Margaret Tait – filmmaker, photographer, poet, painter, essayist and short story writer – is one of the UK’s most unique and remarkable filmmakers. She was the first female filmmaker to create a feature-length film in Scotland (Blue Black Permanent, 1992). Although for most of her career Tait remained focused on the goal of making a feature-length film, her most notable and groundbreaking work was arguably as a producer of short films.

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”