METHS300 Anime-tion
May 19–June 19, 2008

A decade plus ago one could see Mao Zedong in Mickey Mouse Ears, a Zapatista Slogan, and a panel of a scene from Otomo Katsuhiro's Akira sharing a common space on a crumbling wall. It was then war-torn Sarajevo, but it could have been an imagined Neo-Tokyo, New York, Paris, Chiapas, or Shanghai - "Glocal" places impacted by a hybrid modernity, economy, polity, and aesthetic. Could it be read as mere satire, adult rage, youthful angst or "just" Pop Culture? Or, a cry for help, a political aesthetic of the commons, an archaic postmodern? Or, rather, could it be the projective screen of a passing order, hanging on desperately to the icons of a new techno-organic, trying to confront the apocalyptic puzzles of the new millennium? Anime-tion explores aspects of this conundrum through the artful visual sociologies of Anime, a Japanese animation art form that has broken through the thick ramparts of the local via a series of emotions, reflections and images that resonate across a global audience. Universal themes of love, wisdom, nature, gender, beauty, war and peace, eroticism, youth, old age, combine with questions of survival, power, diversity, human origins, change, identity, magic, religion, science fiction, cyborg aesthetics and technology, or pure entertainment, to make it an apt field of visual, cultural, ecological, and political study.

Methods Seminars are in-depth, interdisciplinary investigations of a particular problem or theme. These seminars focus on ways of knowing the world characteristic of the disciplines represented in the seminar, such that the forms or methods of investigation are as important as the subject matter itself.