This book discusses developments and continuities in experimental animation that, since Robert Russet and Cecile Starr’s Experimental Animation: Origins of a New Art (1976), has proliferated in the context of expanded cinema, performance and live ‘making’ and is today exhibited in galleries, public sites and online. With reference to historical, critical, phenomenological and inter-disciplinary approaches, international researchers offer new and diverse methodologies for thinking through these myriad animation practices.

VSW Press is pleased to announce our latest publication, Bouquets 11-20: Notebooks by Rose Lowder, an exciting new artist book featuring direct reproductions of the notebooks of experimental filmmaker Rose Lowder. Each page is an illustrated transcription of 10 seconds of 16mm film from Lowder's Bouquets series, hand-drawn in 24-frame increments by the artist after the film has been shot.

I want art to stand strong, to display how it manipulates its audience. I want it to take up their expectations, their sense of the world, their predispositions toward the way they think or use their language, and then to use these things perversely, politically, colorfully, “expressively.”

—Tony Conrad, “Dolomite: Having No Trust in Readers”

Maria Lassnig (1919–2014) is internationally recognized as one of the most important painters of the 20th and 21st centuries. The leitmotif of her painting, the act of rendering her body awareness visible, found additional expression in the films she made in New York in the early 1970s. And what films they are! Influenced by painting, but also by U.S. experimental film, the feminist movement, animation, and her new hometown of New York, Lassnig created a remarkable body of radically independent short films in just a few years.