Animation, Embodiment, and Digital Media: Human Experience of Technological Liveliness

Grounded in ideas of embodiment – that our minds are largely shaped by our perceptual and bodily experiences – Animation, Embodiment and Digital Media discusses the latest interactive animated phenomena enabled by computing and related technologies. Analysed in terms of sensory perception, bodily action and cognitive processes, Kenny Chow formulates a new theoretical framework, exploring a corpus of digital designs including graphical user interfaces of the Macintosh OS X and iOS systems, interactive installations like Text Rain, and video games like the arcade classic Pong and more recently Angry Birds, the animated remake of the canonical Chinese painting Along the River During the Qingming Festival exhibited at the Shanghai Expo in 2010. These analyses simultaneously demonstrate how the proposed perspectives and principles inform possibilities for creating more immersive, affective, and evocative forms of digital designs.