ANIMA(THEMA)TIC perspective

by Alexander Schellow

I. Essay: Perspective in Animated Cinema

Experimental animations, whether framed as expanded or pervasive, in each their specific processes do not merely extend animation beyond the cinema screen; they rather have the potential to redistribute the position from which a world is seen. Perspective is therefore not a neutral technical apparatus within animation. It organizes scale, duration, agency, bodily orientation and access to knowledge. From this angle, animation can be understood as a field in which an approach to perspective is continually constructed, destabilized, shared, critically questioned and contested.

1. Panofsky and Linear Perspective as Symbolic Form

Erwin Panofsky’s account of linear “perspective as a symbolic form” (1927 published in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg) offers a productive starting point. Perspective, as addressed here, is not simply a correct optical method for representing three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface. It marks a contested field of historically specific ways of making the world intelligible. Renaissance perspectival construction for instance establishes a homogeneous, measurable, continuous space organized around a single, ideally stable eye. The world becomes available as an ordered extension before a viewing subject.

Such construction has technical consequences: a horizon line, vanishing points, proportional diminution, and a fixed relation between viewer and represented scene. Yet its deeper significance lies in the social and philosophical model it installs. Perspective accords the viewer a privileged position outside the image-world, while transforming that world into an object of survey, calculation, possession and/or control.

2. Animation as Destabilization of the Gaze

Animation inherits the various world-producing and -structuring machines of perspective making, but nevertheless isn‘t confined to any of them. Even conventional animated cinema complicates the notion of a fixed spectator of perspectival painting. The camera/eye might move through drawn space; dimensions can be compressed, inverted, duplicated or dissolved; a line can become a body, a body a landscape and a landscape an interface. Animation renders visible that perspective (like other aspects of its never preexisting indexicality and signification architectures, such as the sound-image relation for instance) is generated and in collaboration with a spectator co-constructed, rather than given. It does in many cases actively expose the rules that organize vision precisely, and it is able to do so because it can alter those rules frame by frame, namely in the very process of constructing its each specific approach of (dis)continuity.

3. Temporal Perspective: From Cinema to Animation

In classical cinema, perspective becomes temporal. The camera does not merely frame a space; it moves, tracks, pans, zooms, cuts, reorients. Animation radicalizes this mobility because its camera, space and objects may all be constructed and set into relation independently. A virtual camera can enter a molecule, traverse a city, inhabit an eye, follow a line or move through an impossible topology without the material constraints of live-action recording.

The described „freedom“ though doesn‘t seem to automatically produce emancipation. (Digital) animation, simulation, gaming or contemporary VFX often reinforce a highly regulated perspectival regime: a smoothly navigable, Cartesian, calculable world. Moreover, as an obvious example — even if what this refers to doesn‘t at all reduce to the field of CGI , but definitely concerns in each different ways the entire field of animation related practices — three-dimensional software commonly presumes grids, coordinates, axes, cameras and virtual lenses. Its default operational space remains closely related to Renaissance perspective and to modern systems of mapping, architectural planning, military visualization, logistics and data management.

The political issue is therefore not whether animation uses perspective. But it is which perspectives it naturalizes, who is placed at their center, and how their rules can be made available for transformation. Finally and even more fundamentally how it is inscribed into some sort of an implicit mental contract with the spectator… a sort of conscious processing that however and importantly must not at all render impossible the forms (and pleasure!) of believe, immersion, identification within an animated world.

A stable central perspective can produce mastery, orientation and legibility. It can however also exclude those perceptual positions that do not conform to its single-point organization: partial attention, wandering, peripheral sensing, collective orientation, sensory overload, hesitation, bodily proximity or nonhuman scale.

Now, what the notion of „contract“ above is referring to: experimental animation often intervenes at precisely this point. Rather than presenting a coherent world to be mastered, it foregrounds the very conditions under which specific worlds tend to appear. It is in such sense that experimental animation has long treated the image as a site of instability rather than as transparent or consistent representation. Its ever-expanding fringes towards abstract film, direct animation, cameraless practice, expanded cinema all question a.o. the assumption that images must open onto a unified perspectival world.

In direct animation for example, marks scratched, painted or otherwise inscribed onto film do not necessarily represent objects located in depth. They may function as rhythmic/tactile/luminous/material events. The field of 1) film(pellicule) and 2) screen ceases to be a window and becomes a surface. This shift interrupts the conventional relation between viewer and image: rather than looking through the frame toward an imagined world, the spectator encounters the film strip’s material operations. In a documentary animation field then, this particular strategy might inscribe a strong speculative contrast and resistance towards a primarily shot material as a trace or to be constructed document of observed events.

This can be read as a political shift in visual address. Linear perspective tends to conceal its construction by presenting itself as transparent and opaquely „given“. Experimental animation here takes a subversive turn: by revealing seams, layers, flicker, exposure, registration, grain and temporal discontinuity, it materially refuses the fantasy that vision is frictionless.

4. Matrix of Animation Techniques and Perspectival Regimes

In various ways the question of perspective is transformed by specific animation techniques in verious ways — such as stop motion, collage, rotoscoping, photocopy, digital compositing, procedural generation and feedback systems. They do this namely in the way(s) each of those techniques (and countless further ones) produce a distinct relation between bodies, space, time and causality. While the precise methodologies of course largely depend on each particular case (of an artists’s practice, a context, a particular project), there are however certain aspects related directly to the particularities of various animation technics that might be interesting to list, even if by such somewhat reducing complexity to an oversimplified scheme >

Practice	Perspectival operation	Perceptual/political implication
Classical cel animation	Constructed depth, multiplane movement, controlled camera	Often reproduces cinematic hierarchy and centrally organized viewing
Stop motion	Fragmented capture of material bodies and spaces	Makes discontinuity, handling, gravity and duration perceptible
Collage animation	Incompatible scales, image sources and spatial logics	Challenges visual coherence and exposes archival or ideological fragments
Direct animation	Surface-based inscription without stable represented depth	Disrupts window-like viewing and foregrounds material mediation
Digital 3D animation	Navigable coordinate space and virtual camera	Can reproduce managerial or game-like control, but can also deform its rules
Projection installation	Multiple screens, architectural surfaces, moving spectators	Distributes perspective across bodies, paths and spatial relations
Interactive and networked animation	View changes through participation, data or algorithmic response	Raises questions of agency, surveillance, access and delegated control

Perspective in experimental animation often, depending on the singular “animation” strategy, seems to be less a matter of depicting depth than of organizing relations: between frame and body, body and machine, image and site, viewer and other viewers.

5. Expanded Animation: Distributed Perspective & Situated Bodies

Expanded animation, a notion originally lended from the concept of „expanded cinema“, for instance displaces animation from the discrete screen into architecture, performance, installation, urban space and sensory environments. Streightly put, here, the viewer is no longer necessarily seated before a single image. Perspective — always, seated or not, embodied — becomes mobile, multiple and potentially contingent.

In projection-based installation, an image may span several walls, fall across uneven surfaces, dissolve into darkness or be interrupted by columns, doors, bodies and shadows. The spectator’s movement changes the image’s apparent scale and alignment. Rather than one correct viewing point, there may be many partial positions. The image is not fully available from anywhere. Such situation evidently challenges the Renaissance ideal of the ideal observer. The spectator becomes a situated body whose perception is shaped by proximity, by fatigue or distraction, boredom and hesitation, by orientation, architectural constraint and encounters with others. One sees and acts from somewhere, basically, not from any- or nowhere.

Expanded animation may therefore produce what could be called a distributed perspective. No single viewpoint contains the whole. Meaning emerges across trajectories, delays, overlaps, and missed elements. Such distribution activates political force because, in the very act of perception and an experience of the situation, it structurally weakens the authority of a however defined central observer. It opens space for collective, asynchronous and plural modes of attention.

At the same time, complementarily, expanded animation can as powerfully reproduce systems of control. Immersive environments, large-scale LED displays, projection mapping, virtual reality, and algorithmically responsive installations may, depending on HOW such dispositive is approached and handled, intensify being squeezed into an experience of impotence rather than of liberation. When every movement is tracked, measured, and converted into a visual response, participation, even “resonse/ability” can be absorbed by a form of data extraction. A central question here appears: does inter-activity enable shared agency, or does it merely stage the user as a predictable input within a pre-designed system?

A critical expanded animation practice does not assume that immersion is inherently radical. It examines the distribution of power between apparatus, programmer, institution, participant and image.

6. Pervasive Animation: Computational Regimes & Temporal Governance

Pervasive animation, a term coined in 2013 by Suzanne Buchan and co-researchers, refers to the diffusion of animated processes across contemporary life: interfaces, social-media feeds, advertising screens, navigation systems, surveillance platforms, augmented reality, dashboards, games, machine-learning visualizations, responsive environments and many more… Animation is no longer limited to a cultural object encountered at a designated time and place. It has long become a background condition of networked perception. Icons pulse to solicit attention. Notifications slide into view. Maps recalculate routes. Feeds refresh. Autoplay systems initiate images before a viewer chooses them. Recommendation systems anticipate interests and organize future perception through prior behavior. In this context, animation is, far beyond “animated film”, a technique of temporal governance. It guides attention, establishes urgency, modulates affect, and structures habits of return.

Perspective here is increasingly computational. The visible world is filtered through systems that rank, predict, classify and personalize. Rather than a single vanishing point, there may be an invisible set of countless operational viewpoints: the platform’s model of the user, the advertiser’s segmentation, the state’s surveillance grid, the logistics system’s map of movement, or the machine-learning system’s probabilistic classification.

This puts a crucial distinction into place, between what the user sees and from where the system sees the user. The animated interface may offer apparent freedom of navigation while silently organizing attention according to commercial or institutional priorities. The contemporary politics of perspective include this asymmetry: the user is positioned as an active viewer, while also becoming an object of continuous, often opaque observation.

Experimental and artistic practices do counter such realities, namely by rendering computational perspectives perceptible. They may reveal the glitches of automated classification, visualize and speculatively transform hidden datasets, delay interface responsiveness, stage algorithmic misrecognition or create systems whose behavior cannot be reduced to efficient feedback. Such practices turn animation into a means of examining the infrastructures that animate contemporary perception.

I would like to come back to the critique of central perspective - importantly, such is not a rejection of spatial organization itself. It is a call to recognize that every organization of space implies and in fact realizes a politics, a regime of relation. Alternative perspectives include axonometric projection, oblique projection, map-like arrangements, montage, split screens, composite images, diagrammatic systems and immersive environments without a privileged center.

Axonometric projection, for example, does not organize receding lines around a vanishing point. Objects retain their scale across depth, allowing space to be read more as a system of relations than as an optical view from a fixed subject. This has made it useful in architectural drawing, technical illustration, games and speculative design. In animation, it can create a world that is less dependent on cinematic illusion and more attentive to structure and simultaneity.

But, again, no perspective is innocent. While Axonometric projection can support collective legibility and non-central organization, it can clearly also serve bureaucratic abstraction, planning or infrastructural control. Central or Axonometric - the critical task is not to select a politically pure visual system, whatever in a certain context might be considered as such. It is to ask what a system enables, hides, distributes and excludes.

7. Nonhuman Perspectives: Animism and Relation

This question becomes especially urgent in relation to nonhuman perspective. Animation, somewhat intending to move close to a sort of animism, has a unique capacity to shift scale and agency: to imagine the movement of dust, cells, animals, weather, machines, pollutants, code or geological time. Yet representing a nonhuman viewpoint does not mean simply placing a virtual camera inside an animal or object. That gesture does clearly remain anthropocentric if it merely converts another mode of existence into a human-readable image. A more rigorous approach might treat nonhuman perspective as a limit and a relation. Animation would then register forces that exceed individual intention: turbulence, accumulation, friction, decay, repetition, vibration or collective movement. Such work does not claim full access to another being’s experience. Instead, it composes conditions in which human perception might be constructed as less sovereign and more attentive to interdependence.

8. Animation as Epistemological Practice

Animation is often described as the art of giving life or movement to images or “inanimate” objects/materials. A more precise formulation though might be that animation organizes the conditions under which movement can be perceived. It produces rhythms, intervals, frames, transitions, continuities and discontinuities. In doing so, it also produces perspectives.

This is why animation can serve as an epistemological practice rather than only a representational medium. It does not simply illustrate an already known world. It can test how worlds become visible, how attention moves, how relations are sensed and how forms of knowledge take shape within and in fact through duration.

From this viewpoint, the frame is not merely a boundary. It is an operation of selection. The cut is not merely a transition. It is a redistribution of temporal and spatial relation. A loop is not merely repetition. It can become a mechanism for memory, fixation, return, exhaustion, resistance or transformation. A camera movement is not merely expressive. It establishes a relation of proximity, authority, vulnerability or desire.

Animation is a “making of”: perspective.

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II. Constellation: 12 Historical Perspectives

Perspective systems become politically legible when they are treated not merely as techniques for depicting space, but as ways of distributing orientation, authority, access and scale. Following a few concrete historical examples beyond the animation frame:

01. Aristotle: Embodied Directionality

A possible starting point, while of course there could be many more even earlier ones, is Aristotle’s account of directional distinctions. In his On the Heavens (around 350 BCE), he differentiates “up/down”, “front/back” and “right/left”, treating them not as interchangeable coordinates but as qualitatively distinct orientations of a living body.

