Re-territorialising learning: The experience of time in stop frame animation

The talk builds on ongoing work exploring the intra-action (Barad 1997) of humans, objects and technical apparatus as actants (Latour 1984) and co-creators (Thiel 2015) in the making of stop frame animation. The approach called 'animating objects' consists of creating short animation movies through engagement with personally meaningful objects, becoming vibrant matter (Bennett 2010) in contact with the human hand. The aim is to understand animation making as a de- and reterritorializing experience (Deleuze & Guattari 1987) and as 'design out of time' (Leander & Boldt 2013) that disrupts outcome oriented educational practices by foregrounding more 'a-representational' sources of knowing and meaning making. Having looked at affect (Spinoza 1974) and the change of subject positions through collaborative collaboration, this paper focuses more deeply on affective flow (Fox & Alldred, 2015), how it emerges in animation making, what it does to human creators and what implication it has for communicating and learning. The talk is based on six years of experience in 'animating objects' with different publics in schools and the university in Luxembourg. This research is a collaboration and team effort of Master students and an experienced researcher thinking, writing and creating academic knowledge jointly. The approach is anchored in collaborative ethnographie involving (auto-ethnographic) observation, interviews, recorded conversations and team meeting discussions. The goal is to contribute to educational theory that aims at disrupting neo-liberal educational policies and practices. It seeks to highlight what we can gain by decentering learning from more static approaches and by, instead, emphasizing fluidity, movement and experimentation (Massumi 2002). The work shows how such a shift in focus can impact communication and (language) learning by enabling in students a new readiness to engage in communication, to speak and to learn.