As we’ve mentioned before, Arts Council England rejected our application to be one of its National Portfolio Organisations because it was decided that Animate Projects did not fit into a “balanced portfolio”. NPO status would have meant core support for three years from April 2012, and would have enabled us to produce around 50 new works and exhibited over 150 experimental works online.
We have since asked Arts Council England, through their ‘complaints’ procedure, about their understanding of our work and of animation as an artform. And we asked Alan Davey, their Chief Executive, about comments he made on The Guardian’s Culture Cuts blog - “Animation is included in the funding decisions we announced yesterday. Yes, it's right that there is no single body dedicated to this work but galleries we fund, and moving image companies such as Film London, Lux and Film and Video Umbrella cover animation as part of their work.”
We said we did not agree with this statement because it confuses animation as a technique with animation as a pervasive artform with a distinct and substantial community of practice. We also outlined how the organisations he cited don’t work with the broad range of people that Animate Projects work with, eg those who may have commercial practice, or work in the creative industries; people who call themselves animators or filmmakers or graphic designers or ceramicists, and who have a range of different histories, traditions, contexts, and practice, and who reach different audiences with their art.
We reminded Arts Council England that Animate Projects is the only cultural organisation of its kind in the world and of the messages of support we have received about the detrimental impact that their decision will have on an entire community of practice.
We asked where there would be support of animation through the Portfolio, and how “the best mix of organisations..in terms of artform” could exclude animation.
Alan said he stands by his comments, and assures us that, whilst Animate won't be an NPO, animation and animators “will have opportunities to be supported through national portfolio organisations...the work of all national portfolio organisations is still being negotiated and the full context will become clearer later in the year.”
At Animate Projects we are now focusing on delivering our 2011 exhibition programme - including the first Animate OPEN, and the forthcoming Digitalis Commissions, supported by the Jerwood Charitable Foundation - and pursuing alternatives to Arts Council support so that we can continue to champion experimental animation.
Thanks again to everyone who has expressed support and sent encouraging messages over the past few months.
14 June 2011
9 June 2011
Animate OPEN Digitalis: deadline approaching
The deadline for submission is fast approaching – there’s one week left to apply, all entries must be sent by 10am Monday 20 June. It’s our first exhibition selected from an open call.
Animate OPEN Digitalis is for complete works by UK-based artists, animators and filmmakers, produced since January 2009. We are looking for works that - in a broad sense - explore, question, subvert or confound our expectations of art and the ‘digital’. Or which might be ‘anti’ the digital, emphasising the handmade, physically crafted.
A Jury will select up to ten films for exhibition and there will be two cash prizes - one awarded by the Jury (£1000), and an Audience Prize (£300), open to a public vote. Each artist included in the exhibition will be paid a £100 fee.
Entry to Animate OPEN: Digitalis is free.
Guidelines and how to submit
Animate OPEN Digitalis is for complete works by UK-based artists, animators and filmmakers, produced since January 2009. We are looking for works that - in a broad sense - explore, question, subvert or confound our expectations of art and the ‘digital’. Or which might be ‘anti’ the digital, emphasising the handmade, physically crafted.
A Jury will select up to ten films for exhibition and there will be two cash prizes - one awarded by the Jury (£1000), and an Audience Prize (£300), open to a public vote. Each artist included in the exhibition will be paid a £100 fee.
Entry to Animate OPEN: Digitalis is free.
Guidelines and how to submit
19 May 2011
Animate OPEN: Digitalis
Image: Digitalis © Sebastian Buerkner
Animate OPEN: Digitalis
A fresh open for experiments in animation
Animate Projects - the champion of experimental animation – announces a call for its first online exhibition to be selected from an open submission.
The Animate OPEN is part of Digitalis, a strand of activities throughout 2011 that sets out to explore, question, subvert or confound our expectations of art and the ‘digital’. And that includes ‘anti-digital’ - handmade, physically crafted animation.
Call for submissions deadline: 20 June 2011
Exhibition online: from July 2011
Jury Prize: £1000
Audience Prize: £300
Guidelines: animateprojects.org/opportunities
Entry: free of charge
For the Animate OPEN, Animate Projects is looking for experimental works by UK based artists, animators and filmmakers. The selected films will be presented online at animateprojects.org, from July 2011, accompanied by interviews with the artists. The films will also be featured in the Digitalis publication and at Digitalis events later in the year. Gary Thomas, Director of Animate Projects says: “We hope that the inaugural Animate OPEN will prove to be a platform bursting with experiment, to inspire and provoke discussions around creativity and the digital. And we are looking forward to discovering some awe inspiring stuff.”
