Last spring, I wrote an article regarding animation artist Anna Malina’s wonderful art for Chinese media “BIE别的” (previously VICE China). Here is the original interview of Anna Malina in English.
About Anna Malina
Anna Malina is an experimental animation artist who makes fun and weird GIFs.
How to make a GIF animation? In the era of one-click art-making Apps, people seem to have forgotten what they can do with their bare hands. As I observed, every now and then people on Tumblr ask Anna Malina, wondering what software she uses to make her hauntingly beautiful GIF animations.
Actually, there is no necromancy nor sorcery involved here. Like any stop motion animation work, the creation process of Anna’s handmade graphic art works is very time-consuming: She cuts them, she tears them, draws on them, and then she photo the images and animate them frame by frame, that simple.
For instance, for the above two-minute music video Anna made, 770 laser-printed frame from copyright free films were used. After post processing, which means manual cropping, drawing and re-arrangement here, the production cycle exceeded two months.
Interview of Anna Malina
Q. Please introduce yourself a bit:
Anna Malina: I started exploring art through photography which, over time, progressed into photography-based art and by now has turned into moving photography-based art or experimental animation.
I was born in the Ukraine when it was still part of the Soviet Union but I have been living in Germany since the early 90s. In the last few years I’ve been studying art & philosophy at the University of Wuppertal and am starting to work on my bachelor’s thesis right now.
In my thesis I plan to explore gifs as an artistic medium and its unique temporality. This topic is part of a big interest of mine: still and moving images, the philosophical implications of their individual temporalities, how the different materials I use in my animations are responding to this and what kind of imagery and spatiality is possible with the means of animation and materials.
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Q. Your GIFs reminded me school years when I saw the first time: Back then it was a popular mischief to “edit” the illustrations in course books, add mustaches on every figure’s face, add modern objects in the hands of ancient people in history book, or even carve out the heads on illustrations and draw skulls in the holes…etc. I’d like to know what inspired you most of making your hand-manipulated, stop-motion graphic arts?
Anna Malina: That’s such a nice association and of course I used to do this as well! :)
As I came rather slowly and gradually to the techniques I use at the moment, it’s actually difficult to say what inspired me the most to do it. My main source of inspiration is film. I watch all kinds of films all the time and I still remember the moment when I saw scenes from a hand-painted film from the beginning of the 20th century for the first time. I couldn’t believe my eyes! People would paint films frame by frame in different colors — what an incredible amount of work! And the obvious artificiality of the colors — the way they do not perfectly match the outlines of the figures and spill onto their surroundings — it filled me with so much joy. But this was a very long time ago, so I guess this was just one of those little parts that added up over the years and brought me to where I am now.
A more recent source of inspiration is the filmmaker Gianluigi Toccafondo, from whose work I got a much clearer idea of how I could use real-life footage as a basis to make work of a painterly or artistic quality.
And another factor that informs my artistic approach in a very strong way is that I’m just a messy and impatient person when it comes to making art, so using all the imperfections of torn and crumpled paper, smeary colors and generally all the small and big mistakes that sneak into handmade work is another source of inspiration and a way to utilize something that is usually considered a flaw and to turn it into a tool of expression.
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Q. We are living in an era of digital editing of…almost everything. What do you feel when you manipulate frame after frame with hands?
Anna Malina: To be honest, it gets very tedious after a few frames.
The most exciting part is developing or finding an idea, then testing the first few frames to see if that idea will actually work. The greatest feeling is when either the idea works as intended or when it works in a different, unexpected way and entails a new idea to be tested. Everything that comes afterwards, the repeated treatment of each frame and the scanning, feels like actual work in a boring kind of way, especially because I’m just very impatient and always wish to see the ideas I had on my mind just magically appear on the screen.
Because of that I can understand that professional animation directors like to delegate this part of their work to executing animators. However, I think that maybe for an artistic and kind of personal approach like mine it’s crucial to go through all the frustrations and difficulties of such work, as for me the process itself is a necessary part of the finished result and not simply a means to get to the goal.
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Q. Some people might think your works are trippy and dreamy, some would think they are soul-chillingly solemn, and some might associate them with necromancy or darker stuff (jokingly, or not). Do you expect people to interpret your works in a certain way? If so, how would it be?
Anna Malina: I love it when people see all of this in it. I am aware that the style and themes of my work exist on the edge of something that some people would call pretentious, some would probably even say that it’s beyond the edge and actually is pretentious; in any case, I’m not a person who (consciously) works with ironic detachment in any kind of way, so what I do is always sincere. But I hope that people also recognize my kind of humour and absurdity in it as well.
As for literal interpretation, I’m just happy if the viewer doesn’t try to interpret too much or to make more of it than necessary. I hope it works on an emotional level, making people feel something, whether it’s melancholy or an inner smile. I think the viewer’s response depends on their mood anyway.
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Q. We see a lot of glitch art on the Internet, usually purely digital, associated with human-computer relationship, resurgence of “I love 80s stuff”, or vaporwave etc. Why do you think people make glitch arts so much these days? Despite being edited by hands instead of computers, do you consider your artworks to be a sort of glitch art?
Anna Malina: This is an interesting thought that hadn’t occurred to me before, but I think you could see it as a kind of glitch art, if you define it by the utilization of flaws, no matter if they are digital or analogue; Wikipedia actually defines it that way, so I guess it even might be legitimate to see it as such.
As to why I think that glitch art has become quite popular these days: As part of my thesis research I have found a very interesting MA thesis on .gifs by Iris Cuppen: http://www.ihavenothingtosayonlytoshow.com/ . It doesn’t say anything about glitch art specifically, but she writes about how, by making gifs from VHS tapes, for example, people emphasize the specific character and flaws of the VHS material. (I’d say) She argues that every media technology has a strong connection to reality when it is still new, being the best and closest way to reproduce what we actually see or experience. Once this technology becomes older or is even challenged by newer and better technology, we begin to see its faults and shortcomings and are able to experience them in a fresh way — aesthetically interesting and valuable in their own right. Referencing Walter Benjamin, she’d say that they get the auratic status which they lacked in their youths.
So I’d say that we’re probably at a point where we recognize the aesthetic & artistic value of flawed digital data and its general imperfections, while at the same time the tools to make such artworks have become very accessible.
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Q. I noticed you have made graphic works for music videos as well as music album covers. Do you have plans of making a full length movie with your style? If so could you describe how the movie would be?
Anna Malina: My initial bachelor’s thesis idea was to make another short film but because of various reasons I now have chosen to further explore the very short gif format. I actually like short films a lot and I think that, in general, it’s a great format for work that is focused on aesthetic, technical or material questions or experiments, since with longer films there is a risk of it becoming a bit tedious — unless one builds upon an actual narrative or story.
I’m not very good at coming up with stories, but if I had something good it definitely would be an exciting idea. Of course the other thing is that a feature generally is a costly and usually collaborative work, which would make things even more difficult for me. So far the short format is the reason why I’m even able to make anything at all without having to overcome all the obstacles the art or film industry puts in your way.
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Q. Anything else?
Anna Malina: I think my replies may be already overlong, so I think that might be enough. But I want to thank you a lot for this opportunity and your interesting questions. It was nice to have the opportunity to reflect on my work.
Thank you Anna Malina!
Poppel Yang
2019–02