For Aristotle, “up” is associated with the direction of growth and nourishment; “front” with perception and purposeful movement; “right” with what is prior or stronger; and “left” with what is secondary or weaker. Direction therefore emerges from an embodied, animate relation to the world rather than from an abstract empty container called space.

The distinction matters because a coordinate system can look universal while silently inheriting embodied, social, theological or administrative priorities. “Up” is never only an axis: it may indicate transcendence, sovereignty, surveillance, aspiration, elevation or exclusion. “Centre” is never only a point: it can organize what counts as normal, visible, measurable - or governable.

02. Euclid: Relational Space and Geometric Abstraction

Euclidean geometry offers a different and equally consequential model. Euclid’s “Elements” from around 300 BCE in Alexandria (Egypt) defines points, lines, planes, ratios and figures through relational propositions rather than through a viewing subject. A line is not a visual ray emanating from an eye; it is an ideal extension without thickness. Parallel lines are defined by their non-meeting relation in a plane.

This abstraction was politically productive because it made space transferable across circumstances. Land could be measured, boundaries calculated, buildings set out, military trajectories plotted and territories rendered as comparable units. Yet Euclid’s perspective does not itself prescribe a centralized viewer. Its space is potentially decentered: any point may become the origin of a construction. While such Euclidean space marks an abstract field of measurable relations, Central perspective in comparison is a projection system that maps this field onto a picture plane from a finite viewing position. State surveying, cadastral mapping, military engineering and colonial cartography often combine both: Euclidean calculation supplies commensurable space, while perspectival or cartographic visualization supplies an apparatus of overview. Here it might be important to consciously reflect, that political force does not lie in geometry alone. It lies in the institutions that turn geometric abstraction into property lines, building regulations, borders, logistics, extraction zones and systems of administration.

03. Chinese Scroll Painting: Unfolding Movement and Parallel Projection

Chinese scroll painting and architectural representation offer a productive contrast to the Renaissance ideal of a fixed monocular viewpoint. Many works use forms of oblique or parallel projection: receding lines do not converge toward a single vanishing point, and the viewer’s access to the scene may unfold through lateral movement, vertical ascent, changing scale and temporal sequence.

Again, of course, this does not mean that Chinese painting is simply “more democratic,” nor that it lacks hierarchy. Court painting, imperial cartography, and administrative images could serve powerful institutions. The difference is formal and epistemological: the image does not subordinate all visible space to one eye at one moment.

This has a.o. narrative consequences - a handscroll can distribute viewing across time. The spectator unrolls it progressively; the landscape arrives in sections and transitions rather than as totality captured at once. The image therefore models a relation to space based on passage, sequencing and partial access - an aspect that renders parallel or oblique projection valuable for contemporary work concerned with collective perception, infrastructural space, migration, ecology, maintenance or computational systems. It might support a gaze resisting the fiction that one sovereign viewpoint can grasp and possess the whole.

04. Byzantine Reverse Perspective: The Gaze of the Icon

Does the image looks back? The so-called reverse perspective in Byzantine icon painting gives another decisive example. Architectural and spatial lines may expand toward the viewer rather than converge into distant depth; figures can appear hieratic, scaled by spiritual or narrative significance rather than optical distance.

The standard reflex “incorrect perspective,” already imposes a Renaissance norm - an icon does not fail to imitate visual reality; rather it organizes a different relation between image, spectator, and sacred presence. The space of the icon can project outward, constructing its viewer less as a master of the represented world than as a participant addressed by it.

Its cultural-political implication is not primarily anti-centralization. Byzantine visual order certainly crystallizes imperial and ecclesiastical hierarchies. But the image does not secure authority by installing an autonomous individual eye at the centre of a homogeneous visual field. It locates meaning in liturgical relation, theological presence, and the unequal yet reciprocal encounter between viewer and image.

05. Japanese Ma: The Charged Interval and Latency

The Japanese concept of ma offers another way to reconsider perspective by shifting attention from objects and viewpoints toward intervals, pauses and relations. Ma is often translated as “space,” “interval” or “between-ness,” but it does not designate an empty container separating independently existing things. It names a charged interval whose qualities emerge through timing, distance, rhythm, framing and embodied attention.

In architecture, garden design, theatre, music and visual composition, ma may be experienced as the pause between gestures, the opening between structures, the temporal gap in a performance or the empty area that allows a form to become perceptible. The viewer is not positioned before a complete image whose elements have already been stabilized. Perception is organized through delay and transition. What is absent, withheld or not yet encountered participates in the structure of the scene.

This does not provide a simple non-Western alternative to linear perspective, nor does it imply that Japanese spatial culture is free of social hierarchy. Its significance is more precise: ma makes the interval itself structurally visible. It proposes that orientation depends not only on where a viewer stands but also on what separates, interrupts or suspends relations. In a contemporary context, this can support an understanding of perspective attentive to latency, inaccessible zones, silence, sensory thresholds and the temporal conditions through which something becomes present. The image is no longer only a field to be surveyed; it is an arrangement of permissions, delays and potential encounters.

06. Mesoamerican Stratified Time: Co-present Ritual Temporalities

Mesoamerican visual and spatial systems offer examples in which representation does not conform to the idea that a scene must be organized from one coherent optical viewpoint. In Maya, Mixtec and Aztec manuscripts, for example, places, bodies, routes, ceremonies and historical events may appear through combinations of profile, frontal, plan-like and symbolic views. Scale often follows ritual or political significance rather than optical distance, while several moments can coexist within one composed field.

Such images, of course, can not be described merely as “primitive” forms awaiting the discovery of naturalistic perspective. Their apparent discontinuities are often precisely what enables them to represent relations that a single viewpoint would separate: genealogy, movement, calendrical time, territorial connection, ritual sequence and political legitimacy. A mountain, a city, a ruler, a captive and a deity do not necessarily occupy the same representational scale because they do not occupy the same cultural or cosmological status.

The perspective is therefore layered rather than singular. The spectator does not receive a neutral slice of visible reality but a structured condensation of different times, agencies and levels of significance. Its political force could serve imperial power, dynastic history or ritual authority, yet its logic differs from the fiction that one eye can stabilize the whole field. For contemporary animation, such systems suggest images capable of holding simultaneous temporalities without reducing them to a unified spatial depth. They can model memory, inheritance and collective history as co-present strata rather than as a line receding toward a single horizon.

07. Islamic Geometric Space: Relational Pattern and Distributed Orientation

Islamic geometric ornament and architectural design offer a perspective system that does not depend on the Renaissance model of a single, stationary eye organizing depth through one vanishing point. In muqarnas, tilework, arabesque, calligraphic bands and complex geometric patterns, spatial order is generated through repetition, proportion, symmetry, subdivision and transformation. The viewer encounters not one privileged optical position but a field whose intelligibility emerges through movement, proximity and changing scale.

This does not mean that Islamic visual culture lacks hierarchy or centralized authority. Mosques, palaces, gardens and urban monuments could materialize dynastic power, religious legitimacy and social distinction. The difference lies in the way spatial coherence is produced. Rather than subordinating the visible world to a single perspectival aperture, geometric systems can distribute orientation across surfaces, thresholds, axes, reflections and recurring units. The image or building becomes less a window onto a complete scene than an environment whose order is gradually recognized.

The political and epistemological implication is not simply decentralization. It is the displacement of the sovereign eye by a relational intelligence. No individual position exhausts the pattern; the observer must move, compare, remember and infer. A tiled surface can therefore operate as a model of knowledge in which totality is never delivered instantaneously but is approached through local encounters. In contemporary terms, such systems offer a way to think about collective perception, distributed agency and forms of spatial order that are neither formless nor dependent on one universal point of view.

08. Brunelleschi’s Mirror and Alberti’s Open Window

A canonical anecdote of Filippo Brunelleschi’s perspective experiment in Florence makes the dispositif unusually graspable. Around the early fifteenth century, Brunelleschi is said to have painted the Baptistery of San Giovanni on a small panel, drilled a viewing hole through it, and instructed the observer to look from the reverse side while holding a mirror before the painted surface.

The observer did not freely survey the image. They had to stand at a prescribed position, look through a prescribed aperture, and regulate the relation between panel, eye, mirror, and actual building. The city becomes convincing as an image only when the observer accepts an exact bodily placement.

This shows why and how linear perspective can be read as more than optical realism. It needs and thus constructs a set of rather restrictive and far from “generally given” features such as a stable eye, a fixed distance, a unified visual field, a horizon calibrated to the observer, vanishing point that coordinates receding lines, a visual world whose coherence depends upon remaining in the assigned place.

The often-cited political reading is not that central perspective automatically induces authoritarianism, not even necessarily “centralization as such” (see for instance Piranesi below). Rather, it trains and naturalizes a relation between subject and world in which a single, stabilized position can organize a field of objects. It is through this naturalizing force, that it offers a compelling model of command, ownership, surveillance, architectural planningand rationalized urban order.

Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura in 1435 defines painting through the metaphor of an open window. The painter’s task is to construct a visual plane through which a scene is seen; the image becomes a calculated intersection of visual rays and pictorial surface. The “window” is an epistemic machine. It separates an observing subject from a world arranged before them, converts depth into a manageable projection, and enables the scene to be composed from a stable exterior position. The world is no longer only inhabited; it is framed, assessed, proportioned, and made available for intervention.

In cultural terms, the Albertian window aligns with Renaissance developments in architecture, mercantile calculation, civic display, territorial administration and the ideal of a rationally ordered city. While evidently it does not cause these formations, it offers their visual grammar.

09. Dutch Landscape Painting: Framing against the Vanishing Point

The term “landscape” first appears in the vocabulary of Dutch painting practice in 1598. It develops from the Dutch word “landschap” (“-shap” corresponding with the English suffix: “-ship”, referring to a composed, organisational entity), which earlier simply meant “region” or “tract of land”. Although this seems not to be the actual etymological origin of “-scape”, the Latin “scapus” resonates in the term, like it does in its German translation “Schaft” (landscape: “Landschaft”). One of the several meanings of “scapus” in Roman antiquity was the stick a scroll was rolled over to be un- and refurled during the process of reading.
According to its etymological origin the notion of “landscape” strongly involves the framing of a (human) viewing instance. It can be described from two sides either as “a (painters) view on a spatial constellation of objects, that is edged by an horizon” or as “a visible section of the earth`s surface, which is possible to survey from one specific point”. The concept seems somewhat stretched between those two poles.

The term as a more abstracted or (re-)“objectivised” concept, for example in Alexander von Humboldt’s idea of the “Totalcharakter einer Erdgegend” (“totality of an earth`s site”), was already imported from a more literally “framed” visual context. In a contrary manner the early rhetorics of landscape-painting (unfolding perspective through color grading, tonality and density) have been strongly articulated in opposition to the concept of central perspective and (italian) architecture-painting. So that within the very logic of „a framed view“ they deliberately contradicted a vanishing point and thus the complementary single-viewpoint (distance points etc). Their strong structural ambiguity made them available even as „discussion statements“ in a very literal sense : images of early Dutch landscape-painting have been brought by envoys to Vatican councils, used there as factual arguments in the (de)centralisation-conflicts of the catholic church (pope-cardinals) as well as in those of the secular sovereignty (emperor-princes).

10. Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons: The Subversive Vertigo

Giovanni Battista Piranesi is an interesting case because his work exploits perspective with immense technical precision while simultaneously tricking the viewer by rendering impossible its promise of stable orientation. His Carceri d’invenzione (Imaginary Prisons), first published in 1745 and radically reworked in 1761, construct enormous architectural interiors of stairs, bridges, arches, scaffolds, chains, machines, wells and inaccessible openings.

At first glance, the Carceri appear to intensify central perspective: deep corridors, dramatic diagonals, plunging verticals, perspectival recessions and vast architectural volumes all evoke the authority of engineered space. Yet the images become increasingly difficult to inhabit optically. Stairs lead ambiguously; bridges fail to establish a clear route; scales shift; arches overlap; foreground, middle ground and background refuse stable coordination; several local directional systems coexist without resolving into one navigable whole (a bit comparable to far later M.C. Escher’s perspective tautologies and loops).

Piranesi therefore does not merely abandon central perspective. By an immersive manipulation of the spectator he forces its internal contradictions into a performative visiblity - a remarkable subversive strategy, that surely in the systematic of the time (but in a certain way even still today) offers a truly explosive potential, clearly readable, historically, as a political gesture - Piranesi worked amid eighteenth-century conflicts over antiquity, architectural authority, papal Rome, archaeological ownership, and Enlightenment ideals of order. The political force of the Carceri lies in their attack on visual sovereignty. They expose that central perspective’s apparent unity depends on suppressing other trajectories, scales, labour processes, obstacles, material histories and first of all: points of view. Piranesi turns perspective into a machine that generates disorientation rather than mastery.

It would surely go to far to claim that Piranesi directly staged a modern anti-state or anti-centralist program. The historically defensible assumption is more precise: he turned the prestigious and hegemonic visual technology of perspectival architecture again not itself - to render spatial order unstable, excessive and potentially carceral. His images convert the rational promise of architecture into an environment where orientation, agency and exit remain uncertain.

