From the 1950s through the 1990s, the trope of performance was elaborated across a range of academic disciplines, providing a platform for comparing the construction of identities through mimetic embodiment in ritual, work, and everyday life. Today, as animation is being remediated through digital media, both scholars and participants in various types of online communities are beginning to use animation as a trope for human action on/in the world. This essay attempts to bring together the insights of recent scholarship in various disciplines in order to outline a general animation model, first presenting some of the characteristics of animation that allow it to draw connections between social, technological, and psychic structures, and then examining some of the ways that the models of animation and performance interact in contemporary subcultural practices. [animation, performance, remediation, media ideologies, techno‐cultures]
This article analyzes the Pili International Multimedia Company's “digital video knights‐errant puppetry” serials, a popular culture genre unique to Taiwan, to answer two questions. First, how do digital technologies, originally developed to meet the needs of the American military and entertainment industries, become embedded in a different cultural context? Second, how does this embedding allow media technologies to become something through which distinctly local models of globalization itself may be imagined? Analyzing both the style of the serials and the discourse of producers and fans, I argue that new media technologies, despite their foreign origins, may not only be adapted or resisted, but may also come to be imagined as emerging from local aesthetics and local needs. Through the specific ways they utilize both digital and traditional technologies, the Pili producers and fans construct a utopian vision of what globalization might look like if Taiwan were at the center.
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