AI and Animation (with Mihaela Mihailova)
The creative - and highly controversial - relationship between animation and artificial intelligence provides the focus of Episode 167 of the Fantasy/Animation podcast, which features as its special guest Dr Mihaela Mihailova , an Assistant Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. Mihaela is the editor of Coraline: A Closer Look at Studio LAIKA’s Stop-Motion Witchcraft (Bloomsbury, 2021), whose work has also appeared in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies , The Velvet Light Trap , Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema , Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, Feminist Media Studies , animation: an interdisciplinary journal , Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema , and [in]Transition . She has contributed to Animating Film Theory (with John MacKay), The Oxford Handbook of the Disney Musical , Animated Landscapes: History, Form, and Function , The Animation Studies Reader , and Drawn from Life: Issues and Themes in Animated Documentary Cinema , and was editor of the recent “AI and the Moving Image” dossier published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies . She is currently co-editor of Animation Studies and serves as co-President of the Society for Animation Studies . Listen as Mihaela introduces Chris and Alex to the AI-generated short films Generation (2022) , PLSTC (2022) , Bruegel the Younger (2022) , and Dissolution (2023) as a backdrop to thinking about the trajectory of machine learning in relation to animated imagery and creative practice; the aesthetics and implications for labour prompted by AI as both an assistive and generative tool; the discourses of technophilia and technophobia that surround contemporary synthetic media; and what impact the ‘open secret’ of AI might have within the animation industry beyond some of its current applications. ** Fantasy/Animation theme tune composed by Francisca Araujo** **As featured on Feedspot’s 25 Best London Education Podcasts ** **As featured on MillionPodcast’s Best 10 UK Animation Podcasts and Best 60 Movie Podcasts in the UK **