Join cinema studies for “Evolving Animation Through its Long, Lost Past: An Artist Talk with Eric Dyer.”

Free and open to the community.

Animation is still a young art form with many underexplored avenues of expression. Although the lay-person’s view of animation is still predominantly as entertainment on screens, it can also exist as participatory sculpture and painting, immersive kinetic environments, live performance visuals, and as experiences of exploration and discovery. Such forms and experiences challenge us to rethink what animation is and how it can engage people. Artist Eric Dyer draws on all of this and more through works based on one of the keystones of animation – the zoetrope, or the ‘wheel of life’. 

Artist Eric Dyer, dubbed The Modern Master of the Zoetrope by Creative Capital, brings animation into the material world through his sequential images, sculptures, installations, and performances. He has been honored as a Fulbright Fellow, Sundance New Frontier Artist, Creative Capital Grantee, and Guggenheim Fellow. Dyer has been a visiting artist at Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh), East China Normal University (Shanghai, China), California Institute of the Arts (Los Angeles), and the Royal College of Art (London, UK), among others. His participatory animated sculptures and award-winning films have been widely exhibited at prestigious international events and venues such as the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), Ars Electronica (Austria), Tabakalera (Spain), ARoS Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), and at the Cairo and Venice Biennales. His talk on TED.com, The Forgotten Art of the Zoetrope [go.ted.com/ericdyer], has been viewed over 1.1 million times.

Cosponsored by the UO Minor in Comics and Cartoon Studies, the Department of Art, the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, the Department of History, and the generous donation from the Kaplan family.