This research originates from a practice-driven urge to achieve simultaneity and immediacy in the creation and experience of animation by aiming to bring together construction, production and presentation of illusion of movement in time and place. Focusing on illusion of movement as animation, this research borrowed from the perceptual elements already employed in animation practices. However, recording a sequence – as in filmmaking – leads to temporal and physical distance between the creation and presentation of an animated work. Accomplishing the aimed simultaneity and immediacy suggested looking for ways to achieve illusory movement without producing material artefacts to yield it. In order to realise this goal, this research turned to performance studies, where ephemerality and immediacy are theorised as inherent properties of performance practice. Those insights from performance theory were developed as possibilities for animation within the research practice. Performance theorist Erika Fischer-Lichte’s positioning of performance event as open-ended and artwork as fixed was taken as a starting point. On the basis of that theoretical grounding, a process to unite separate phases in animation creation is explored in tandem with incorporating event properties into animation.

The research asks the question:
How can animation be created and experienced simultaneously and immediately, as ephemeral as a performance event?

In this practice-based research, the enquiries were carried out through practical experimentation while building a framework for reference and analysis based on performance theories. As suggested by Gray and Malins, this study devised its own methodology where collecting visual, auditory and written data, building physical and developing theoretical tools, as well as working with participants provided methods to inquire an animation practice of immediacy.

The research begins in animation practice, negotiating possible ways to create the illusion of movement. In order to understand how this illusion occurs in animation, the research looked at perceptual and cognitive mechanisms. The preliminary investigation of optical toys and flipbooks, rather than films, was then extended to non-visual modes of illusory perception, and possibilities through aural and haptic illusions of movements were explored.

The study then introduced the theoretical framework to explore the immediacy of ‘event-ness’. Based on Fischer-Lichte’s framing of the four characteristics of performance, the framework through which to shape and analyse the research practice emerged: mediality (bodily co-presence), materiality (transience), semioticity (emergence of new meaning) and aestheticity (the experience of performance as ‘event’). The considerations of liveness, co-creation, ephemerality, and fixity of the research practice thus found structure for evaluation through Fischer-Lichte’s perspective.

Finally, as contribution to expanding animation practice, it is proposed to approach animation as an event where illusory movement is observed through instructional scores. By calibrating and analysing possibilities of animation through the framework provided by Fischer-Lichte’s work, it becomes possible to amalgamate the three separate processes of animation – construction, production and presentation – into a single process, the animation event. In this event, the creation and experience of animation are simultaneous and concurrent; thus, providing an answer to the research question.