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Paper short abstract

This paper will examine computer animators’ changing embodied relationships to their work, technology, and professional identity with GenAI in their industry. Informed by dance, animation, and feminist labour theory, I will attend to their affective experience of movement in the software interface.

Paper long abstract

This paper will examine how computer animators’ embodied relationships to work, technology, and professional identity are changing through GenAI in their industry. Machine learning and generative algorithms are increasingly woven into the processes of computer animation for film and television, sparking both celebratory and doomsday predictions and compounding the real precarity pressing upon workers. This extends a legacy of automation and perceived struggles between embodied human craft and technology in animation, conceived of as a medium existing through the tension between the freedom of the moving image and the regulated movement of labour producing it (Frank).

My dissertation approaches the embodied labour and knowledge of animators from an interdisciplinary perspective, building on a shared history of systems for movement analysis between dance and animation (Gadassik). I will present fieldwork findings exploring animators’ embodied relationships to algorithms in their software interfaces (how they engage tool sets to “think in movement” [Sheets-Johnstone], felt sense of time and space shaped by the interface’s “possibility space” [Wood]). Through long-form interviews and walk-throughs (Light) of their creative process, animators describe experiences of struggle, play, power, or partnership as technology does or does not do what they expected. These experiences inform their shifting professional identities (artist, craftsperson, technician…), which they articulate differently depending on how GenAI is integrated into their roles (e.g. high or low-level). I will bring these findings into conversation with feminist theories of labour and technology (Chun, Nakamura) to consider how embodied findings tell about workers’ varied experiences of marginalization and resistance.