This event is part of the 2024/2025 MVS Proseminar Series and is free and open to the public. No registration is required.

The title of this lecture—Bad Animation: The Computer-Generated Image in Contemporary Art—should not be taken as a negative judgment against contemporary moving image artists such as Peggy Ahwesh, Ed Atkins, and Aria Dean, who make use of computer-generated animation in their works, whether by appropriating existing images or fabricating their own. On the contrary, it borrows from curator Marcia Tucker’s notion of “bad painting,” a concept explored in her 1978 New Museum exhibition of the same name. For Tucker, “bad” painting was interesting painting; painting that flouted established norms.  

This talk will address how Ahwesh, Atkins, and Dean adopt forms of computer animation that deliberately depart from industry standards, query pervasive aspirations to photorealism, and/or embrace an aesthetic of the generic template. This talk will explore the meanings assigned to the animated image in these artists’ practices and probe how they use CGI as a means to address broader questions of neoliberal subjectivity and the exercise of control over human and nonhuman life. 

Erika Balsom is Reader in Film and Media Studies at King’s College London. She is the author of four books, including TEN SKIES (2021) and After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017). Her writing has appeared in publications including Cahiers du cinéma, E-Flux, Frieze, Grey Room, and New Left Review. In 2022–23, she was the co-curator of the exhibition “No Master Territories: Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image” (HKW, Berlin/Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw).