Ecstatic Truth IX symposium: Ways of Knowing

practice as research, material resistance and re-presented reality in expanded documentary form.

Join us in Prague on Tuesday 29th April, 2025 at VSKK for a symposium on :

Ways of Knowing: practice as research, material resistance and re-presented reality in expanded documentary form.

This symposium delves into the dynamic intersections of artistic research, practice as research, and expanded documentary forms. We aim to explore how knowledge is produced and what it means to truly know something in the context of creative practices. How do we engage in processes of knowing, deeply and intimately, through sensory, embodied, and experiential methods? How do these processes of research—whether in audio-visual media, animation, or documentary—transform our relationship with the world and shape the forms through which we communicate our findings?

We will focus on the concept of material resistance—how materiality, environment, and the media we use inform and challenge our perceptions of reality. How do we work with provisionality and metamorphosis ? We are interested in exploring how expanded animation and expanded documentary can create new, layered ways of communicating knowledge and resistance through audio-visual media.

Join us to explore, question, and expand your own understanding of how we know and how we can communicate knowing in the context of artistic practice, expanded media, and creative resistance!

ONLINE ZOOM LINK:

https://vskk-cz.zoom.us/j/6283413238?omn=99730304004

Passcode: 010203

Organising committee: Tereza Stehlikova, Birgitta Hosea, Pedro Serrazina, Natalie Woolf

Keynote: Abelardo Gil-Fournier is an artist and researcher, born in Rabat and based in Madrid. Originally trained in Physics, he holds a PhD in Art from Winchester School of Art (UK) and has worked as a researcher at FAMU in Prague. He is currently a grantee of a Leonardo scholarship from the BBVA Foundation. His practice addresses the entwining of media and matter. His projects involve different techniques, spanning from installation to image, sound and computational processes where either the living or other so-called natural and planetary temporalities conflate with human visual cultures, knowledge systems and politics.

Programme

10.00 Introduction

10.10 – 10.30
Animating Resistance: Embodied Knowledge and Subversive Truths in Iranian Anti-Domestic Violence Campaigns
Dr Nadia Aghtaie, Dr Ladan Hashemi, prof Birgitta Hosea, Dr. Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib

10.30 – 10.50
Exploring Haptic Communication in Mother-Daughter Relationship Through Expanded Animation Practice
Yanqi Liang

10.50 – 11.10
Listening to the Dead
Penny Woolcock

11.10-11.30
Carolina López Caballero
I RAISE MY VOICE: curating animated realities from Ibero-America

11.30- 11.45
BREAK

11.45 – 12.30
Keynote: Abelardo Gil-Fournier

The continuous evolution of visual media transforms not only the cultural forms to which a society gives rise, but also the way in which scientific knowledge is constituted and stabilized. Following this line, understanding in this way the space of image techniques such as photometry, timelapses and datasets, opens a space of inquiry for artistic research in relation to ways of knowing and ecological aesthetics. This talk will present the concepts of living surfaces and radiant regimes as tools to address this intertwining of media and knowledge.

12.30 – 13.00
Morning panel: discussion + QA

13.00 – 14.00
LUNCH

14.00 –14.20
The Frame Rate is a Machine Gun – animation and war, a media history
Christoph Steger

14.20 – 14.40
Unravelling Narratives: Animated Documentary as Embodied Knowledge
Kim Noce

14.40 – 15.00
Follow your knows: Animation Practice Through Second-Order Cybernetics and Embodied Knowledge
Hugo Glover

15.00-15.30
Q&A

15.30 – 15.40
BREAK

15.40 – 16.00 Anima Natura Project: Stop motion as a tool to explore the intersection between animation, animism and nature
Andrea Gudiño Sosa

16.00 – 16.20
In the Garden: Listening, Learning, and Animating the More-than-Human
Dominica Harrison

16.20 – 16.40
Rich Material Documentary: ways of knowing material agency through stop-frame/time-lapse animation
Jane Cheadle

16.40 – 17.10
Q&A

END

Ecstatic Truth is an annual symposium on animated documentary founded in 2016 that explores issues arising from the interface between notions of animation (in its most expanded form) and of documentary (conceptualised very broadly as non-fiction) with a particular interest in questions raised by experimental and practitioner perspectives.

Enquiries: [email protected]

Organising committee: Tereza Stehlikova, Birgitta Hosea, Pedro Serrazina, Natalie Woolf

MAKING SENSE MINIFESTIVAL: In connection with the symposium, we have also organised a minifestival on Sunday 27th April, focused on materiality, sensory perception and embodiment. You can find out more and register here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/making-sense-minifestival-tickets-1279860680749

Birgitta Hosea, Professor of Moving Image and Director of the Animation Research Centre at UCA Farnham, is an artist / curator known for her innovative approach to expanding animation who creates live events, exhibitions, installations, durational images and short films. Previously, she was Head of Animation at the RCA (2016-18); Course Director of MA Character Animation (2000-15) / Research Leader in Performance (2011-4) at Central Saint Martins, where she also did her PhD. Amongst academic publications on drawing and experimental animation, her most recent book is Performance Drawing: New Practices Since 1945 (Bloomsbury, 2020) co-written with Foá, Grisewood and McCall.

Pedro Serrazina is an award-winning director and senior lecturer in animation. His first short, Tale About the Cat and the Moon, premiered internationally at the Cannes Film Festival’96 and continues to be screened at retrospectives and festivals worldwide. Since then, his work has been exhibited and published internationally, ranging from film, site-specific installations, to documentary, music videos and academic projects. Serrazina is interested in the intersections of architecture, documentary and animation, and his practice-based PhD was dedicated to the use of animated space as a tool to reflect on social space. A member of the Society for Animation Studies, he recently completed Shadows of Ourselves, an experimental sand animation short exploring the feeling of being observed, and is co-writing a book on Portuguese animation, to be published by Taylor and Francis.

​​Tereza Stehlíková is an artist, researcher and educator. She is the head of the visual arts department at VSKK and also teaches artistic research to PhD and MA students at Academy of Performing Arts and Academy of Applied Arts, Prague. Tereza is engaged in research focused on investigating the role our senses and embodiment play in conveying meaning through artistic practice. Her practice spans moving image, installation and participatory performance and is driven by cross-disciplinary collaboration. She is writing a book called Exiled from our Bodies, How to Come Back to our Senses to be published by Routledge and is also an editor of an online arts journal/platform Tangible Territory, featuring essays and articles by established artists/authors from the world of arts, science, philosophy.

Natalie Woolf is an artist and professor/researcher at Universidade Lusófona, co-curating the DELLI drawing program and teaching expanded and exploratory drawing practices in the Animation and Communication Design BA and MA courses. Holding a PhD from the Royal College of Art, her research on material responsiveness evolved into public arts consultancy, where work on site-specific interventions and urban design projects has influenced her academic and creative practice. Woolf has presented her work internationally, combining expanded drawing, animated moving images, and installation art to address themes such as spatial phobias, sensory perception, and the mediation of experience through technology. Actively contributing to research groups focusing on digital interactions and sensory narratives, she is part of a team that recently secured EU research funding to study animation’s role in enhancing wellbeing in children’s hospital contexts across Europe.