Overview
This project is made possible by a postdoctoral fellowship funded by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme. The fellowship was awarded to Marco Bellano/University of Padua and is supported by the Visual Narrative research group at HSLU.
The MSCA global research project FICTA SciO (https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101063803) aims to identify and raise awareness about the audiovisual conventions and communication tactics of animation in multimedia science outreach, in respect to the representation of invisible objects (too big, too small, too far away in space and time).
The animated visualizations of the “invisible” sides of reality, like black holes or atoms, are mostly offered to the audience “as they are”, without any warning that they are scientific models based on non-optical evidence. Because of this, they get misunderstood for true-to-nature representations, and as such they circulate also in audio-visual entertainment, reinforcing the wrong belief that those objects would exactly look like that, if they were to be seen by the human eye. This is the case of objects at macroscopic cosmological scales (black holes, quasars, neutron stars), or at atomic and sub-atomic scales (atoms, quarks, strings), or too far away in time (extinct life forms).
The main disciplinary field is that of the animated documentary, a major point in the Animation Studies agenda. It is also based on the epistemology of scientific communication; as Daston and Galison argued (2007), «truth-to-nature» objectivity is being superseded by visuals balancing art and science. Merleau-Ponty (1964) had previously called for an equilibrium between objectivity and subjectivity in science outreach, due to the new “invisible” frontiers of knowledge.
The action will start with 12 months at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, whose excellence in visual research and its interdisciplinary environment will support the Researcher in building a list of animations in multimedia science outreach from 1980, critically engaging the conventions and tactics from the point of view of animation theory, of animators and of scientists (in dialogue with the resident experts on data visualization).
The next 12 months will be hosted by the Department of Cultural Heritage of the University of Padova, Italy. With the collaboration of the Department of Information Engineering and the CICAP (the Italian committee for scientific skepticism), the results from the outgoing phase will be used to:
a) create an open access database of multimedia science outreach about the “invisible”;
b) set up educational actions;
c) create a permanent committee to promote good practices in animation for science.
