Chapter 13 from Art in Motion by Maureen Furniss discusses the problem of spectator interpretation of abstract animation. I thought Wassily Kandinsky had an interesting and very valid point about todays viewers and abstract animation. He basically says that todays spectators are overanalyzing the picture that we view in any type of cinema. He thinks that instead of trying to make meaning out of the picture, we should let the picture make its own meaning. This of coarse comes from Hollywood cinema’s hyperdominace in the main stream, making narrative story lines the norm.
The Hollywood cinema has trained us to try and probe beneath the surface of what we are watching, but one has to realign his or her process of interpretation to appreciate viewing abstract animation. Viewing an abstract animation more than once in a sitting is preferable because it is hard to extract meaning from one viewing. When one switches their conceptualization of an image, they use different parts of their brain. The right part of the brain is predominantly used at night and the left during the day. One switches their interpretation to the right side of their brain to let the meaning of an abstract film make itself.
This seg-ways into the idea that watching a film is like having a dream, and sometimes strict laws of reality don’t bind the world of dreams. Shamus Culhane says that people have an aversion to thinking with right side of their brain because there is no use of logic or reason, just intuition. This scares people because they perceive a loss of control. A final element I thought was interesting, was the section about mandalas. A mandala is a symmetrical object , sometimes a circle or a lotus, used in Buddist or Hindu culture to meditate. These ‘mandalas’ are used in many abstract animations as focal points.
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