Third International Conference on Communication & Media Studies

Abstract

The much touted contemporary convergence of technologies, including media technologies, is joined by the contemporary convergence of all disciplines on and in media studies. Insofar as the cfp situates media in media res, in the middle of things, it marks media as “in betweener,” a term tellingly not only from but of, as well as privileged by, animation—a sign for this animation theorist that animation is “hiding in plain sight” here, a “hiding,” and let me add “blind spot,” of animation I have posited for all disciplines. For, as I claimed in 2007 and the paper argues, indeed itself “(re)mediates,” as it does Bolter and Grusin, all media (and communications) are forms of animation. And media (and communication) studies, like all disciplines, are modes of animation studies, thus marking the contemporary convergence of all technologies and disciplines upon animation (studies). So the project of the paper is to elaborate that media in between after Derrida and its morphing into the hypermedia, hyperimmedia, hyper in between of Baudrillardian hyperreality, a (re)animation of global significance, and vice versa, and to take the analysis further to posit the mediatic and hypermediatic in terms of my notions of the animatic and hyperanimatic.