Theory, Culture &

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Animation/Re-animation
Ryan Bishop
Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 346
DOI: 10.1177/026327640602300261

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19_life_062697 10/5/06 10:24 am Page 346
346 Theory, Culture & Society 23(23)
Animation/Re-animation
Ryan Bishop
Keywords animation, art, media, science,
technology
A
s science became more enamored with not
only finding the secrets of nature but of
mastering them and turning the natural
world to the will of human society, the concept
of animation, converting dead tissue into a living
being again, captured the imagination of artists and
scientists in Europe in the late 18th and early 19th
centuries. This fascination, of wresting the power
of life from death by means other than the divine
or the metaphysical, was perhaps most memorably
evoked by Mary Shelleys gothic novel Franken-
stein, and is contextualized within a larger desec-
ularization of European society, and thus
constitutes the human as having power over life
and death, over nature, and thus becoming God
himself. The 1931 James Whale film version of
Frankenstein, which provided the monster with his
iconic bolts in the neck, explored many of the
issues about animation and re-animation found in
Shelleys novel but the medium, cinema, and the
immediate cultural-historical context of the film,
the 1930s and Europe creeping toward war again,
provides a repetition of and concerns about the
powers unleashed by technology, especially those
that can animate or provide the illusion of re-
animation. Cinema, as with Frankensteins
monster, is composed of an array of lifeless pieces
(film stock for the former and body parts from
corpses for the latter) that are sewn together
(editing, suturing) and infused with the simulation
of life through electricity (the projector in the
theater, the lab equipment in the laboratory). The
unconscious anxiety addressed in the film is that
the life it has created might be monstrous, and that
the very technologies that deliver humans this
divine-like power might not always deliver what
they promise.
The film further thematized the capacity
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found in various recording and projecting tech-
nologies from the 19th century onward, the
capacity to provide the presence of that which is
absent (often through death or time-space
distance). Representation, itself, provides such a
technology: the presence of that being represented
through the act or trick of the representation.
Early visual culture, such as magic lanterns,
zoetropes and photodromes, often depicted ghosts
or spirits, as if in acknowledgement of the power
of technology to animate and overcome time and
space. Similarly, the effects of early audio tech-
nology can be seen in the icon known the world
over of Nipper, the corporate logo of HMV
music and video shop. The image comes from a
late 19th-century painting that became popularly
but incorrectly known as His Masters Voice. The
painting depicted the dog, as in the current logo,
cocking its head in recognition of his masters voice
coming out of the horn (speaker) of a gramophone.
But the dog is sitting on a coffin, clearly indicat-
ing that the master is dead yet, through the capa-
bilities of aural technologies, his voice remains
present. Though inanimate himself, the voice is re-
animated by the gramophone.
From the Second World War to the present,
technologies of animation and re-animation repeat
and intensify the simulation of re-animation, as
well as its attendant ambivalence of empowerment
and dread, in computer-based virtual realms, IT
and tele-technologies. Many of these were
developed through and for military use, intensify-
ing the connections between animation and re-
animation the living and the dead and which
have now become an increasing part of global
consumer culture.
Ryan Bishop teaches at the National University of
Singapore in the Department of English and has
published on urbanism, military technology,
critical theory, avant-garde aesthetics and inter-
national sex tourism.