Combined and uneven spectacle of animated VFX: world building, labor and wage relations

Combined and Uneven Spectacle in Animated VFX: World Building, Labor and Wage Relations
In this paper, I aim to contribute to debates on animation production, labour and politics (Cubitt 2004, Leslie 2002, Ward 2005) and present a dialectical address of the spectacle (Debord 1994, Clark 1999, Wark 2013) as it is produced, experienced and detourned in digital contemporary culture. The concept of spectacle has traditionally focused on how everyday life is mediated through images, but in a period in which the “creative economy” is lauded as the touchstone of a new capitalist future, is it not equally important today to take a deeper look at the labour of spectacle itself? This question will be explored in a contemporary animation context by putting the rational mastery of high end visual effects (VFX) into dialogue with the activities of dissident imagineers in rebel architecture. The ‘rebel architect’ uses the world building capacities of pre-visualisation software not simply as a means to entertain the idea of another world, but towards a re-imagining and re-animating of the one being abandoned.
As the traditional high value workers of VFX spectacle become increasingly proletarianised and the wage relations come under unrelenting pressure, I will explore how those already surplus to requirement are taking steps to pre-visualise radically other worlds from the rubble of our own.