Software and Visual Effects

This paper presents a study of Autodesk Maya informed by software studies, and explores what thinking through software adds to debates about visual effects. The user interface of Maya is a hybrid space, the familiar spaces of objects coexisting with the more intangible spaces of software processes and procedures. The latter are visible through a range of materials: interviews carried out with animators working within different industrial sectors, as well as training and publicity materials. Critical approaches relying on photorealism and representational strategies draw digital entities into the world inhabited by humans, and discursively treat them as though they are a little like us. Exploring digital space in terms of procedures and processes allows access to digital space as digital space. It is a space that is intangible and computational, and plays a structuring part in all kinds of ways. Thinking procedurally adds another register to debates about digital entities and visual effects. Not only can we think about how we digitally construct variations on our world, but also how digital spaces coexist beside our more familiar ones and shape their possibilities.