Frontiers of Animation #3

Snow Yunxue Fu: The liminality in the Digital Art

How does the concept of liminality and liminoid play in contemporary digital art? The word liminal is often used to discuss the sublime within digital space and the VR experience, conjuring up notions of time, space, and perception, and echoing the experience of the sublime in nature. Working primarily with 3D animation software, Fu creates scenes of experimental abstraction that translate the concept of liminality into the digital experience. Within it, the viewers are offered an encounter to reflect on our response to the simultaneously beautiful and overwhelming artifice of the techno-sublime.

Chris Sullivan:
Beauty in difficult images. Inside the making of Independent animated Feature. Postscript to Consuming Spirits, and Making of The Orbit of Minor Satellites.

In this talk I will address the pleasures and pitfalls of multi-year animated or live action films, and ways to keep the project alive and transformative, Even while working with Difficult subject matter. In my Feature animations I make script changes, create new scenes, and even as I will discuss, introduce new characters late in the game.

As a film grows, it leaves you behind and starts running ahead of you, talking over you,  I will be speaking about how to listen to your work, not to yourself. Animators work in secret  often, but we are speaking to someone, how do we say what we want to say without causing harm to the audience who has given us their trust. How do we Create and show beauty in the darkest moments of the human experience.

I will illustrate these points, while showing scenes and production images from Consuming Spirits and The Orbit of Minor Satellites.

Biography, Snow Yunxue Fu

Snow Yunxue Fu is a New York based international New Media Artist, Curator, and Assistant Arts Professor in the Department of Photography and Imaging at New York University Tisch School of the Arts. Using topographical computer-rendered images and installations, her practice merges historical, post-photographic, philosophical, and painterly explorations into the universal aesthetic and definitive nature of the techno sublime. She sees her transition into new media and 3D moving image as a natural extension of her conceptual research in which she draws parallels between the physical, metaphysical, digital, and multi-dimensional spaces. Fu’s artwork has been shown internationally in solo shows, group exhibitions, screenings, and festivals including the New York Gallery of Chinese Art, New York; Ars Electronica, Austria; Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice, Italy; Pioneer Works, New York; NADA Art Fair, New York; Sedition, Hong Kong; Arebyte Gallery, London, UK; West Bund Art Center, Shanghai, China; Shenzhen Independent Animation Biennale, Shenzhen, China; Pingyao International Photography Festival, Shanxi, China; Current Museum of Art, New York, Thoma Art House, Santa Fe; Currents Santa Fe New Media Art Festival, New Mexico; The Wrong Biennale, the Internet, and etc.

With a background in painting, Fu remains the youngest artist collected by the National Art Museum of China. Her new media artworks have also been collected by the Currents Museum of Art in New York and other institutions. She was awarded the First Place in the Digital Art Category of the Art Rights Prize in late 2020.  Her work reviews and interviews have been covered in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Arebyte on Screen, Sedition, the St. Louis Magazine Art Review, Guangzhou Today’s Focus in China, and etc. She participated in residencies such as the Hatch Residency through the Chicago Artist Coalition, Biocultura Residency in Santa Fe NM, Lexington and Concord Artist Residency in Illinois, and Estudio Nómada’s Mas els Igols Residency in Barcelona, Spain. She has given lectures and presented on her work and research in conferences, symposiums, and institutions around the world including International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), SIGGRAPH, SIGGRAPH Asia in Brisbane Australia, the Chinese-American Art Faculty Symposium, Veritas Forum, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Chicago, and China Academy of Art.