The Animate OPEN Jury will select up to ten films for exhibition and there will be two cash prizes - one awarded by the Jury (£1000), and an Audience prize (£300) voted for by visitors to the exhibition.
The Jury members are Francesca Gavin, writer, curator and Visual Arts Editor at Dazed & Confused; Rebecca Shatwell, Director, AV Festival; Gary Thomas, Director, Animate Projects; and artist and music video director, David Wilson.
The Animate OPEN is supported by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Submission guidelines
Deadline for submissions: 10am, Monday 20 June 2011
The Animate OPEN exhibition will be online from July at
animateprojects.org
Animate OPEN: Digitalis press release
If you have any further questions please email digitalis@animateproject.org
8 April 2011
#CUJOPRIMITIVE twitter competition winners
Earlier in March we put together a competition to mark the UK DVD release of Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
A grand prize of three copies of the Primitive issue of CUJO of which only 1000 copies have been published were up for grabs, quite the treat!
We asked you to tell us three famous people or animals you would like to have been in your past lives. Here are our favourite and winning tweeters entries…
WINNING TWEETS...
BrickVanDee @AnimateProjects A white stoat, Ferdinand Cheval, Alla Nazimova #CUJOPRIMITIVE
PawelitoCom Hirundo Rustica, Jean Jacques-Rousseau, Μέδουσα #CUJOPRIMITIVE
caffeinatedmatt #CUJOPRIMITIVE If karma has nothing to do with it (because damn, I'd be in for it): Herodotus, Genghis Khan's horse, and Ho Chi Minh.
If you didn’t win and feel a bit sad then not to worry because you can purchase the DVD here
Uncle Boonmee.. and CUJO PRIMITIVE are part of the PRIMITIVE projects, as are the short films Phantoms of Nabua (which you can see here) and A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (see it here)
Lovely prizes to be delivered shortly, a big thanks to all who entered. You can follow @AnimateEngine and @AnimateProjects on twitter to keep an eye out for the next big give away!
A grand prize of three copies of the Primitive issue of CUJO of which only 1000 copies have been published were up for grabs, quite the treat!
We asked you to tell us three famous people or animals you would like to have been in your past lives. Here are our favourite and winning tweeters entries…
WINNING TWEETS...
BrickVanDee @AnimateProjects A white stoat, Ferdinand Cheval, Alla Nazimova #CUJOPRIMITIVE
PawelitoCom Hirundo Rustica, Jean Jacques-Rousseau, Μέδουσα #CUJOPRIMITIVE
caffeinatedmatt #CUJOPRIMITIVE If karma has nothing to do with it (because damn, I'd be in for it): Herodotus, Genghis Khan's horse, and Ho Chi Minh.
If you didn’t win and feel a bit sad then not to worry because you can purchase the DVD here
Uncle Boonmee.. and CUJO PRIMITIVE are part of the PRIMITIVE projects, as are the short films Phantoms of Nabua (which you can see here) and A Letter to Uncle Boonmee (see it here)
Lovely prizes to be delivered shortly, a big thanks to all who entered. You can follow @AnimateEngine and @AnimateProjects on twitter to keep an eye out for the next big give away!
31 March 2011
de-animation - Arts Council England's new Portfolio
Arts Council England’s head honcho Alan Davey was answering questions on The Guardian’s Culture Cuts blog this lunchtime, so we took the opportunity to ask why they’d decided, apparently, to exclude an entire artform - animation - from their new ‘Portfolio’ of funded organisations.
Apparently we were wrong - animation is there, Alan said. There are ‘galleries and moving image companies such as Film London (FLAMIN), Lux and Film and Video Umbrella cover animation as part of their work.’
[I think it’s worth noticing the use of the term ‘companies’. It’s what performing arts organisations call themselves.]
Alan, or whoever was feeding him the answer, is quite simply wrong on that one. Of course there is crossover with the work of arts organisations working in the moving image - but I’m sure that not one of those three organisations (and I know them very well) would lay claim to substantially supporting 'animation'. And when they do, their focus is exclusively on work by visual artists for a visual arts context.
The two ‘animation’ focused organisations that the Arts Council has supported for many years - onedotzero and Animate Projects - engage with a very different crowd and practice. onedotzero’s exporation of ‘new forms and hybrids of moving image’ has been a vital platform for creative practice beyond the boundaries of ‘visual arts’ practice, and at Animate Projects we crisscross those boundaries all the time.
We certainly work with ‘visual artists’, but usually to support them to work in new ways, for new contexts. And more commonly we work with people who work specifically within 'animation'.
