What Does Animation Mean in the Middle Ages? Theoretical and Historical Approaches, Białystok, Poland, September 16–19, 2021

This conference is concerned with the agency and life of material objects and evolves around the investigation of two interlaced objectives. First, the project will shed light on understudied aspects of medieval visual culture, focusing in particular on the agency of images and material objects. Second, it will provide new cutting-edge theoretical reflections and methodologies concerning the study of material agency and “living images” today. We argue that the cultural use of and interaction with images may be regarded as more than mere historically or culturally specific phenomenon. Rather, it concerns the ontology of images and constitutes a fundamental aspect of our life with images, in the premodern as well as in the contemporary. It is our contention that images are embedded in social interaction and that animation is deeply constitutive of the production of meaning. Animation, we argue, is not only located in the mind of the beholder, but in the epistemology, creation, interaction and materiality of images. Furthermore, we will argue that medieval animation may inform contemporary views on animation and provide us with a more precise vocabulary to capture current phenomena for instance in the digital world. 

The conference aim to be interdisciplinary and transhistorical in its perspective. The conference targets scholars of visual studies, material studies, study of religions, anthropology, medieval studies and theology. It is also relevant more generally for current discussions about the life and agency of seemingly dead matter.

There are four main topics of the conference:

• Physical animation of art-works and other artefacts (sculptures, reliquaries, paintings etc.)
• Mental "animations" of objects (art-works, and other artefacts)
• Animation in a theatrical context (mystery-plays, liturgical plays and staging’s, puppets and other theatrical use of figures and sculptures)
• Medieval and Early Modern animation in the 20th Century and contemporary theatrical practices.

The Conference takes as its point of departure the work of the newly organized international research-project: The Living Image (LIMA): On the ontology, agency and personhood of living images and objects – medieval and modern. This project is coordinated from the University of Bergen, Norway, and consists of a group of researchers from Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Norway, Poland, United Kingdom, and USA, and the work of the international research network: The European Network on the Instruments of Devotion – ENID.

The conference in Bialystok is designed to be a platform for the exchange of opinions, ideas, and historical documentation, as well as the starting point for a publication. We plan to publish a collection of articles offering an interdisciplinary academic survey of the topic of animation in the Middle Ages, and its reception in the 20th Century.

The language of the conference is English.