11. Molotov-Ribbentrop Map: The Violence of the Administrative Gaze

In late September 1939, following the joint invasion of Poland, Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop met to amend the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Stalin personally redrew the border on the map, shifting it eastward from the Vistula, before he and Ribbentrop signed directly on the map document.

From above, Poland becomes a planar surface: a territory rendered legible as a field of rivers, towns, routes, and administrative units. The line appears thin, exact, and almost frictionless. It converts political calculation into geometric clarity.

The graphic line however has a double existence. On paper it is a mark between two agreed zones of authority; in lived space it materializes as checkpoints, arrests, deportations, forced transfers, occupation regimes, altered legal status and lethal constraints on movement. The carto-graphic gesture in fact organizes an immense machinery of bodies, property, labour, language and survival.

Of course, the concept of maps as such is vast and stretches over a huge variety of (more or less framed as “objective” or “subjective”, “partial” or “totalizing” etc.) approaches - to differentiate some of its relations to animation another article ANIMA(THEMA)TIC maps is coming soon. For now - the Molotov-Ribbentrop map’s top view perspective seems to eliminate the positioned observer. It presents territory as if simultaneously visible, measurable and available for partition. While this seems to delete the defined Renaissance viewpoint perspective, the apparent “neutrality” produces a powerful and violent political viewpoint itself: an administrative gaze, within which the map separates decision from consequence. The border line is therefore not merely a representation of power. It is a performative instruction: a drawn mark that realizes relations - in fact producing the territory, subjects and exclusions it announces to describe.

Of course, the case is particularly violent and a bit rhetorically placed here… but there is a range of mapping approaches that tend to demonstrate the difference between a perspectival image and a territorial instrument. A bird’s-eye city view for instance may mimic lived vision through receding streets and monuments, while a cadastral plan suppresses visual appearance in favour of parcels, boundaries, ownership and measurement. The shared systematic however is that a land survey can transform a heterogeneous landscape of paths, seasonal uses, oral agreements, local names, common rights, and ecological relations into a flat, legible surface. Once rendered as a grid, parcel, cadastral number, or border line, territory becomes easier to tax, sell, police, inherit, develop, expropriate, defend.

12. Aboriginal Songlines: Relational, Acoustic, and Situated Mapping

Many Aboriginal Australian knowledge systems provide a radically different account of what it means to represent space. In songlines, routes across Country are held through interconnected systems of song, story, ceremony, kinship, ancestral action, ecological knowledge and bodily passage. A place is not adequately represented as a bounded surface viewed from above. It is encountered as part of a living network of obligations, histories, names, seasonal changes and ancestral relations.

A songline can encode directions, water sources, landmarks and travel sequences, but it does so without separating geographical information from law, memory and responsibility. The landscape is not an inert container through which an autonomous subject moves. It is an active participant in the formation of the traveller, and the traveller’s movement renews a relation that is social, ecological and ceremonial. Knowledge is therefore transmitted through voice, rhythm, repetition, performance and situated inhabitation rather than through a detached visual overview alone.

The contrast with cadastral or colonial mapping is especially sharp. A colonial map tends to transform Country into a surface available for naming, measuring, claiming and administering. Songlines bind place to obligations that cannot be reduced to ownership or coordinates. Their perspective is neither panoramic nor conventionally pictorial: it is itinerant, multisensory and relational. The question is not simply “What does this territory look like from above?” but “Who is connected to this place, what happened here, how must it be approached, and what forms of care does it require?” Such a perspective challenges the presumption that visibility is the primary condition of spatial knowledge.

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III. Annotated Critical Bibliography

This not at all exhaustive text reference list of ANIMA(THEMA)TIC perspective intends to connect a history of perspective in relation to film and animation theory, expanded cinema, media archaeology, interface culture and decolonial or feminist critiques of visual sovereignty. The annotated references below are selected for their direct usefulness on experimental, expanded and pervasive animation addressing political and perceptual forms of perspective.

Section 1: Foundational Theories of Perspective

- Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form (1927; English trans. 1991).

The central reference for treating linear perspective as a historically specific cultural system rather than a neutral optical truth. It establishes the link between perspectival construction, a homogeneous mathematical space, and the modern subject.

- Samuel Y. Edgerton, The Renaissance Rediscovery of Linear Perspective (1899).

A detailed historical study of perspective’s development in the Renaissance, useful for grounding Panofsky’s theoretical claims in artistic, scientific, and architectural practices.

- Hubert Damisch, The Origin of Perspective (1987; English trans. 1994).

A major critical re-reading of perspective that focuses on the vanishing point, the horizon, and the instability embedded within perspectival systems themselves.

- Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (1993).

Maps critiques of Western visual culture and “Cartesian perspectivalism” in twentieth-century philosophy. Particularly useful for connecting perspective to rationalism, distance, mastery and modern regimes of knowledge.

- Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990).

Shows how modern visuality shifted away from the classical camera-obscura model toward embodied, physiological and technologically mediated perception.

- Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (1999).

Essential for thinking about attention as historically produced and politically organized, especially in relation to animated interfaces, feeds, notifications and screen-based distraction.

- Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (1983).

Distinguishes between the fixed, controlling “gaze” associated with Western perspectival painting and forms of vision understood as temporal, situated, bodily.

- W. J. T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986).

A foundational work connecting visual forms to institutional power, ideology and representation.

Section 2: Animation Theory and the Politics of the Image

- Suzanne Buchan, ed., Pervasive Animation (2013).

A key collection for conceptualizing animation beyond film and television: across interfaces, games, architecture, mobile media, performance, visualization, daily life. It is especially relevant to the term “pervasive animation”.

- Suzanne Buchan, The Quay Brothers: Into a Metaphysical Playroom (2011).

Useful for analyses of stop motion, materiality, uncanny spatial construction, objects and the destabilization of conventional cinematic depth.

- Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (2009).

A foundational work for thinking about animation through the “animetic interval,” multiplanar composition, compositing, movement and distributed visual fields. Lamarre is particularly valuable as an alternative to film theory centered on deep perspectival space.

- Thomas Lamarre, The Anime Ecology: A Genealogy of Television, Animation, and Game Media (2018).

Extends his work toward media environments, platforms, infrastructures, transmedia systems. Useful for discussing animation’s relationship to contemporary technological ecologies.

- Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (2001).

An influential account of database logic, compositing, virtual cameras, digital cinema, navigation and the cultural consequences of software-based images.

Here specifically relevant chapter “The Automation of Sight: From Photography to Computer Vision.” Particularly relevant to the separation between human viewing and machine vision, a central issue for pervasive animation and computational perspective.

- Esther Leslie, Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-Garde (2002).

Connects animation to critical theory, modernity, labour, technology, commodity culture, avant-garde artistic practice.

- Alan Cholodenko, ed., The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (1991).

A major theoretical collection that challenges simple definitions of animation and addresses animation’s relation to cinem/ illusion/ movement/ life/ death.

- Karen Beckman, ed., Animating Film Theory (2014).

Places animation at the center of film theory rather than treating it as a marginal genre. Useful for reframing montage, spectatorship, movement, realism, medium specificity.

- Scott Bukatman, The Poetics of Slumberland: Animated Spirits and the Animating Spirit. (2012).

Explores animation’s relationship to metamorphosis, corporeality, space, elasticity, modernity and visual play.

- Donald Crafton, Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898–1928 (1982).

Valuable historical background for early animation’s visual experiments and the relationship between animation, trick film, optical toys and modern visual culture.

Section 3: Expanded Cinema, Installation and Embodied Spectatorship

- Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (1970; revised editions available).

The foundational text for cinema beyond the conventional screen. Addresses multi-screen environments, electronic media, cybernetics, intermedia, altered spectator relations.

- A. L. Rees, White, Ball, Curtis, Expanded Cinema: Art, Performance, Film (2011).

A historical and critical account of expanded film practices, including projection performance, installation, artists’ film and screen-based spatial experimentation.

- Chrissie Iles, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art, 1964–1977 (2001).

Examines projection in installation and performance, making it useful for analyses of moving images that become architectural, environmental, bodily.

- Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (2002).

A major resource for thinking about filmic space as haptic, architectural, affective and mobile rather than simply optical.

- Giuliana Bruno, Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (2014).

Particularly useful for moving beyond the window metaphor of cinema toward surface, texture, material contact, projection and the tactile image.

- Erika Balsom, Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art (2013).

Addresses the migration of moving-image practices into galleries and museums, including installation, spectatorship, duration, circulation, institutional framing.

- Erika Balsom, After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation (2017).

Useful for questions of repetition, copying, circulation and the political economy of contemporary moving images.

- Claire Bishop, Installation Art: A Critical History. (2005).

Provides a framework for analyzing installation as a spatial and phenomenological encounter, including the changing role of the spectator.

- Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (1945; English trans. 1962).

Foundational for an embodied account of vision. Particularly relevant when discussing spectators who walk through, navigate or physically negotiate animated environments.

- Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (1999).

A foundational account of experimental ethnography as a mode of audiovisual research that unsettles the authority of observational, documentary, and ethnographic vision. Russell treats film and video as sites where memory, archive, displacement, embodiment and cultural difference can be reworked rather than transparently represented. In relation to perspective, the book supports a shift from the sovereign, distanced observer toward partial, situated, self-reflexive, materially mediated forms of seeing.

- Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1992).

Develops a phenomenological account of cinema in which the film itself has a perceptual and expressive body. Highly relevant to moving-image installation and animation.

- Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (2000).

Introduces the concept of haptic visuality: modes of looking that are close, tactile, fragmentary and non-masterful. A valuable counterpoint to distant perspectival vision.

Section 4: Digital Space, Interfaces, Games, and Computational Perspective

- Anne Friedberg, The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft (2006).

One of the most directly relevant texts for tracing the continuity and transformation of perspectival “window” logic from Renaissance painting to cinema, television, computer screens, digital interfaces.

- Alexander R. Galloway, The Interface Effect (2012).

Examines interfaces as cultural and political systems rather than transparent tools. Useful for discussing animation within software environments and interactive media.

- Alexander R. Galloway, Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture (2006).

A central text on games, action, algorithms, protocols, control. Useful for analyzing navigable animated worlds and the politics of player agency.

- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory (2011).

Explores how software becomes naturalized and opaque, while shaping memory, habit, agency, visual culture.

- Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Updating to Remain the Same: Habitual New Media (2016).

Particularly useful for thinking through repetition, habitual interaction, social-media loops, platform capture and animated interface routines.

- Mark B. N. Hansen, New Philosophy for New Media (2004).

Proposes an embodied account of digital media, arguing that bodily affect and sensation exceed the visible image.

- Mark B. N. Hansen, Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media (2015).

Useful for understanding contemporary media as environmental, predictive, data-driven and increasingly oriented toward pre-conscious perception.

- N. Katherine Hayles, Unthought: The Power of the Cognitive Nonconscious (2017).

Helps articulate how technical systems make decisions and shape perception below the level of conscious reflection.

- Tara McPherson, “U.S. Operating Systems at Mid-Century: Interfacing Race and Gender in the 1960s.”

An influential article connecting computational modularity to racialized histories of organization, separation and visual culture.

- Hito Steyerl, The Wretched of the Screen (2012).

Includes influential essays on circulation, surveillance, low-resolution images, vertical perspective, military vision and the politics of contemporary image systems.

- Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective” (2011).

Essential for analyzing the shift from horizontal Renaissance perspective toward aerial, orbital, satellite, drone, logistical vision.

- Harun Farocki, Eye/Machine I–III (2000–2003).

A filmic and theoretical resource on operational images: images produced for machines, military systems, industrial processes and surveillance rather than human contemplation.

Section 5: Feminist, Decolonial, and Situated Critiques of Vision

- Marisol de la Cadena, Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice Across Andean Worlds (2015).

Develops an account of Andean worlds in which mountains and other entities participate in political and social life. It challenges the separation of landscape from agency and is useful for animated environments where terrain, weather, matter and infrastructure act rather than merely appear.

- Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics (2009; English trans. 2014).

Introduces Amazonian perspectivism, in which different beings inhabit distinct perceptual worlds rather than sharing a single neutral world observed from different positions. This is highly productive for animation, nonhuman agency, transformation and plural ontologies of vision.

- Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Ch’ixinakax utxiwa: On Decolonising Practices and Discourses (2012; English trans. 2020).

Develops the Aymara concept of ch’ixi: coexistence without synthesis, where heterogeneous elements remain distinct without being purified into a single identity. It provides a strong vocabulary for plural, layered, contradictory, non-unified perspectival fields.

- Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (2009; hemispheric institute, keynote lecture).

Directly addresses images, coloniality, Andean visual practices and the political force of visual archives. Particularly relevant for countering colonial cartographic and ethnographic modes of looking.

- Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” (1988).

A crucial text against the “god trick” of disembodied, universal vision. Haraway’s notion of partial perspective is highly productive for experimental animation and plural spectatorship.

- Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991).

Includes “Situated Knowledges” and offers a broader feminist critique of objectivity, technology, embodiment and visual power.

- bell hooks, “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators” (1992).

A foundational account of spectatorship as a site of resistance, useful for analyzing who is authorized to look and how visual systems can be inhabited critically.

- Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (2013; English trans. 2017).

Examines the historical production of racial categories within capitalism, colonialism and modernity. It supports an analysis of visual and computational systems that sort, track, value or render populations visible in unequal ways.

- Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics (1991).

