A lecture on the delirious hyperreality of our present Age of Endarkenment, and the hyperanimation of Donald Trump.
Matt Bonner, Trump Baby, July 2018
This paper is necessarily speculative.
But it proceeds from the simple assumption that one needs to know as best as possible what reality one is dealing with, especially if it is a pervasive, or increasingly pervasive, ‘reality’ of radical, irreducible uncertainty, a hypervirtual, ‘post-truth’, ‘post-fact’ reality, whose hyperanimated character (including Trump) as hypercartoon distinguishes this daffy, nutty, delirious, virulent, monstrous, terroristic epoch I call the ‘Age of Endarkenment’.
Challenging that assumption, of the continued existence of second order reality and animation, are for me two overriding, entangled, mutually-reinforcing subjects: 1. Baudrillardian third/fourth order reality, hyperreality, as contemporary reality and hyperanimation as its mode of animation, with special focus on hypermedia as it relates to hyperpolitics today; and 2. Donald Trump the hyperanimator—extreme figure exemplary of hyperreality as a reality of extremes and extremisms, of pushing to the limit and beyond, the maximalising logic of hyperanimation.
Even as hyperreality trumps reality, is fatal to reality, so hyperanimation trumps, is fatal to, animation.
Part of the Art History Seminar Series, convened by Mary Roberts, and presented by the discipline of art history at the University of Sydney, with support from the Power Institute.
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Alan Cholodenko
Dr Alan Cholodenko is former Head of Department and Senior Lecturer in Film and Animation Studies in the Discipline of Art History at The University of Sydney, where he is now Honorary Associate. He has pioneered in the articulation of film theory, animation theory and ‘poststructuralist’ and ‘postmodernist’ French thought. He organised THE ILLUSION OF LIFE—the world’s first international conference on animation—in Sydney (1988), edited the anthology of that event—The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation—the world’s first collection of scholarly essays theorising animation (1991), as well as did a sequel conference (1995) and anthology (2007).