Next, artist filmmaker Mary Stark’s paper focused on the largely forgotten history of female editors in the film industry between 1895-1927, pointing to early associations of cutting and joining film with craft-based practices of cutting and sewing cloth-both considered menial women’s work until editing started to be seen to play a more primary role in the artistic process, and male editors began to predominate. Honess Roe pointed to the ambivalence of such an equation: on the one hand celebrating and validating the creative contribution of women’s independent animation coming from the margins, but simultaneously being attentive to the potentially less helpful ghettoising aspects of such a categorisation. Referring primarily to Paul Wells’ influential 1998 book Understanding Animation, Annabelle Honess Roe (University of Surrey) began the panel with a talk that questioned a tendency in animation studies to align women’s animation with feminism and experimental or unorthodox aesthetics, describing the ‘feminine aesthetic’ as ‘ inevitably political’ in its opposition to the male-dominated mainstream. The first panel, entitled ‘Women in film poetry and animation: feminist perspectives’ addressed issues related to the shifting place of women in the production and labour of film and experimental animation. Thomas’s reference to Animate Project’s self-description as an organisation that ‘works at the intersection of animation, film and art’ set the tone for the rest of the day’s broader interrogation and situating of experimental and expanded animation’s place within today’s multimedia landscape/ecology, if not the creative diversity and formal heterogeneity of the animated medium more broadly. His talk took the audience through a brief history of British experimental animation by way of the various organisations, sites and funding schemes that have afforded a range of artists the opportunities to produce experimental works in the UK since the 1960s. ![]() Thomas has been instrumental in the development of independent animation in the UK since he began working for the Arts Council England/Channel 4 Animate scheme in 1992. The conference began with a keynote from Gary Thomas, co-director of Animate Projects (with Abigail Addison). Hamlyn’s observation during the round table that culminated the day’s conversations regarding the difficulty of summarising developments in this elusive art form over the last fifty years therefore reflected the overarching ethos of the day, borne out in a number of the papers presented. Changing technologies and moving image art contexts have meant that contemporary experimental and expanded animation appears across multiple platforms, from cinemas, public sites, festivals and galleries to online and digital platforms. The Experimental & Expanded Animation conference offered a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches broader themes of the conference included feminist perspectives, posthumanist and new materialist approaches, intersections with science and technology, engagements with space and place, and experimental and expanded animation’s evolution over time. With many of the event’s speakers being practitioner/scholars, a particular focus on expanded animation practice allowed for insightful investigations into developments in animation performance, technological intervention and live ‘making’, drawing continuities between contemporary work and traditions of experimental animation and expanded cinema. Organised by Smith and Hamlyn themselves, the aims of the conference were to investigate “further into understandings of what experimental animation is and has been since Robert Russett and Cecile Starr defined it 1976.” The day’s talks mirrored the book’s desire to both pay a debt to foundational work within the critical study of experimental forms and also to plot a new set of possible pathways for their close interrogation. Vicky Smith and Nicky Hamlyn’s book, published in late 2018, was the catalyst for the one-day conference Experimental & Expanded Animation, which took place on February 13th at the University of the Creative Arts, Farnham. Over the last few years there has been a rise in the number of screenings, performances and academic publications related to the multifarious art form, including the recent edited collection Experimental and Expanded Animation: New Perspectives and Practices (2018) (Fig. ![]() 43 years after the publication of the first edition of Robert Russett and Cecile Starr’s seminal text Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology, experimental animation seems to be finally experiencing a very welcome surge of public interest and critical attention.
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