Challenges ethnographic authority, transparent representation and the politics of speaking or seeing for others.

- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, The Civil Contract of Photography (2008).

Offers a political account of images as relations among photographed subjects, viewers, institutions, states. Its framework can be extended to animated and computational images.

- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism (2019).

Useful for confronting imperial visual archives and for developing non-extractive ways of relating to images, histories and worlds.

- Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (2012).

Extends Azoulay’s challenge to imperial visual regimes by proposing the image as a shared political event rather than an object owned by the photographer, archive, state, viewer. Useful for moving-image practices that redistribute agency among subjects, spectators, technologies and institutions.

- Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (2011).

A major account of visuality as a technique of authority and the “right to look” as a practice of resistance.

- Nicholas Mirzoeff, How to See the World (2015).

A more accessible introduction to visual culture, surveillance, networks, climate imagery and contemporary image politics.

- V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (1988).

A foundational critique of how colonial scholarship produced “Africa” as an object of knowledge. Useful for examining perspective as an epistemic ordering system that classifies territory, peoples and cultural difference from an external position.

- Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007).

A demanding but highly relevant philosophical critique of racialized globality, modernity, universality and the spatial-temporal ordering of subjects.

- Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman, 4 Waters: Deep Implicancy (2018).

A visual and conceptual work that challenges separability, ownership, fixed subject-object relations. It offers a powerful framework for ecological and nonhuman approaches to animation and perspective.

- Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990; English trans. 1997).

Especially useful for concepts of opacity, relation and the refusal of total transparency or complete visual possession.

- Édouard Glissant, Treatise on the Whole-World (1997; English trans. 2020).

Extends Glissant’s relational philosophy through the concepts of “Tout-monde”, opacity, creolization, interdependence. Especially valuable for resisting totalizing viewpoints and for approaching animation as a field of relations rather than an image mastered from outside.

- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance (2017).

Articulates Nishnaabeg thought through land-based pedagogy, relationality, embodied knowledge and Indigenous resurgence. Useful for shifting perspective away from extractive overview toward reciprocal, place-specific practices of attention.

- Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999; 3rd ed. 2021).

A key Māori intervention into the politics of research, representation, archives, classification, institutional knowledgev. It is especially relevant when animation or audiovisual research works with communities, oral histories, territories, cultural materials.

(Thank you for writing, if you consider other here missing sources relevant: schellow_a@gmx.de. I am gladly expanding this list of sources step by step.)

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ANIMA(THEMA)TIC perspective - an annotated WATCHLIST

Within Erwin Panofsky’s concept of “perspective as symbolic form,” pictorial space is not a neutral mathematical grid but the expression of a particular worldview and historical period. Renaissance linear perspective, for instance, established the rational, autonomous individual as the centre of the world.

When experimental animations manipulate these perspectives—linear perspective, parallel perspective, isometry, reverse perspective or any other forms of perspective—they deconstruct certain specific aspects of the related worldview each of them is rooting in; thus namely expose political and ideological structures of power embedded in various spatial constructions.

If we were looking for curatorial categories of the selection below, they might, quite heterogeneously, read as follows: Breaking Open of Cartesian Space; Multiple Perspectives and the Deconstruction of the Vanishing Point; Digital Spaces and Post-Perspectival Worlds; Playing with Dimension (surface vs. space); Absolute Film: The Flattening of Space into Surface; Dadaism and Cubism: Fragmenting the Gaze; Postwar Avant-Garde: The Materialization of Space; Censored Space and the Political Counter-Perspective; Literary-Journalistic Spatial Collage; Bureaucratic Space as a System of Control; The Unreliable Perspective of Memory; Invisible Space; The Stretching and Distortion of Space in Testimony; Mapped Space and Colonial Gazes; Space as Archive and Architectural Prison; Deconstructed Space as a Politically Restricted Zone; The Physical Camera as Documentary Fake; Space as Sensory Overload; Depression, Trauma, and Tunnel Vision; The Algorithmic Eye and Ubiquitous Surveillance; The Visual Noise of Memory, etc., etc.

As such large variety of directions suggests, the following experimental (animation) films and projects are chosen in technical such as conceptual terms from a deliberately vast field of approaches. They are, whatsoever, not at all exclusively unfolding “about” questions of perspective. Far from such pre-definition, in fact… the range of their subjects, aesthetics and methods of narration is broad and often actually taking deliberate distance from such - one could consider as - rather formal or at least primarily structural question in their center. Many of them instead focus on various forms of storytelling, documentary speculation, poetics or activism. So again, why then: perspective? What gathers them in my view is not a common “aboutness” but is a shared potential to be read through a perspectival lens, in each case then unfolding a notion and practice reflection of “perspective as a symbolic form” in very particular, surprising, sometimes deeply unsettling ways.

Enjoy watching!

- Rhythmus 21 (Hans Richter, 1921): Rectangles and squares expand, contract, slide across the screen, producing momentary suggestions of approach, recession and volume. Yet no stable world, horizon.or architectural coordinate system is ever established. Richter turns apparent depth into a rhythmic fluctuation of flat forms, revealing cinematic space as an effect constructed by scale, contrast, timing and the spectator’s perceptual habits.

- Symphonie diagonale (Viking Eggeling, 1924): Eggeling’s animated line forms develop along diagonal vectors in a highly controlled visual score. The film refuses naturalistic depth and conventional architectural orientation; instead, it renders the screen a site of graphic transformation and temporal counterpoint. Space is organised as a relational choreography of signs rather than as a perspectival stage for objects.

- Ballet mécanique (Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy, 1924): Extreme close-ups, repeated objects, machine parts, rotating forms, reflections, montage fragment the modern world into a sequence of optical shocks. The film disrupts bodily scale and conventional orientation, replacing the unified human viewpoint with a machinic and serial logic. Perspective becomes plural, mechanical, discontinuous… reflecting the technological reorganisation of perception in modernity.

- The Adventures of Prince Achmed (Lotte Reiniger, 1926): Through layered silhouettes, shifting scales and articulated paper figures, The Adventures of Prince Achmed constructs depth while preserving the image’s graphic flatness. Space is not a stable container but a transformable field shaped by movement, magic, narrative desire. The film’s impossible flights and changing viewpoints destabilise ordinary physical laws, presenting perspective as means of cultural and imaginative world-making. By producing depth through visible layers and cut-out forms, Reiniger exposes cinematic space as constructed, theatrical and open to continual transformation.

- Emak-Bakia (Man Ray, 1926): Man Ray combines distorted optics, spinning objects, repeated patterns, found imagery and rayographs—camera-less images created by placing objects directly onto photosensitive material. These procedures displace the camera lens as the privileged source of visual truth. By collapsing volume into shadow, trace and surface, the film breaks the optical assumptions underlying linear perspective and unfolds the image as a material event.

- Studie Nr. 7 (Oskar Fischinger, 1931): Fischinger synchronises abstract forms with music, using growth, contraction, acceleration, directional movement to create rhythmic spatial effects. Forms may appear to rush forward or recede, but their movement remains detached from a stable physical environment. Perspective is converted into musical energy: a variable expressive device rather than a system for representing an objective world.

- A Colour Box (Len Lye, 1935): Painted and stencilled directly onto film, the work sets rapidly changing bands, shapes, textures against a driving musical rhythm. The frame becomes an active field rather than a window: colour expands, contracts and collides across the screen, producing intensity through speed and repetition. Perspective functions as temporal and material organisation, not as a fixed optical viewpoint. By foregrounding the handmade surface of film, A Colour Box renders animation into an encounter with pattern, velocity, namely: the physical trace of making.

- An Optical Poem (Oskar Fischinger, 1938): Through animated paper shapes choreographed to Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, Fischinger creates a shifting field of colour, scale and rhythm without a stable horizon or vanishing point. Perspective operates not as a fixed optical system but as a temporal relation produced through movement and musical timing. Forms seem to advance, retreat and cross the screen, generating depth as an affective event rather than an illusion of measurable space. The film therefore treats abstraction as being capable of organising perception beyond the sovereign, single viewpoint of linear perspective.

- Dots (Norman McLaren, 1940): Created by drawing and scratching directly onto film, the work animates points of light whose movement and rhythm emerge from their frame-by-frame arrangement. The dots do not occupy a coherent depicted space; they produce relations of approach, separation, acceleration, pulse across the screen. Perspective unfolds here through temporal coordination rather than optical depth: perception is organised through intervals, repetition and the material trace of the hand. Dots exposes animation as a constructed rhythm, replacing cinematic transparency with an active encounter between mark - soundtrack - projection - viewer.

- Motion Painting No. 1 (Oskar Fischinger, 1947): The film animates the gradual construction of an abstract painting, synchronising changing forms and colours with Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3. Each new layer both develops and partly conceals what preceded it, making the image a record of irreversible decisions and vanished states. Perspective operates here not through spatial depth or a stable viewing position, but as a temporal construction: the viewer sees the painting emerge through successive acts of framing, covering and revision. Animation exposes the supposedly finished image as a moving history of marks, where visibility is continually negotiated between appearance and disappearance.

- Begone Dull Care (Norman McLaren and Evelyn Lambart, 1949): Painted, scratched, and manipulated directly on film, the work develops an abstract choreography synchronised to jazz music by the Oscar Peterson Trio. Its pulsating marks do not construct a stable depicted space; they create an animated surface of changing intensity, speed and affect. Perspective operates here without optical depth or a sovereign viewing position: it is distributed through the material relation between gesture, frame, soundtrack, projection. By foregrounding the filmstrip’s physical trace, Begone Dull Care challenges cinema’s claim to transparent vision and makes perception an event of rhythm/ colour/ bodily movement.

- Form Phases series, especially Form Phases IV (Robert Breer, 1952–1954): Breer’s rapidly transforming geometric forms make foreground and background repeatedly exchange roles. The spectator cannot settle into a stable spatial reading because apparent depth is continually interrupted by abrupt graphic change. The series demystifies cinematic space by demonstrating that depth is not inherent in the image but assembled through temporal perception, visual persistence and convention.

- Blinkity Blank (Norman McLaren, 1955): Made through direct animation on black film stock, the work brings figures, lines and abstract forms into being through abrupt appearances, disappearances, metamorphoses. The intermittent image makes each frame perceptible as a constructed event, while flicker produces movement from discontinuity rather than seamless continuity. Perspective operates not as a unified optical viewpoint but as an architecture generated through rhythm, interruption and material trace. By exposing the surface and temporal mechanics of film, Blinkity Blank replaces representational depth with an animated space of instability and visual play.

- Free Radicals (Len Lye, 1958–1979): Scratched directly onto black film, its white lines and signs flash, split, convulse in rhythmic dialogue with music. The marks create no stable horizon, scale or perspectival depth; instead, they organise the screen through pulses of speed and temporal intensity. Perspective functions as a form of embodied movement: vision is shaped by the force, duration, recurrence of gestures recorded in the filmstrip. By foregrounding the abrasive physical trace of its making, Free Radicals rejects cinema as transparent representation and turns projection into a direct encounter with energy and rhythm.

- Dog Star Man (Stan Brakhage, 1961–1964): Across its multi-part structure, the film follows a figure ascending a mountain, but this minimal narrative is continually dissolved by layered exposures, coloured light, scratched and painted marks, fragmented rhythms. The landscape is not presented as stable, measurable space; it becomes an event of perception in which interior vision, physical exertion or celestial scale intermingle. Perspective operates as embodied consciousness rather than linear optical order. By multiplying visual planes and destabilising temporal continuity, the film challenges the camera’s apparent neutrality and makes cinematic vision a shifting relation among body, material, memory, world.

- Heaven and Earth Magic (Harry Smith, 1962): Smith’s dense collage animation dismantles stable scale, gravity, chronology, causal progression through the continual metamorphosis of found images. Objects move according to an occult and associative logic in which visual connections replace conventional narrative explanation. Perspective is altered consciousness: the image becomes a fluctuating field where bodies, machines, diagrams, fragments enter unpredictable relations beyond rational spatial order.

- Mothlight (Stan Brakhage, 1963): Brakhage pressed moth wings, leaves, grasses and other organic fragments between strips of film, allowing projection to animate their translucent textures at high speed. The work rejects the camera’s perspectival regime—its fixed position, optical depth, or the claim to at all capture an „external scene“. Perspective instead becomes grounded in contact, fragmentation and temporal exposure: the viewer encounters matter as it flashes between presence and disappearance. By making the filmstrip both support and image, Brakhage replaces cinematic transparency with an unstable material field of light-trace and mortality.

- Fuses (Carolee Schneemann, 1964–1967): Schneemann combines intimate bodily imagery with hand-painting, scratching, solarisation, optical alteration to challenge the conventions of both cinematic observation and erotic representation. The film refuses the detached, controlling gaze by making the image bear the marks of touch, duration and embodied participation. Perspective is critically transformed as feminist self-determination — vision is reclaimed as a reciprocal and tactile relation rather than an instrument for objectifying the body.

- The Hand (Ruka, Jiří Trnka, 1965): The sets of this stop-motion film employ a strict, almost theatrical parallel perspective. This spatial form imprisons the artist-protagonist within a rigid, inescapable grid—a direct translation of the totalitarian state’s absolute, geometric control over the individual.

