grundlegende Bruchstücke,” 1.

17. For a different view of this polarity, see T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 235–6.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Spyros Papapetros

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. This article draws from the introduction to my book On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2012). Parts of this research have been presented at conferences organized in conjunction with the exhibition Animismus (Animism), curated by Anselm Franke at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and E-flux in New York during 2011 and 2012