It’s that support that is now missing - completely - from the new Portfolio - and therefore, from the Arts Council’s focus. Animate Projects and onedotzero have been taken out, and there's nothing that replaces them. Funds may be available through Grants for the arts, but that’s for projects - it simply won’t fund us to do much of what we do.
There is a depressing conservatism about the Arts Council’s decisions. Many digital/media organisations are being cut, and the Arts Council’s emphasis is on the ‘delivery’ potential of digital, as opposed to its creative potential. Their new initiative - Building Digital Capacity for the Arts - seems to be mainly about performing arts companies acquiring production skills to post trailers online.
We have regularly complained to the Arts Council about the lack of overview - their signal failure to develop an effective strategy for moving image, animation in particular, and digital work more generally. So that, consequently, the development of animation and its talent base has no context, no strategy, no critical mass and no nurturing.
And their response is to agree that they don’t have a specific strategy on moving image, animation and/or digital work. 'Just as there are no specific strategies for other visual arts sub art forms such as photography, publishing or live art.'
‘Sub art form’ feels a bit loaded to me. But anyway, unlike those other ‘sub forms', animation is not simply theirs not to have a strategy for. UK Film Council had been lax too - but one would have thought the two organisations might have had a conversation about animation. At some point.
They tell us that ‘the work [we] do is valued and well respected across the sector.’ That will be the ‘visual arts’ sector. We work with artists, but much of the animation we’re talking about is made by a different kind of talent - people who call themselves animators or filmmakers or graphic designers or ceramicists.. people who have a range of different histories, traditions, contexts, and practice, and who reach different audiences.
We’re pleased that Animate Projects has funding to enable us to deliver a programme of online exhibition for the coming year, and we hope to use that time to advocate more strongly - with others - for recognition of the importance and value of animation, and for a bit more respect for its audience.
Apparently we were wrong - animation is there, Alan said. There are ‘galleries and moving image companies such as Film London (FLAMIN), Lux and Film and Video Umbrella cover animation as part of their work.’
[I think it’s worth noticing the use of the term ‘companies’. It’s what performing arts organisations call themselves.]
Alan, or whoever was feeding him the answer, is quite simply wrong on that one. Of course there is crossover with the work of arts organisations working in the moving image - but I’m sure that not one of those three organisations (and I know them very well) would lay claim to substantially supporting 'animation'. And when they do, their focus is exclusively on work by visual artists for a visual arts context.
The two ‘animation’ focused organisations that the Arts Council has supported for many years - onedotzero and Animate Projects - engage with a very different crowd and practice. onedotzero’s exporation of ‘new forms and hybrids of moving image’ has been a vital platform for creative practice beyond the boundaries of ‘visual arts’ practice, and at Animate Projects we crisscross those boundaries all the time.
We certainly work with ‘visual artists’, but usually to support them to work in new ways, for new contexts. And more commonly we work with people who work specifically within 'animation'.
It’s that support that is now missing - completely - from the new Portfolio - and therefore, from the Arts Council’s focus. Animate Projects and onedotzero have been taken out, and there's nothing that replaces them. Funds may be available through Grants for the arts, but that’s for projects - it simply won’t fund us to do much of what we do.
There is a depressing conservatism about the Arts Council’s decisions. Many digital/media organisations are being cut, and the Arts Council’s emphasis is on the ‘delivery’ potential of digital, as opposed to its creative potential. Their new initiative - Building Digital Capacity for the Arts - seems to be mainly about performing arts companies acquiring production skills to post trailers online.
We have regularly complained to the Arts Council about the lack of overview - their signal failure to develop an effective strategy for moving image, animation in particular, and digital work more generally. So that, consequently, the development of animation and its talent base has no context, no strategy, no critical mass and no nurturing.
And their response is to agree that they don’t have a specific strategy on moving image, animation and/or digital work. 'Just as there are no specific strategies for other visual arts sub art forms such as photography, publishing or live art.'
‘Sub art form’ feels a bit loaded to me. But anyway, unlike those other ‘sub forms', animation is not simply theirs not to have a strategy for. UK Film Council had been lax too - but one would have thought the two organisations might have had a conversation about animation. At some point.
They tell us that ‘the work [we] do is valued and well respected across the sector.’ That will be the ‘visual arts’ sector. We work with artists, but much of the animation we’re talking about is made by a different kind of talent - people who call themselves animators or filmmakers or graphic designers or ceramicists.. people who have a range of different histories, traditions, contexts, and practice, and who reach different audiences.
We’re pleased that Animate Projects has funding to enable us to deliver a programme of online exhibition for the coming year, and we hope to use that time to advocate more strongly - with others - for recognition of the importance and value of animation, and for a bit more respect for its audience.
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