- Wavelength (Michael Snow, 1967): A continuous zoom across a room transforms architectural space into an experience of duration. As the camera advances, scale, sound and attention become progressively detached from narrative action, making vision itself the subject of the film. The apparently objective movement of the camera produces not mastery over space, but a sustained encounter with delay, distance, and anticipation. The room becomes a measurable yet unstable field in which perception is stretched until spatial depth is experienced primarily as time.

- T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G (Paul Sharits, 1968): Built from rapidly alternating coloured frames, repeated visual fragments and a looping spoken phrase, the film focusses the interval between frames as a source of perceptual intensity. The image does not open onto coherent pictorial depth; it acts directly on the viewer’s retina, nervous system and sense of duration. Perspective functions here as a form of embodied spectatorship: vision is organised by pulses, interruptions and sensory thresholds rather than by a stable optical viewpoint. By exposing projection as a material and temporal apparatus, Sharits replaces cinematic transparency with an intense, unstable encounter between screen and body.

- Pas de deux (Norman McLaren, 1968): Filmed against a black background and printed through repeated exposures, the work builds ghostly chains of figures around two dancers. Each gesture produces a visual residue: limbs multiply, turns become arcs and bodies occupy several moments at once. Perspective here does not mark a stable position from which movement is observed, but is constructed through a form of temporal accumulation. The film challenges the singular viewpoint and instantaneity associated with photographic representation, making the body appear as a layered relation between memory, rhythm, motion.

- Back and Forth (Michael Snow, 1969): The camera repeatedly sweeps across a classroom with increasing intensity, reducing the room’s architectural coordinates to flashes, interruptions, and rhythmic reversals. Objects and bodies become momentary registrations within a movement that can no longer stabilise them as separate forms. Perspective here traces institutional and perceptual discipline: the camera scans the room as if producing an inventory, yet its excessive repetition causes the spatial order to collapse. What begins as observation becomes vibration, demonstrating how systematic vision might dissolve the world it attempts to organise.

- La Région Centrale (Michael Snow, 1971): A mechanically programmed camera records a remote mountainous landscape through continuous rotations, tilts, changes of orientation that no human observer could sustain. The resulting images abandon the stable horizon and frontal viewpoint associated with conventional landscape vision. Space is nonhumanly scanned by an apparatus without a body, intention or privileged centre. Anticipating automated and drone-like vision, the film reveals mechanical observation as both expansive and disorienting, replacing visual mastery with an impersonal circulation through space.

- Belladonna of Sadness (Kanashimi no Belladonna, Eiichi Yamamoto, 1973): This animated film rejects stable, Renaissance-style depth in favour of elongated bodies, ink-and-watercolour fields, ornamental flatness, sudden empty expanses and violently shifting scale. Its medieval European setting is rendered through a Japanese graphic and psychedelic visual language, making space an affective terrain rather than a coherent container. Jeanne’s body repeatedly expands, dissolves, merges with landscape, is subjected to hallucinatory transformations; perspective registers the force of feudal, patriarchal and clerical power as well as the unstable emergence of erotic desire, rage and counter-power. The oscillation between decorative two-dimensionality and abyssal depth turns pictorial space into a field to negotiate gendered oppression, social exclusion, witchcraft and collective revolt.

- The Street (Caroline Leaf, 1976): Leaf paints with oil on glass directly beneath the camera. Perspective fluidly morphs from overhead views into extreme distortions, without stable vanishing points. The rejection of geometric stability resonates an unstable, subjective nature of familial grief and Jewish-Canadian identity.

- Mindscape (Jacques Drouin, 1976): Using pinscreen animation, Drouin creates a mutable visual field in which light, shadow, drawing, sculptural relief continually alter the appearance of depth. The image seems to emerge from a surface while also opening into an unstable interior space, making material resistance part of the animation. Perspective is mental and tactile projection — spatial relations are generated through pressure, texture, illumination, and transformation rather than through a fixed geometric grid. The screen becomes a threshold between external environment and interior consciousness.

- The Metamorphosis of Mr. Samsa (Caroline Leaf, 1977): Leaf’s painted animation translates Kafka’s transformation into a world where figure and ground, interior and exterior, body and environment continually exchange positions. Forms emerge, dissolve and deform within the same tactile surface, preventing the viewer from locating a stable visual standpoint. The room is not merely where transformation occurs but participates in the character’s altered condition. By rendering space itself unstable, the film renders estrangement as a perceptual and material experience rather than only a narrative theme.

- The Sand Castle (Co Hoedeman, 1977): Through stop-motion animation, Hoedeman presents a group of sand figures constructing a fragile collective environment that is continually threatened by erosion and external forces. The visible labour of building, shaping, rebuilding makes material process central to the film’s spatial organisation. Perspective functions and the environment is constructed through cooperation but remains subject to collapse, transformation and impermanence. Sand possesses its own agency, resisting complete control and reminding the viewer that every built space is also a temporal process.

- Powers of Ten (Charles and Ray Eames, 1977): Through controlled movements between the human body, architecture, the planet, the galaxy, microscopic matter, Powers of Ten presents scale as a continuous and intelligible system. Its elegant transitions make radically different spatial orders appear measurable within one unified field of vision. The camera, stating scientific authority, assumes an apparently universal position from which the world can be organised, compared, known. At the same time, the film reveals that every viewpoint depends on instruments, conventions and changes of scale that construct rather than simply disclose reality.

- Satiemania (Zdenko Gašparović, 1978): A great piece of the Zagreb School. Here, the construction of the metropolis repeatedly collapses into psychedelic, unstable lines. The dissolution of linear perspective unfolds alienation, decadence and the modern individual’s loss of control under late capitalism.

- Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979): Norstein constructs memory through layered cut-outs, drifting camera movement, mist, interior thresholds, temporal discontinuity. Space does not proceed as a coherent linear world but as a mnemonic field in which war, childhood, domestic life and dream coexist. This layered construction resists the single, rationalised viewpoint and makes perspective an operation of fragile collective memory.

- Tango (Zbigniew Rybczyński, 1980): Rybczyński uses a rigid, mathematically constructed linear perspective of a room. By compositing dozens of isolated figures, each trapped in a loop and never touching one another, perspectival space becomes a structural frame for existential isolation and the deterministic routine of socialist Poland.

- Son of the White Mare (Marcell Jankovics, 1981): Based on Hungarian folk mythology, the film rejects naturalistic depth in favour of radically flat, emblematic colour fields and metamorphic figures. Its patterned space displaces Renaissance perspectival realism with a cosmological organisation in which body, animal, landscape and myth remain inseparable.

- Reassemblage (Trinh T. Minh-ha, 1982): Trinh’s film refuses the stable explanatory perspective of ethnographic cinema. Fragmented framing, discontinuous sound, close observation, an anti-totalising voiceover interrupt the viewer’s ability to master the represented environment. Senegalese space emerges not as an object of Western knowledge but as a field in which filming, listening, cultural authority and representation remain openly contested.

- The Night Club (Jonathan Hodgson, 1983): Hodgson’s work is relevant for its use of expressive, unstable drawing to reconstruct social space through movement, atmosphere, sound, recollection. Rather than treating nightlife as a perspectivally unified location, it makes the club a fluctuating field of bodies, rhythm, visibility, sensory pressure. Spatial coherence gives way to a subjective topology of encounter.

- Dimensions of Dialogue (Možnosti dialogu, Jan Švankmajer, 1983): The film employs extreme close-ups and axis jumps that refuse coherent spatial perception. This shattering of rational space system(at)icly renders visible the radical failure of human communication under totalitarian systems.

- The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer (Quay Brothers, 1984): The Quay Brothers use extreme depth of field, macro-perspectival distortions, anamorphic spaces. This visual construction breaks with Cartesian rationality and becomes a cage for the survival of magical, subversive and somewhat anti-Enlightenment reflection in Central Europe.

- Object Conversation (Paul Glabicki, 1985): Glabicki treats perspective, geometry, diagrammatic notation as visible languages rather than transparent tools. Lines, grids, shapes, and apparent volumes continuously shift between representing depth and functioning as flat marks on a screen. The film demonstrates how pictorial space is coded: the spectator sees depth being proposed, tested and withdrawn before their eyes.

- The Street of Crocodiles (Stephen and Timothy Quay, 1986): In a miniature world of decaying interiors, mechanical objects, puppets and industrial debris, the Quay Brothers replace coherent spatial representation with an atmosphere of material uncertainty. Objects appear to possess their own agency, while scale and depth remain unstable and resistant to transparent interpretation. It is though entrapment and transformation, that a form of perspective is constructed: the viewer is drawn into a world where vision is obstructed by surfaces, mechanisms and the persistence of degraded matter.

- Seated Figures (Michael Snow, 1988): Snow directs attention toward the ground plane and toward the apparatus of looking rather than presenting a conventionally composed, inhabitable scene. The low, downward-facing orientation suppresses a stable horizon and denies the viewer the privileged upright position assumed by Renaissance perspective. Asphalt, grass, soil, surface texture become the primary spatial event: space is experienced as material proximity rather than as a transparent container extending toward a vanishing point.

- Balance (Christoph and Wolfgang Lauenstein, 1989): On a small platform suspended in a void, five identical figures try to maintain equilibrium while competing for possession of a mysterious object. The strict frontal arrangement and limited spatial field turn perspective into a political diagram: every shift in individual weight redistributes the conditions of collective survival, exposing the fragile relation between desire, hierarchy and shared ground.

- Drawings for Projection series (William Kentridge, 1989–ongoing): Kentridge’s charcoal animations are made by drawing, erasing, redrawing directly on the same sheets of paper, so that each image retains traces of earlier states. Maps, buildings, mines, offices, domestic interiors, Johannesburg landscapes become unstable archives of South Africa’s racial capitalism and apartheid history. Their perspectival order is never secure: it is visibly produced through surveying, ownership, extraction, bureaucratic administration and the continual return of what official history attempts to erase.

- The Thief and the Cobbler (Richard Williams, 1993 and 2006): The film’s excessive hand-drawn environments (especially mind blowing in the 2006 created non-profit fan restoration of Williams’s workprint by Garrett Gilchrist, titled The Thief and the Cobbler: The Recobbled Cut) use extreme deep-focus perspective, mobile vanishing points, architectural patterning and prolonged spatial transformations. Its crazy perspectival worlds alternately magnify sovereign spectacle and destabilise it: monumental palaces, streets, towers, machines become elastic graphic systems in which scale, gravity and orientation can suddenly fail.

- Mine (William Kentridge, 1991): In a compressed modernist city, the capitalist-industrialist Soho Eckstein appears to control an underground world of miners through machinery, paperwork and extraction. Vertical spatial organisation links the executive’s office, the urban surface, the subterranean mine, producing a graphic anatomy of racialised labour in which wealth above ground is materially dependent on exploited bodies below it.

- Franz Kafka (Piotr Dumała, 1992): Dumała’s scratched-plaster animation creates shadow-heavy interiors and compressed architectural spaces that evoke Kafka’s world without reducing it to biography. Low ceilings, constricted rooms, unstable light and oppressive corridors transform perspective into an architecture of alienation. Space appears to enforce an impersonal authority, making the viewer feel the pressure of bureaucratic and existential confinement.

- Food (Jan Švankmajer, 1992): Švankmajer explores eating, labour, social routine, bodily exchange through grotesque transformations in which people and objects repeatedly change roles. The film’s absurd material logic undermines the distinction between subject and object, turning everyday behaviour into a ritual of consumption and dependence, while perspective appears as social conditioning. Bodies are caught within systems of repetition, while tactile matter exposes the irrational structures beneath ordinary routines.

- A Is for Autism (Tim Webb, 1992): Created collaboratively with autistic participants, the film combines drawings, writing, voices, animation to communicate experiences that exceed normative models of representation. Rather than imposing a single external viewpoint, it allows perception to emerge through distinct sensory rhythms and forms of expression, while perspective functions according to specific neurodivergent subjectivities in the spectrum: not a fixed visual position, but a changing relation between language, image, sound, embodied experience.

- Felix in Exile (William Kentridge, 1994): Kentridge constructs Johannesburg through charcoal erasures, drawn architectural fragments, surveying instruments, maps, unstable sightlines. The recurring image of the draughtsman makes vision inseparable from measurement and territorial power, while erasure turns the apparent neutrality of the mapped city into a record of displacement, apartheid violence and contested memory.

- Ghost in the Shell (Mamoru Oshii, 1995, and 2 2004): The film’s city is organised through vertical megastructures, networked surveillance, reflective surfaces, dense sequences of detached urban observation. Its shifting relation between the embodied camera, the cybernetic body and the distributed network destabilises human-centred perspective; urban space becomes an interface through which state power, corporate infrastructure, posthuman subjectivity are mutually produced. In Ghost in the Shell 2 Oshii expands this spatial politics through labyrinthine interiors, baroque corridors, mirrored surfaces, virtual overlays and recursive architectural thresholds. The alternation between perspectival depth, digital compositing, optical illusion turns the city into an epistemic trap, where vision cannot guarantee knowledge and where bodies, commodities, data and programmed perception circulate through the same systems.

- The End of the World in Four Seasons (Paul Driessen, 1995): Divided frames and simultaneous actions produce a plural animated space in which several viewpoints and temporal processes unfold at once. No single image dominates the composition; meaning emerges through relations between adjacent scenes, parallel movements, and overlapping narrative rhythms. The world is not organised around one privileged observer but distributed across multiple centres of attention. Driessen’s segmented screen challenges linear perception, presenting space as relational, concurrent and continually reorganised through the viewer’s shifting focus.

