Hack the Barbican is now running over the next four weeks at London’s Barbican Centre, from August 5 to 31. Open daily during regular opening hours the London institution will be a hive of activity throughout its theatres and foyers as artists, entrepreneurs and technologists look to their boundaries and stretch them as far as they can with experiments in post-apocalyptic Beekeeping, “barbicoins“, arcade games of the future and much more.
See Lanyrd.com for the full schedule. **
Next month starts one of those exhibitions which will delight big & small equally. A dream within a dream taken out of the insomnia and creative seizures that artists like Étienne-Jules Marey or Walt Disney used to suffer.
A historical trip through the animation history produced in the last 150 years going from the emergence of the animated image, from early scientific experiments with photography to the latest wonders of computer generated imagery… and all those hairs that Pixar’s supercomputers can generate!!!
You know how much we love animation here @aqnb, and we have a special interview prepared for the end of the month, we shall be dedicating special attention this summer during the Barbican exhibition and all the satellite events, articles, interviews… (and hopefully if the London International animation festival takes place again… no details so far), so if we were you, we would tune in on a regular basis.
“Watch me Move” should bring a comprehensive mix of the good old pioneers (Lumière brothers, Mr Marey..) the omnipresent American essentials (Disney, HannaBarbera, Pixar…) & the Japanese masters (Studio Ghilbi, Toei Anmation..), we have to say that we’re missing a heavier European & UK component (with the exception of Semiconductor)… but the truth is that trying to cover the whole history of animation is so ambitious and complicated that Greg Hilty (curator) has probably had to make very hard choices.
Stop-motion, CGI, Technicolor, time & space collages, impossible geometric patterns… endless technologies that have brought decade after decade unimaginable possibilities. The exhibition is divided into seven interconnected themes: Apparitions, Characters, Superhumans, Fables, Fragments, Structures, and Visions.
Animation is definitely one of the most powerful tools to promote, export and reflect local cultures and Watch Me Move should dive & explore this relationship between animated films and our local / universal cultural phenomena. The show features over 170 works, from iconic clips to lesser-known masterpieces. Taking the viewer behind the dream-world of the finished film, it includes puppets, stage sets, storyboard drawings, wire-frame visualisations, cel and background images.
How animation stopped being experimental to become a mass-market trend in the 30s, how the comic industry has forever nourished their animated cousins since the first DC & Marvel houses appeared in the States, how new technologies are enabling tangible virtual worlds like those of Avatar or Tron… and on top of the usual educational introductions, there will be of course many, many, many screenings.
But to know which, you’ll have visit the @Barbican Center this summer.
From June 15th till September 11th (for £10 though, good things aren’t free these days unfortunately).
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