ArtCenter/South Florida is pleased to present “Deborah Levitt: Animation and the Medium of Life” in conjunction with the exhibition “An Image.” Her talk will address our contemporary image ecology through what she calls the age of the animatic apparatus. The animatic apparatus marks the emergence of animation as the dominant medium of our time coinciding with developments in the biological sciences that open possibilities for producing living beings. While these might appear as disjunct cultural fields, with no causal and little conceptual relation, understanding the link between Dolly the cloned sheep and her progeny (metaphorically speaking) and the multimediated bodies of cinema and video are a key to understanding the time in which we live. Today, the horizon of possibility offered by simulation in both art and science—from cartoons and the animatic effects of CGI to various dreamt and incarnate potentials of biological production—are shifting the reigning cultural paradigms of life in significant ways, moving away from questions about ontology, category, and being, to ones of appearance, metamorphosis, and affect.

Free & Open to the public.