- The Last Angel of History (John Akomfrah, 1996): Akomfrah combines interviews, speculative narration, archive material, electronic music and futurist landscapes to develop an Afrodiasporic spatial imagination. Time is treated as an uneven terrain structured by slavery, colonial extraction, technological modernity, sound. Perspective becomes diasporic and temporal rather than geographically fixed, enabling a counter-history in which Black futurity is assembled from fragments.

- Feeling My Way (William Hodgson, 1997): Hodgson’s film works through embodied movement, close-range observation and the variable rhythm of walking. Rather than organising the world through a stable, sovereign viewpoint, it lets space emerge through touch, duration, hesitation, repeated orientation. Perspective becomes a situated and bodily process: an unstable relation between camera, ground, memory, passage.

- The Old Man and the Sea (Aleksandr Petrov, 1999): Petrov’s paint-on-glass animation creates a marine space in continual metamorphosis, where sea, sky, body, fish, memory flow into one another. Its shifting horizons and liquefied depths undo the stable observer of linear perspective, rendering the ocean as an animate and relational environment rather than an object available to human mastery.

- When the Day Breaks (Wendy Tilby and Amanda Forbis, 1999): The film connects the fates of city dwellers through the perspective of everyday objects and utility lines. The linking of countless isolated micro-perspectives materializes a fragile, invisible interconnectedness of modern urban society.

- The Legend of the Sacred Stone (Chris Huang, 2000): This glove-puppetry film constructs a world through theatrical framing, dense ornament, miniature architecture and choreographed martial movement. Its spaces combine stage conventions, ritualised gesture, and screen spectacle, challenging the assumption that cinematic depth must be organised around a stable, individual observer.

- In Absentia (Brothers Quay, 2000): Combining projected images, musical performance, objects, fragmented narrative space, In Absentia turns perception into a dislocated temporal and sensory experience. Projected textures and mechanical details suggest a world governed by repetition, memory and partial disappearance, while psychic instability formats perspective - space is not observed from a secure position but encountered through fragments, echoes, and shifting relations between sound, image, and object.

- Father and Daughter (Michael Dudok de Wit, 2000): The film places extreme emphasis on the horizontal line and on flat, almost two-dimensional spaces in the tradition of European graphic art. This abandonment of the depth axis of linear perspective crystallizes to an image of an infinity of time, waiting and longing.

- Eye/Machine I–III (Harun Farocki, 2000–2003): Farocki examines “operative images”: images generated by technical systems to guide action, calculate targets, monitor processes or automate decisions rather than to be viewed contemplatively. Missile guidance, machine vision, tracking systems and military interfaces reduce space to coordinates, grids, thresholds, targetable objects. Perspective is no longer centred on a human spectator; it becomes an operational apparatus through which software sees, classifies and potentially destroys.

- Copy Shop (Virgil Widrich, 2001): Widrich assembles the film through photocopied and re-photographed images, generating a city of multiplying surfaces, repetitions, and visual deterioration. Perspective loses its promise of singular location as the protagonist and his environment proliferate across copied planes. The image-space becomes a scattered trace of technological reproduction, bureaucratic repetition and the collapse of individual identity into serial processes.

- Mind Game (Masaaki Yuasa, 2004): Yuasa shatters all continuity, constantly shifting between extreme vanishing-point distortion, flat isometry and photographic collage. The anarchic spatial construction speculates liberation of the mind from social constraints and religious dogma.

- Ryan (Chris Landreth, 2004): Landreth’s “psychorealist” digital environments distort bodies and architectural space to visualise the emotional damage of animator Ryan Larkin. Although the film begins from a recognisable interview setting, its apparent realism is continually fractured by missing faces, ruptured surfaces, warped spatial relations. Perspective functions as a psychological index rather than as neutral depiction: the room reflects addiction, vulnerability, memory and interpersonal injury.

- 200,000 Phantoms (Jean-Gabriel Périot, 2007): Constructed from around 600 photographs of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial taken across several decades, Périot’s experimental documentary animates the images chronologically in a flickering, flipbook-like montage. The building shifts between its pre-war existence, the atomic bombing’s aftermath and its preservation as a memorial to those killed. Animation does not recreate the event directly; it activates the archive, exposing history as a succession of changing frames, technologies, viewpoints, acts of remembrance. Perspectives here become activated as a catalyst or a machine to produce a ghost. One that appears very concretely through the pixelated image of the Dome: its apparent architectural permanence renders through the spectator’s pattern recognition into a sort-of-stable model between the images - contrasting with the instability of the actual photographs as its base, and the historical violence they bear witness to.

- spots (Alexander Schellow, since 2007): the ongoing series of short animated works focuses on fleeting sites, observations and minor events, treating each “spot” as a concentrated field of temporal and spatial attention. Rather than presenting space as a stable setting, the series allows surfaces, textures, movements and environmental traces to generate the image from within. Animation becomes a method of dwelling with instability: small shifts in light, matter, rhythm, viewpoint transform ordinary locations into animated thresholds between observation and projection. In relation to perspective, the spots reject a detached overview associated with central perspective. Their images emerge through situated, fragmentary, process-based forms of looking, in which no single position fully commands the scene. Perspective therefore distributes attention rather than mastery: it makes visible how perception is shaped by duration, proximity, material resistance and the partiality of embodied observation. The series proposes animation as a practice of spatial listening, where minor phenomena become evidence of larger ecological, social and perceptual relations.

- Aïda, Palestine (Till Roeskens, 2009): Roeskens’ film draws maps with residents of Aïda refugee camp near Bethlehem, allowing lived routes, improvised landmarks, blocked passages and remembered places to supersede official cartography. Its spatial construction rejects the abstract top-down view of administrative power and renders perspective as collective testimony shaped by occupation, displacement and restricted mobility.

- The External World (David OReilly, 2010): OReilly uses deliberately crude computer-generated models, abrupt stylistic shifts, glitches, violent discontinuities to dismantle the seamless authority of digital space. Domestic rooms, streets, bodies, objects are rendered as unstable assets rather than as coherent environments. The film exposes computer-generated perspective as a programmable convention whose apparent realism can collapse into absurdity, cruelty, visual error.

- An Eyeful of Sound (Samantha Moore, 2010): Moore’s practice frequently combines documentary testimony with experimental animation to visualise perception that cannot be “directly” photographed. In this work addressing synaesthetic or sensory experience, sound may become colour, movement, shape or spatial pressure. This transfers the organisation of space from the eye alone to a cross-sensory field, challenging the assumption that visual perspective is autonomous from hearing, touch, memory, affect. Perspective here becomes auditory and relational, formed by vibration, direction, intensity and sensory association.

- Body Memory (Pikko Ülo, 2011): Body Memory approaches the body as a repository of experience: gestures, movement, posture and physical sensation retain what language or conscious recollection cannot fully recover. Through animation, the body can fragment, repeat, distort or merge with its surroundings, giving form to memory as an unstable and embodied process rather than a linear account. Perspective operates from within sensation rather than from an external observational position. The animated image shifts between interior and exterior space, refusing a stable distance between viewer and figure; memory becomes spatially and physically enacted in the image.

- City of Progress (Justin Bennett, 2011): in his working practice Bennett uses spatial sound and urban recording to construct a city that is experienced as an acoustic and infrastructural field rather than as a stable visual panorama. The work dislodges the primacy of the optical viewpoint: streets, transit systems, construction, distance, institutional architecture become audible forces that organise attention, orientation and urban belonging.

In the animation City of Progress, Bennett develops the city through lines, corrections, erased traces, while his voice comments on and simultaneously accompanies the process. Architecture thus appears as a provisional conception: every construction already contains the possibility of its own dissolution. Perspective functions here as institutional and political order, produced, examined, transformed through drawing. The utopian city has no stable vanishing point; it becomes visible as a conflictual process between imagination, planning, language and erasure. By revealing the image’s process of formation, Bennett also makes perceptible the ideological premises underlying urban visions of the future.

- Crulic: The Path to Beyond (Anca Damian, 2011): Through collage, watercolour, drawing, documentary evidence, Damian recounts the death of Claudiu Crulic in a Polish detention system. Institutional rooms, legal documents, bodies, national borders continually change graphic form, exposing bureaucratic space as both abstract and lethal. The film refuses the neutrality of official representation by constructing an affective counter-perspective grounded in a prisoner’s vulnerability and disappearance.

- Places Other People Have Lived (Laura Yilmaz, 2011): Places Other People Have Lived approaches domestic and urban space as an archive of previous inhabitants. Through animated observation and reconstruction, rooms, objects, surfaces and transitional spaces become charged with traces of lives that are no longer directly accessible. The work does not treat architecture as a stable container for human action; instead, space appears as a layered record of use, absence, projection and imagined intimacy. In relation to perspective, animation unsettles the privileged viewpoint of the outsider who enters and surveys another person’s home. The film constructs a tentative, speculative perspective in which looking is shaped by partial knowledge, empathy and the awareness that every interior exceeds the images and stories available to the viewer.

- The Pixelated Revolution (Rabih Mroué, 2012): Mroué’s lecture-performance analyses amateur mobile-phone videos recorded during the early Syrian revolution, focusing on instances in which a person filming confronts a sniper through the aligned optics of camera and rifle. This “double shooting” transforms the recording device into both witness and target: when the sniper fires at the camera lens, the violence is directed not only at the person filming but also toward the future viewer positioned behind the image.

Although it does not use animation in a conventional character-animated sense, the work activates moving-image fragments through repetition, pausing, enlargement, slow motion, reframing, performative narration. These operations make the pixelated image a critical visual field rather than a transparent document. Its blurriness, digital compression, interrupted movement and incomplete information register the material conditions under which the footage was produced.

In relation to perspective, The Pixelated Revolution contests the detached, secure viewpoint conventionally granted to spectators of war imagery. The phone camera’s perspective is embodied, precarious and exposed; it is determined by fear, movement, limited technical resolution, the possibility of immediate death. Mroué reveals that visual perspective is inseparable from power: the sniper’s optic seeks to erase the camera’s evidentiary gaze, while the pixelated moving image allows the threatened witness to persist, circulate and address viewers beyond the scene of violence.

- The Centrifuge Brain Project (Till Nowak, 2012): Presented in the manner of a technical documentary, this mockumentary imagines enormous centrifugal amusement rides embedded in real landscapes. Extreme rotations, wide-angle distortion and impossible trajectories undermine the assumption that the camera can stabilise space for a human observer. The film transforms perspective into kinetic overload: horizon, gravity, scale and bodily orientation are continuously displaced by engineered acceleration.

- Marilyn (Philippe Parreno, 2012): Parreno’s film imagines Marilyn Monroe’s final hours through the spaces and objects of the Waldorf Astoria hotel, drawing on archival photographs, her personal effects, letters and recordings. Monroe herself remains absent, yet her presence is reconstructed through a synthetic voice reading fragments from her correspondence, a digitally animated avatar and carefully choreographed interiors. The work does not restore an authentic private subject behind the celebrity image; it exposes how that image persists through media systems that continually reproduce, interpret and commodify her. Perspective is distributed across hotel rooms, surveillance-like views, archival records and computational simulation. These forms of mediation address how access to Monroe is always indirect, structured by technologies of recording and display. By animating archival remains without resolving their gaps, Marilyn treats the star’s image as a contested archive—one in which intimacy, speculation and commercial spectacle remain inseparably intertwined.

- Hollow Land (Michelle and Uri Kranot, 2013): This animated short constructs migration as passage through a sparse and often hostile environment. Cut-out, stop-motion and reduced theatrical spatiality deny the protagonists a stable or welcoming architectural world. The apparent flatness and monumental barriers turn space into an administrative and emotional threshold, visualising the precarity of arrival, articulating aspects like waiting and exclusion.

- WONDER (Mizue Mirai, 2013): Mirai’s abstract animation is useful for considering space as a cellular, patterned, procedural field rather than an environment organised around a human viewer. Repetitive geometries, pulsation, graphic multiplication can evoke pandemic isolation, administrative ordering, networked systems etc. Perspective gives way to a distributed matrix in which orientation is governed by rule-based repetition rather than by a horizon.

- The Missing Picture (Rithy Panh, 2013): Because images of everyday life under the Khmer Rouge were suppressed, staged or lost, Panh creates clay figures to evoke experiences that cannot be directly shown. Set against archival footage and carefully composed tableaux, these figures do not claim to reproduce a past transparently; they mark the limits of representation while giving form to memory. Perspective functions here shaped by power, absence and remembrance. The film challenges the authority of the archival image by placing it beside an explicitly constructed, tactile alternative, showing that what cannot be seen may nevertheless be approached through material imagination.

- TIRANA (Alexander Schellow, 2013): TIRANA investigates rapidly expanding, largely informal neighbourhoods in northern Tirana through the spatial experience of an outsider. Its visual language draws on memory-based route drawings, animated observations, maps, narration, interviews, sound recordings. Instead of resolving the city into a complete cartographic image, the film retains disorientation, repetition, incomplete knowledge and the bodily rhythms of moving through unfamiliar streets. TIRANA contrasts the ground-level, contingent perspective of walking with institutional forms of aerial and administrative vision. Satellite mapping, address systems, planning regulations and demographic data promise a legible and governable city, while the drawn trajectories register a place that is learned through encounter, uncertainty and local social codes. Animation mediates between these incompatible spatial regimes, revealing urban cartography as a political process that determines whose environments are recognised as inhabitable, lawful and visible.

