Active Animation: An Approach to Interactive and Generative Animation for User-Interface Design and Expression

The traditional view of animation is a medium-specific perspective: animation is a sequence of images on film. In contrast, we employ a wider, interdisciplinary theoretical lens, based on a phenomenological perspective of animation. We describe animation as the experience of artifacts imbued with apparent “animacy,” or “liveliness,” and identify a range of media artifacts where an account of animacy is key to understanding and designing their functionality. These artifacts range from computer interface mechanisms such as bouncing and stretching icons to interactive cartoons that may be used for informational, entertainment, or socio-critical purposes. We introduce the term “active animation” to describe this range of artifacts. Insights from textual analyses in the humanities-based field of animation studies can enable analysis and design of active animation, and likewise animation studies can be informed by insights regarding agency in artificial intelligence research, theories of embodied cognition and conceptual blending from cognitive science, and psychological approaches to movement and perception. To exemplify the technical design potential of our approach, we present a cognitive semantics-based interactive and generative multimedia system that we have implemented called the Generative Visual Renku system as a case study active animation. The upshot is that our interdisciplinary animacy-oriented perspective highlights how gesture and movement allow interactive and generative digital artifacts to convey non-verbal meaning to users.