Where Do Shapes Come From?

In this essay, I take abstraction, a familiar term from discussions of experimental animation, and expand it via design theorist Johanna Drucker’s idea of performative digital materiality. In this way I explore digital images through their associations and connections with people, processes and cultural domains. First, I connect abstraction in animation to its usage in computer science, and then establish a link to performative digital materiality. Based on these connections, I draw comparisons between Where Shapes Come From (Semiconductor, 2016) and Category 4 Hurricane Matthew on October 2, 2016 (2017), a visualisation of Hurricane Matthew created by the Godard Science Visualization Studio. Both Where Shapes Come From and Category 4 Hurricane Matthew use data to drive the motion of their CG elements. Consequently, while concerned with events in physical environments, they rely on algorithms to facilitate motion and so have a digital materiality too. Though sharing a similar technique, their associations and connections each reveal different performative digital materialities. The algorithm facilitating motion in Category 4 Hurricane Matthew’s is linked to consensus building, whereas that used for Where Shapes Come From maintains the interrogative gap essential to the experimental animation’s engagement with scientific discourse.