- Foreign Body / Corps étranger (Nicolas Brault, 2013): Brault’s film uses digital scanning, photogrammetry, animation to explore embodiment, illness and medical imaging. Fragmentary surfaces, floating structures, dark voids displace the conventional horizon and stable ground. Space becomes a clinical data environment in which the body is simultaneously intimate, estranged, measurable, incomplete.

- Kriminalistik (Janie Geiser, 2013): Geiser combines collage, optical printing and animation to transform documents and visual fragments into unstable traces. Images appear as evidence while simultaneously resisting clear interpretation, exposing the processes through which meaning and authority are assigned. Perspective functions here strategical as investigation: looking becomes a fractured, tactile, incomplete engagement with the archive rather than the recovery of a single truth.

- How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File (Hito Steyerl, 2013): Steyerl combines digital compositing, instructional parody, resolution targets, drone-like viewpoints and degraded imagery to examine visibility under contemporary image regimes. Satellite calibration patterns and low-resolution systems reveal that the aerial view does not simply enlarge knowledge; it determines what counts as visible, detectable and actionable. The film treats perspective as a politics of resolution, where bodies can be measured, reduced to pixels, hidden or made to disappear.

- Delivery for Mr. Assange (!Mediengruppe Bitnik, 2013): the work followed a parcel sent to Julian Assange during his residence in the Ecuadorian Embassy, documenting its journey through postal systems over roughly thirty-two hours. A small camera and GPS device inside the package captured and transmitted thousands of images online in near real time, recording dark sorting facilities, automated transit spaces, couriers and the package’s gradual approach to its destination. The project is structured as a live documentary whose camera has no stable human operator or cinematic overview; its viewpoint is determined by handling, enclosure, transport and technical transmission. In relation to a question of perspective, the work displaces the sovereign, elevated gaze associated with surveillance and mapping. Its perspective is partial, obstructed, infrastructural: an embedded viewpoint from within the circulation systems that normally remain unseen while they track and classify others. Logistical space thereby is rendered perceptible as a political apparatus, revealing how mobility, access and visibility are unevenly organised through networks of state, communication, delivery.

- Maku (Yoriko Mizushiri, 2014): in Mizushiri’s work, distance is frequently redefined as a tactile and affective relation rather than a measurable metric in Euclidean space. Soft surfaces, partial bodies, material transformations replace the fixed observer and perspectival room. The image becomes a zone of contact where proximity, discomfort, desire, bodily boundaries are continually renegotiated.

Maku constructs a minimal, pale image-world from soft materials, fragmented bodies, subtle movement and ambiguous contact. With no stable horizon or architectural depth, orientation emerges through overlap, texture, timing or the changing relation of body parts to objects. This rejection of conventional spatial anchoring produces a specifically haptic perspective: one organised through intimacy and sensation rather than visual mastery.

- Liquid Traces: The Left-to-Die Boat Case (Forensic Oceanography, 2014): This investigative video reconstructs the 2011 drift of a migrant boat in the Mediterranean, whose passengers were left without rescue despite repeated encounters with surveillance and military infrastructures. Combining distress calls, satellite imagery, ship-tracking data, oceanographic modelling, testimony, the project animates the boat’s route across a supposedly empty maritime space. Perspective becomes a contested operation of state visibility: the animated map demonstrates that the boat was not unknowable or unseen, but rendered operationally negligible. Animation transforms the sea from an abstract border into a dense, monitored and politically administered environment.

- Confusion Through Sand (Danny Madden, 2014): Madden animates a recorded phone call from a soldier during combat in Iraq through rapidly changing, chalk-like marks and minimal graphic forms. The refusal of spectacle and photographic battlefield realism disrupts the familiar spatial language of war cinema. Instead of offering a commanding view of military action, the film produces a fragmented sensory field shaped by panic, dust, uncertainty at the limits of auditory testimony.

- Sound of a Million Insects, Light of a Thousand Stars (Tomonari Nishikawa, 2014): Nishikawa buries a length of 35mm negative film near Fukushima, allowing the soil, nocturnal atmosphere, insects, possible traces of radioactive contamination to participate in its exposure. The resulting images do not represent the landscape from a stable viewpoint; they register an encounter between filmic material and a damaged environment. Perspective becomes a symbolic form of ecological and historical exposure, replacing visual mastery with vulnerability, duration and uncertainty. The film’s beautiful night imagery is therefore inseparable from the invisible risks embedded in the site.

- Can the Sun Lie? / Nature Representations (Susan Schuppli, 2014): Across her video essays and research on material witness, Schuppli works with thermal imagery, satellite sensing, atmospheric data, ice records and other environmental traces to examine how violence becomes inscribed in matter. Animation and data visualisation make processes visible that exceed ordinary human perception, including radiological contamination, climatic change, altered atmospheric conditions. Perspective is no longer solely a human optical position; it becomes distributed across sensors, particles, ice, light, planetary systems. By challenging the distant, aestheticised landscape view, Schuppli frames nature as an evidentiary medium whose changing material states record the effects of industrial and state power.

- Erlkönig (Georges Schwizgebel, 2015): Schwizgebel’s brushstrokes, continually rotating through space, create an endless spiral perspective. As the vanishing point continuously escapes and circles, space itself appears as an inscription of the inexorable, fateful pull of death.

- More Sweetly Play the Dance (William Kentridge, 2015): This multi-screen animated procession unfolds as a continuous lateral movement of silhouetted figures across a dark, panoramic field. Its frieze-like, nearly flat spatial organisation displaces the privileged central viewpoint of linear perspective: the world is experienced not as a stable scene to be mastered, but as a shared, durational passage through illness, mourning, labour, displacement, political struggle. The marching figures—carrying banners, instruments, stretchers, and skeletal forms—evoke histories of colonial extraction, apartheid, migration, public protest, epidemic. By combining charcoal animation, shadow theatre, projected performance and processional choreography, Kentridge turns screen space into a collective counter-monument: a moving archive in which bodies enter and exit visibility without arriving at a final resolution.

- The Magic Mountain (Anca Damian, 2015): Damian combines drawing, collage, paint and documentary materials in a biographical reconstruction of Adam Jacek Winkler’s life and involvement in the Afghan resistance. The film’s heterogeneous styles prevent historical space from solidifying into a single authoritative viewpoint. Landscapes, borders, warfare, exile, imprisonment are experienced through unstable graphic transformations, making perspective a medium of political uncertainty and lived displacement.

- Sixty Six (Lewis Klahr, 2015): Through repeated fragments, cut-out figures and synthetic spatial environments, Klahr constructs a world in which images circulate independently of stable narrative or chronological order. Collage disrupts perspectival coherence, allowing several temporalities and visual registers to occupy the same frame. It unfolds a discontinuous memory, shaped by repetition, interruption, and the persistent afterlife of cultural images.

- Seamless Transitions (James Bridle, 2015): Bridle reconstructs inaccessible sites in the United Kingdom’s detention-and-deportation system—including Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre, immigration courts and the private deportation terminal at Stansted Airport—using plans, public information, eyewitness accounts. Rendered as polished, empty computer-generated architectural spaces, the work adopts the visual language of commercial property visualisation. This animation style is structurally critical: its clean lighting, seamless surfaces and idealised central perspectives expose how bureaucratic architecture normalises exclusion by making coercive infrastructures appear neutral, efficient, almost immaterial. Perspective functions as a form of visual anaesthesia, while the reconstruction renders its administrative violence legible precisely through its absence of visible bodies.

- Hyper-Reality (Keiichi Matsuda, 2016): Set in Medellín and filmed from a first-person point of view, this work overlays everyday urban life with dense augmented-reality interfaces, advertisements, game mechanics, ratings, navigation prompts and surveillance prompts. The street’s ordinary vanishing point is overtaken by competing commercial and informational layers. Perspective becomes an algorithmically managed interface: software determines which objects demand attention, how space is valued and how the user is guided through the city.

- Saydnaya (Inside a Syrian Torture Prison) (Lawrence Abu Hamdan, 2016): Developed with Amnesty International, Abu Hamdan’s project reconstructs the Syrian military prison of Saydnaya through survivors’ auditory memories. Since detainees were often blindfolded and photographic access was unavailable, the investigation used sound testimony, acoustic analysis, architectural modelling and digital visualisation to reconstruct cells, corridors, stairwells, patterns of violence. The project displaces optical perspective with an aural spatial perspective. Animation does not claim a complete visual recovery of the prison; it visualises how sound, echo, footsteps, doors or screams became prisoners’ means of orienting themselves within an architecture of terror. It therefore contests the privilege of the visual vanishing point and establishes listening as a forensic mode of spatial knowledge.

- Kaputt (Volker Schlecht and Alexander Lahl, 2016): Based on testimonies from former prisoners of the Hoheneck women’s prison in the GDR, Kaputt uses stark monochrome imagery and hard, reduced lines. Cells, bars, corridors, walls press into the frame rather than opening into depth, turning architecture into an instrument of psychological pressure. The film’s spatial denial of escape visualises incarceration not only as physical restriction but as the systematic restructuring of perception and selfhood.

- Tower (Keith Maitland, 2016): Maitland combines archival footage, recorded testimony and rotoscope animation to reconstruct the 1966 University of Texas tower shooting through the perspectives of those who experienced it. The animation fills gaps in the historical record while preserving an instable subjectivity of the memorization. Perspective seems to articulate collective remembrance, distributing the event across multiple partial viewpoints rather than reducing it to a single authoritative image.

- Empty Space (Pikko Ülo, 2016): Empty Space uses animation to make absence perceptible as a spatial force. Rather than treating an unoccupied room or open field as a blank background, the work allows emptiness to become charged by traces of former presence, expectation, isolation and possible encounter. Subtle shifts in framing, scale, movement, duration destabilise the viewer’s orientation, so that space appears to expand, contract or retain an affective residue. The film’s approach to perspective rejects the detached, rational viewpoint that understands space as measurable and empty. Its animated perspective is experiential and relational: what appears vacant is shaped by bodily memory, attention, imagined presence. Animation thus turns space into an interior landscape, where absence is not simply the lack of an object but a condition through which perception, attachment and the possibility of relation are organised.

- Everything (David OReilly, 2017): This interactive work permits the player to inhabit and move among entities at radically different scales, from animals and plants to objects, cells, planets, galaxies. By rendering the viewpoint transferable and nonhuman, it removes the human observer from the centre of perceptual organisation. Perspective becomes ecological and distributed: the world is encountered as an interdependent field of entities rather than as a scene arranged for human mastery.

- The Burden (Niki Lindroth von Bahr, 2017): The stop-motion city of late-night service work is built as a shallow, theatrical network of supermarkets, hotels, call centres, fast-food outlets. Its spatial enclosure maps contemporary labour as exhaustion and repetition: workers remain visible within highly ordered commercial interiors while socially and politically isolated.

- Ugly (Nikita Diakur, 2017): Diakur’s physics-based animation makes the digital body visibly contingent on unstable simulation, collision, gravity, software failure. The figures are not controlled as idealised characters but are repeatedly subjected to a computational environment that resists the animator’s mastery. Perspective therefore ceases to guarantee rational order; it becomes a field of glitches, awkward forces and accidental relations between body, camera and virtual world.

- A_biography (Alexander Schellow, 2017): Schellow’s short animated documentary approaches biography not as the linear disclosure of a stable subject, but as a provisional construction assembled from traces, gestures, fragments and temporal discontinuities. Animation becomes a method for rendering the documentary image visibly contingent: rather than securing the past through a single evidentiary viewpoint, it exposes memory and identity as processes of selection, repetition, omission and re-construction. The work unsettles conventional biographical perspective, replacing the coherent overview of a life story with an unstable field of partial viewpoints. Perspective consequently operates as a relational system of endlessly transforming marks that, materially and structurally, determines who may narrate, what counts as a trace or how a subject might at all (or might not) become legible through moving images

- Geomancer (Lawrence Lek, 2017): Lek uses game-engine environments and an artificial-intelligence protagonist to stage a speculative encounter with Singapore’s urban, architectural and digital infrastructures. The virtual camera moves with a smoothness and freedom unbound by human bodily limits, while the AI encounters space as information, architecture, memory, system. Perspective is posthuman: it no longer presumes a single embodied viewer but a computational subject processing an environment as a data-rich field.

- The Murder of Halit Yozgat (Forensis / Forensic Architecture, 2017): This investigation reconstructed the 2006 murder of Halit Yozgat in a Kassel internet café, part of the NSU complex, to test the testimony of a Hessian intelligence officer present at the scene. A full-scale physical model, precise digital reconstruction, sightline studies, acoustic simulations examined whether he could plausibly have neither seen the victim nor heard the gunshots. Perspective becomes a measurable relation between bodies, architecture, sound and obstruction rather than a subjective assertion. By converting the witness’s claimed viewpoint into an animated and testable spatial model, the project confronts official non-knowledge with the material conditions of seeing and hearing.

