Over the past two quarters I have been working primarily in stop motion animation, and have been thinking about the transformation that happens when inanimate objects become animate. In reading the chapter Chaos, Cosmos, Territory, Architecture by Elizabeth Grosz I recognized that much of the process of animating objects is defining order within chaos and establishing a territory or frame where, through order, elements of that chaos can be felt. As Grosz states, “Sensation is what art forms from chaos through the extraction of qualities.”
When Grosz states that “Art enables matter to become expressive, to not just satisfy but also to intensify - to resonate and become more than itself.” I am immediately reminded of a scene in the Brothers Quay animation Street of Crocodiles. In the foreground a screw untwists itself from a windowsill and rolls across the screen. This action is immediately followed by other screws throughout the image, abandoning their positions in the structure. The difference of frames (the animators order) allows the viewer to imagine that this rebellious screw may have an awareness of itself. As Grosz put it “qualities are now loosened onto the world no longer anchored in their “natural “ place but put into the play of sensations that departs from mere survival to celebrate its means and excesses.”
I too think of art as having autonomy, a life of its own beyond whatever order or frame is establish. While at some points if feels as though art may be “the exteriorization of one’s own bodily forces and energies.” as Nietzsche’s believed, their is a stronger sense that as Grosz states art “emerges when sensation can detach itself and gain autonomy from its creator and its perceiver, when something of the chaos from which it is drawn can breath and have a life of its own.” Perhaps both are true, that the order that an artist asserts may be from within, but once expressed it draws from elements of chaos and is therefore autonomous.