The Animated Document: Animation’s Dual Indexicality in Mixed Realities

Abstract

Animation has become ubiquitous within digital visual culture and fundamental to knowledge production. As such, its status as potentially reliable imagery should be clarified. This article examines how animation’s indexicality (both as trace and deixis) changes in mixed realities where the physical and the virtual converge, and how this contributes to the research of animation as documentary and/or non-fiction imagery. In digital culture, animation is used widely to depict both physical and virtual events, and actions. As a result, animation is no longer an interpretive visual language. Instead, animation in virtual culture acts as real-time visualization of computer-mediated actions, their capture and documentation. Now that animation includes both captured and generated imagery, not only do its definitions change but its link to the realities depicted and the documentary value of animated representations requires rethinking. This article begins with definitions of animation and their relation to the perception of animation’s validity as documentary imagery; thereafter it examines indexicality and the strength of indexical visualizations, introducing a continuum of strong and weak indices to theorize the hybrid and complex forms of indexicality in animation, ranging from graphic user interfaces (GUI) to data visualization. The article concludes by examining four indexical connections in relation to physical and virtual reality, offering a theoretical framework with which to conceptualize animation’s indexing abilities in today’s mixed realities.

Reanimating the Master Narrative: How They Shall Not Grow Old Curates the Perception of Common Truth through CGI Animation

“…No object is a history unto itself but must be accompanied by a story which augments its trace. I would agree with Ehrlich (2020: 260) when she states: ‘The merging of the physical and virtual realities leads to an augmented view and experience of reality which exceeds the merely physical.’ Jackson also believes in hauntings, though he imbues his company, not the material object and its accompanying narrative, with the power to make soldiers ‘live again’. Every reformatted frame, paired with meticulously recorded sound effects and a soldier’s story which seems to parallel the action of the film, certainly brings something to life but, I will contend, it is not the individual soldier, but nationalism and all its familiar trappings and tropes.…”

“…Waltz with Bashir remains quite different from TSNGO as it uses animation when photographic images are not available in a process that Annabelle Honess Roe calls ‘non-mimetic substitution’, where animation is ‘a medium that has the potential to express meaning through its aesthetic realization’ (p. 226). Nea Ehrlich (2020: 260) similarly notes that Bashir takes advantage of virtual culture’s ability to discern truth within animation, claiming this use of animation ‘acts as real-time visualization of computer-mediated actions’, requiring us to question our definitions of animation and reconsider ‘its link to the realities depicted and the documentary value of animated representation’.…”

A Cloud Exhibition Hall System of Extended Reality Using Apriori Algorithm

“…In order to increase the reality of the system, it is necessary to generate shadows of objects, but real-time shadows will consume a lot of system resources [31] . In order to improve the performance of the system, for a large number of immovable objects in the scene, you can use the light mapping technology in Unity [32] . For example, the trees in the scene outside the exhibition hall can write the shadow information of the scene to the corresponding file through lightmap (lightmap technology) in Unity, which can be called in real-time during the running of the scene, saving a lot of system resources.…”