About

 

IFF – Animation is a digital compendium that aims to explore the wide-ranging possibilities of animation as a cross-disciplinary artististic practice. Through a diverse range of longform artist interviews, IFF – Animation highlights a wide range of animation practices and approaches that showcase its malleability.

This site is named after the IFF Interchange File Format – a generic container file format developed in 1985 by the Electronic Arts Company and used primarily with the commodore computer system to ease the transfer of information between different computer systems. This file format represents animation’s ability to exist within any media – as a container format for a wide variety of methodological approaches and creative practices.

This site is inspired by the seminal 1977 text Experimental Animation: an Illustrated Anthology by Robert Russett and Cecile Starr; Helen Hill’s 2001/2005 Recipes for Disaster: A Handcrafted Cookbooklet; and Edwin Rostron’s ongoing blog Edge of Frame. Each involve interviews with experimental animators and provide a unique lens and keen curatorial vision. They highlight different processes of animation and showcase many ways of accomplishing the illusion of movement. Through these excellent tools, the experimental process is presented as messy, labour intensive, intrinsically frame-by-frame and on the border of mainstream forms of art making.

Experimental animation represents many different types of artistic practices that it is often defined in the negative as non-traditional, non-linear, non-narrative, non-industry based… etc. Like the IFF file format, experimental animation exists as a container for a variety of fields such as visual art, new media, film, video, performance, computer graphics and so forth. For IFF – Animation, providing formal definitions not the aim. Rather our aim is to present experimental animation as a field that is both porous and elastic.

 

 

IFF – Animation is founded and edited by Lianne Zannier, an experimental animator and artist living in Vancouver, BC, Canada. She works at VIVO Media Arts Centre, is occasionally a Sessional Instructor at Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and works as an independent curator.

 

For more information contact:  hello@iff-animation.com

 

 

 

This project has been supported in part by funds from the BC Arts Council.