Animation: the New Performace?

From the 1950s through the 1990s, the trope of performance was elaborated across a range of academic disciplines, providing a platform for comparing the construction of identities through mimetic embodiment in ritual, work, and everyday life. Today, as animation is being remediated through digital media, both scholars and participants in various types of online communities are beginning to use animation as a trope for human action on/in the world. This essay attempts to bring together the insights of recent scholarship in various disciplines in order to outline a general animation model, first presenting some of the characteristics of animation that allow it to draw connections between social, technological, and psychic structures, and then examining some of the ways that the models of animation and performance interact in contemporary subcultural practices.