Cut to Cute: Fact, Form, and Feeling in Digital Animation

Abstract

This conversation between art historian Johanna Gosse and artist and film-maker Peggy Ahwesh focuses on the role of digital animation in experimental film and media. Beginning with a discussion of Ahwesh’s practice of appropriating CGI animated news footage in her recent films, the conversation then broadens to address questions of genre, affect, politics, violence, labour, gender, and finally, the aesthetics of ‘cuteness’ in animation, which they contrast with Sergei Eisenstein’s influential writings on animation, particularly his theorization of ‘plasmaticness’.