- Fest (Nikita Diakur, 2018): Diakur’s work uses procedural and simulation-based methods to contest polished digital animation. The image-space is shaped by collisions, unstable modelling, automation, imperfect control, rather than by seamless cinematic composition. Within a Panofskian reading, this breakdown of visual command reveals the ideological promise of digital precision as a constructed and fallible convention.

- Egg (Martina Scarpelli, 2018): This intimate animated short doc uses spare drawing and a highly reduced visual environment to translate anorexia into a spatial experience. The room contracts and expands with the protagonist’s distress, while the egg may become disproportionately dominant within the image. Perspective is therefore reorganised by bodily anxiety: ordinary objects and distances cease to be reliable and space becomes claustrophobic, obsessive, psychologically magnified.

- La Casa Lobo (The Wolf House, Cristóbal León and Joaquín Cociña, 2018): This stop-motion film constructs a house whose walls, furniture, bodies, animals, painted surfaces perpetually mutate into one another. The unstable domestic setting is loosely informed by Colonia Dignidad, a German sectarian enclave in Chile associated with authoritarian violence, forced labour, abuse. Rather than presenting the home as a coherent interior governed by stable linear perspective, the film makes architecture behave like a living and coercive image-field: rooms expand, collapse, acquire faces, absorb bodies, lose their boundaries. Its continually reworked surfaces turn perspective into a material record of trauma, enclosure, indoctrination and attempted escape. The film thereby exposes domestic architecture as a political technology that can promise care and protection while functioning as an instrument of surveillance, discipline and terror.

- Noisy Images — Chapters 1: Strong Looks and 6: Hands (Antje van Wichelen, 2018): Van Wichelen reworks colonial photographs through filming, copying, degrading, burying the film material in the soil of Dakar’s IFAN, transforming archival images into unstable, embodied traces. In Strong Looks, the photographed subjects return the camera’s gaze; in Hands, gestures and bodies emerge from images shaped by colonial display and classification. Perspective functions as an inscription of power and resistance: the camera’s authority is disrupted by reciprocal looking, material decay and the agency of the soil.

- The Grenfell Tower Fire (Forensic Architecture, 2018–ongoing): Forensic Architecture’s Grenfell investigation assembled publicly submitted phone videos, broadcasts, photographs, architectural information, survivor testimony into synchronised three-dimensional reconstructions of the fire. Rather than granting authority to one official camera or account, the work creates a collective and distributed perspective formed by residents, neighbours, witnesses. Animation synchronises fragmented recordings into a common temporal and spatial field, making the fire’s spread across the building façade intelligible. The project challenges institutional control over disaster narratives by showing how a multi-perspectival public archive can reveal the spatial consequences of regulatory failure, unsafe cladding, and unequal housing conditions.

- Samouni Road (Stefano Savono/Simone Massi, 2018): Through charcoal-like drawings, animated recollections and documentary material, the animated doc moves between intimate family memories and the wider political reality of Gaza. The unstable transitions between present and past refuse a single, authoritative viewpoint, allowing perspectives to emerge through testimony, absence, subjective reconstruction. Perspective functions here as a symbolic form of memory and survival: space is repeatedly broken apart, redrawn and reassembled according to the experiences of those who inhabit it. By giving visual form to what remains unseen or unrecorded, the film makes animation a means of preserving personal and collective history.

- The Image Book (Jean-Luc Godard, 2018): Godard assembles fragments from cinema, painting, news media, literature, sound into a dense audiovisual essay on the circulation of images and the violence embedded within their histories. Montage repeatedly breaks apart visual continuity, forcing images to be encountered as isolated, contested and politically charged fragments. Perspective formulates ideological power: every image carries the conditions of its production, circulation, and exclusion.

- AIDOL (Lawrence Lek, 2019): Set in a speculative near-future Singapore, AIDOL follows an AI entity through virtual cityscapes, simulations, spaces of self-training. Its game-engine aesthetic treats architecture as an interface for cognition, aspiration and control. The work reflects whether a nonhuman intelligence inhabits perspective in the human sense at all, proposing instead a distributed viewpoint formed through datasets, feedback loops, virtual mobility and machine learning.

- Triple-Chaser (Forensic Architecture and Praxis Films, 2019): Triple-Chaser investigates the global circulation and use of a multi-projectile tear-gas grenade manufactured by Safariland. Using a game engine, the project generated large datasets of photorealistic synthetic images of the canister from many angles, distances, and lighting conditions; these images were used to train a computer-vision system to identify the weapon in vast collections of online footage. Animation here produces an algorithmic perspective rather than a single human viewpoint. By converting the three-dimensional object into a searchable visual signature, the work turns synthetic space into forensic evidence and redirects the technologies of simulation toward corporate and state accountability.

- Big Dada: Public Faces / Spectre (Bill Posters and Daniel Howe, 2019): The public art intervention used synthetic media and deepfake techniques to produce counterfeit video appearances of highly visible public figures. Its relevance at the time (as much of it is clearly common sensus by now) was based in rendering visible how animation can be inserted into the documentary image at the level of facial movement, speech and photorealistic surface - unstabilizing the supposed authority of a convincing perspectival image of a person as “proof” that the depicted event occurred.

- Siete horas de angustia en La Modelo (Juan Camilo González and collaborators, 2020): This project demonstrates, here exemplarily for many other projects (by forensic architecture and similar frameworks), how animation, sequencing, mapping and compositing can operate as forms of forensic animation: techniques for moving between incomplete images, dispersed viewpoints and contested accounts in order to produce a spatial counter-history.

The open-source visual investigation reconstructs the prison uprising and lethal state response at La Modelo prison in Bogotá on 21 March 2020. By geolocating mobile-phone videos through architectural details, ground textures, light poles, satellite images, acoustic cues, witness knowledge, the project converts dispersed fragments of visual evidence into a navigable spatial and temporal model. Its overhead mapping, annotated video sequences, markers for injured and dead bodies expose the prison not as a neutral architectural container, but as an apparatus of confinement, visibility and state violence. The work reverses the usual institutional gaze: rather than allowing the prison administration, police, military to monopolise the production of truth, it assembles a counter-cartography from the partial perspectives of prisoners, guards, relatives and publicly circulating images. Perspective becomes an evidentiary and political practice, capable of locating bodies, reconstructing trajectories of force, challenging official claims of a “mass criminal escape attempt and rendering spatial conditions of carceral violence publicly legible.

- Deyrouth (Chloé Mazlo, 2020): In Deyrouth, Chloé Mazlo recounts the life of her grandmother, who leaves Switzerland for Beirut in the 1950s, creates a home and family there and later confronts the transformation of the city through civil war. Combining cut-out animation, model-like sets, collage, richly patterned graphic space, the film turns Beirut into an unstable architecture of affection, memory and historical rupture. Its spatial world shifts between domestic intimacy and urban fragmentation, showing how a city can be simultaneously a place of belonging, imaginative freedom and forced departure. Perspective functions through the grandmother’s subjective relation to Beirut: the city is not mapped from above as a territory of conflict, but encountered through rooms, routines, colours, textures and emotional attachments. Animation allows these personal spaces to persist even as war interrupts and remakes them.

- Souvenir Souvenir (Bastien Dubois, 2020): Dubois confronts the silence surrounding his grandfather’s experience of the Algerian War through documentary inquiry and changing animation styles. Naïve 3D reconstructions, sketch-like drawings, archival traces, visual breakdowns signal the impossibility of producing a single transparent historical image. When traumatic violence approaches, space loses legibility and coherence; perspective itself becomes inadequate to what testimony cannot—or will not—fully disclose.

Planet City (Liam Young, 2021): Young’s speculative film imagines an entire global population concentrated in one hyper-dense city while the rest of the planet is left to ecological restoration. Vast aerial views and architectural visualisations organise the earth through logistical, planetary and computational scales rather than through individual human orientation. Perspective becomes a form of planetary governance, exposing both the seductive totality and political violence that can accompany design solutions viewed from above.

- Anxious Body (Yoriko Mizushiri, 2021): Mizushiri uses tactile, close-range animation to focus on skin, texture, repetition, touch and small bodily gestures. Conventional architectural setting is largely displaced by a sensory space produced through proximity and contact. Rather than locating a coherent body inside a measurable room, the film creates an intimate, sometimes uneasy topology in which perspective arises from the encounter of surfaces, sensations, rhythm.

- Renderlands (Liam Young, 2022): Young examines the global labour behind computer-generated architectural and cinematic imagery, focusing on render workers in India who manufacture immaculate digital environments for international clients. The work contrasts the virtual spaces of luxury, clarity and Western-style urban aspiration with the material conditions under which those images are produced. Perspective is revealed as outsourced infrastructure: an apparently universal visual order generated through unequal global labour, software supply chains and inherited colonial imaginaries.

- Choolers – Viandes & Poissons (Pimpant, 2023): the animated documentary enters the world of Choolers Division, an experimental hip-hop group whose members work in residence at La S Grand Atelier in Belgium. Following the collective as they develop a new song, the film combines documentary proximity with an animated visual language attuned to their humour, rhythm, imaginations and relations of friendship. Rather than presenting its protagonists through a however pathologizing or explanatory frame, it allows their creative decisions, jokes, sound-making and shared presence to organise the film’s form. In terms of its approach to perspective, Choolers – Viandes & Poissons resists the external, normalising gaze often directed at artists positioned outside dominant cultural norms. Animation expands documentary testimony beyond observational capture, making room for associative imagery, subjective rhythm, exaggeration and shared fantasy. Perspective becomes plural and co-produced: the group are not objects placed before an authoritative viewer, but active makers of the audiovisual space through which they are encountered.

- The Environmental Continuum of Genocide in Namibia (Forensis and Forensic Architecture, 2023): This research project examines the genocide of Ovaherero and Nama people by German colonial forces between 1904 and 1908 through colonial archives, testimony, historical maps, satellite data, terrain modelling, environmental analysis. Its spatial reconstructions trace forced displacement through landscapes shaped by water scarcity, military control, colonial seizure. Perspective is addressed as a colonial technology: maps and administrative images represented territory as empty, available and governable while concealing the communities, infrastructures and ecological violence already present within it. Animation reorients the landscape from the standpoint of flight, survival,dispossession, producing a counter-cartography that treats terrain and environmental conditions as witnesses to colonial violence.

- White Box (Sabine Theunissen, 2024): Theunissen’s interdisciplinary stage work revisits the fatal 1897 Arctic balloon expedition through reverse chronology, live performance, photography, sound, dance and stop-motion animation. Rather than reconstructing the event as coherent history, it treats recovered photographs as unstable fragments that must be repeatedly imagined and materially reassembled. Stop-motion and an onstage camera foreground the act of recording, while performers embody the physical and temporal violence of photography. Perspective becomes archival power: it shapes what remains visible, reconstructable or absent. By reversing time and animating photographic traces, White Box destabilises photography’s claim to factual transparency, making the Arctic image a contested terrain of evidence, memory, speculation and loss.

- SIE (Alexander Schellow, 2004–2024): Hand-drawn from memory across approximately 70,000 drawings, SIE is a 105-minute animated portrait of Schellow’s grandmother (1913-2015), at the time living in an Altzheimer’s clinic in Berlin. The face repeatedly appears, shifts, dissolves, and returns, producing an “impossible cinematic archive” in which conflicting temporalities coexist. Rejecting portraiture’s promise of stable recognition, the work places the viewer in an uncertain encounter with a figure who meets their gaze but cannot reliably return it. Perspective is organised through duration, hesitation, attention and response-ability rather than controllability. Black spots and acoustic traces construct and interrupt the screen as a transparent window, preserving ambiguity as a condition of care. Animation places remembering and forgetting in continuous motion.

- Out of the Picture (An.ash Smolar, 2025): Smolar’s animated documentary investigates the structural exclusion of women architects from architectural history. Combining interviews with more than twenty architects, archival documents, photographs, animation, it examines how authorship is assigned, records are preserved and women’s contributions are marginalised or erased. Animation activates incomplete archival material and makes omissions perceptible without resolving them into false certainty. The film treats the archive as a selective visual system shaped by inherited professional hierarchies rather than transparent proof. It challenges architecture’s authoritative viewpoint—the elevated overview, singular authorial vision and universal narrative of progress—by assembling situated testimonies, fragments and transformations into a plural field of perspectives. Animation becomes a practice of historiographic repair that reveals the political force of archival gaps.

- Emporio no Benevolente (EnFlujo, Gonzales/Idárraga**/**Seiderer/Schellow, 2026): Emporio no Benevolente is an online archive of colonial amateur films from African colonies, made between 1925 and 1960. Organised through fragments, traces, and shifting relations among various registers of images and documents, it rejects the stable hierarchy of an institutional catalogue in favour of associative and discontinuous navigation. Each click reorganises what is included or excluded, central or marginal, connected or missing. The interface produces a dynamic montage of viewpoints rather than a single authoritative overview. To do so, it takes a humorous approach to AI recognition perspective, exposing the mismatch between anachronistic computational classification and the cultural, social, and affective ambiguity of archival images. By retaining such misrecognition, excess and odd association, the project proposes a deliberately partial, fallible and relational archival gaze.

(Thank you for writing, if you consider other here missing sources relevant: schellow_a@gmx.de. I am gladly expanding this list of sources step by step.)

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