Alejandría Cinque, from the The Disposable Generation series

Clara Casian, House on the Borderland, 2017

La Movida was a countercultural movement that emerged in Madrid after the death of dictator Francisco Franco in 1975. Suddenly liberated from the stern restrictions imposed the State and the Church, musicians, film directors (notably Pedro Almodóvar), artists and anyone involved in the capital alternative nightlife collectively shaped one of Spain’s most exuberant movements it’s ever seen. A movement characterized by new forms of expression, clubbing, recreational drugs and more visibility for the LGBT communities.

La Movida is also the name of the exhibition that opened at HOME in Manchester a few weeks ago. The show goes beyond the La Movida Madrileña of the 1980s to explore the traces and echos the movement has left in contemporary cultural life in Spain, in England and by extension in the rest of Europe.

First, the trailer:

Trailer for the exhibition La Movida at HOME in Manchester

Anyone else wondering what the music in the trailer is? It’s Extraños Juegos by Los Zombies. I’m listening to it in loop this week!

Los Zombies, Extraños Juegos, 1980

But back to business…

The exhibition at HOME shows that the Movida Madrileña might be almost 40 years old but much of what made it so explosive and scandalous at the time is still provoking ire and horror today. This is why, in this age of Brexit and shortsighted nationalism, of austerity and politicians pinning for the crucifixion of abortion, same-sex marriage and freedom of movement, an exhibition that breathes hedonism and transgression is not just engaging, it is also necessary. It compels us to reflect on the fights we fought, won and lost again. On the values and rights we should never take for granted.

A short and very subjective tour of some of the artworks:

Alejandría Cinque, from the The Disposable Generation series

Alejandría Cinque, from the The Disposable Generation series

Alejandría Cinque is a young artist who uses disposable cameras to portray the ‘disposable generation,’ the young people who live in Madrid, a city driven by capitalism but they have no money, so feeling angry and abandoned, they seek a temporary escape in drink, drugs and dance. Cinque sees the camera as a tool that enables her meet people. Most of them ended up becoming friends or lovers, she explained in an interview with i-D.

She started sharing her photos of Madrid’s counter-cultural nightlife on tumblr but she now also collects and publish the images in a fanzine called WE ARE.

La JohnJoseph, 182cm Queenie, 2017 (La Movida installation shot). Photo credit Lee Baxter for HOME

La JohnJoseph, 182cm Queenie, 2017 (La Movida installation shot). Photo credit Lee Baxter for HOME

La JohnJoseph, 182cm Queenie (excerpt), 2017

In 182cm Queenie, novelist and performer La JohnJoseph is King Juan-Carlos I of Spain announcing the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Only in his version the Spanish king is cast as a working-class woman called 2D Joan. Because La JohnJoseph is interested in exploring the convergence of social class, gender identity, and religious faith in the matrices of social power, the discrepancies do not end there.

First of all, 2D Joan speaks with a thick Scouse accent, a provocative reference to Basque and Catalan nationalism (Liverpool being often see as a fierce europhile city lost in a sea of Brexiters.) 2D Joan’s portrayal of democracy is also far more nuanced and iconoclastic than the one we would expect from someone belonging to the royal family. Hers come with holiday resorts, promises of a sensual integration into the European Economic Community but also with sharp comments about the machinations of political power, and those who wield it. Despite the outrageous make-up and biting appraisal of power and monarchy, the balance between critique, humour and analysis of reality is so spot on, i doubt anyone could genuinely feel offended by the video (plus, there’s the Liverpool accent which i’ve always found so charming.)

Bruce LaBruce, from the series Obscenity

Bruce LaBruce, from the series Obscenity

Bruce LaBruce, from the series Obscenity

Bruce LaBruce, Obscenity, 2012 (La Movida installation shot). Photo credit Lee Baxter for HOME

Bruce LaBruce, Obscenity, 2012 (La Movida installation shot). Photo credit Lee Baxter

On the other hand, it’s difficult to predict how people might react to artworks.

Take Bruce LaBruce‘s Obscenity portraits, for example. The prints depict Spanish cultural figures dressed as saints, nuns and angels and appearing to perform all kinds of fetishes and erotic fantasies. You might think that fashion magazines ads from the 1990s and 2000s have made us immune to glossy titillation. Or that Madonna had exhausted public indignation over the use of catholic figures in (mild) erotic context. But it turns out that visitors of the HOME exhibition were upset with this close encounter between sex and religions. Some of them even sent hand-written letters to complain about the images.

Their reactions however was nowhere near as ferocious as the ones observed in Madrid where the mayor called for an exhibition of the photo series to be closed, religious groups protested outside the gallery and someone hurled a firebomb through the window.

In an interview that followed the failed attempt to destroy the show in the Spanish capital, LaBruce shared this amusing anecdote about how he got hold of hostias: That’s a good story, actually. We first bought a bag of them in the religious supplies shop where we got all the other props for the shoots. Then during the second shoot we ran out and sent one of the flamboyant gay stylists to get some more. They wouldn’t sell them to him. In the end we got one of the girl assistants to go with a shawl on her head.

La Movida installation shot. Photo credit Lee Baxter for HOME

Linder, Pretty Girls, 1977-2007 (La Movida installation shot). Photo credit Lee Baxter for HOME

Linder, Pretty Girls, 1977-2007 (La Movida installation shot). Photo credit Lee Baxterv for HOME

Linder, from the Pretty Girls series, 1977-2007

A figure in the Manchester punk and post-punk music scenes of the late 1970s and early 1980s, Linder made posters and fliers for rock bands. Her Pretty Girls collages feature naked women found in erotic magazines with kitchen appliances in lieu of head. The series denounced how domestic technologies, instead of aiding the liberation of women, contributed to their enslavement and objectification.

It might seem like pretty standard imagery nowadays but at the time the Pretty Girls caused outrage and was rejected by Manchester’s left-wing bookshops as too extreme.

Clara Casian, House on the Borderland, 2017

Speaking of bookshops, censorship and indignation….

Clara Casian’s film House on the Borderland explores alternative publishing and censorship in Manchester via the history of Savoy Books. Heavily persecuted in the 1970s and 80s for their alternative publications, Savoy’s office and bookshops were raided by the Manchester Obscene Publications Squad more than sixty times. The attempts to restrict the activities of Savoy was part of a moral crusade orchestrated by conservative police commissioner James Anderton, nicknamed ‘God’s Cop’ because of his belief that God was guiding his defense of moral issues.

These attempts to ban boundary-pushing literature echo the fate of HOME’s Dark Habits, a publication that accompanies the exhibition La Movida. Sarah Perks and Bren O’Callaghan, curators at HOME, invited 19 contributors to explore freedom and indulgence, hedonism, transgression, sex and moral conventions for the book. They sent the texts to their usual printer who declared that the content of the book was too offensive to be printed. HOME had to find a more open-minded printer. The book was released a few days ago. I’m waiting for my copy to arrive in Turin and i’m obviously very curious about what i’m going to find inside the book.

And i’ll leave you with 3 more images. One is a touching portrait of Saint Batman, a queered, broken Batman, a folk saint of a lesser pantheon. The other two were taken while i was walking through Manchester, one of the most relentlessly exciting and energetic cities in the whole universe:

Jesse Darling, Don’t hurt Batman !!!, 2016

La Movida was curated by Sarah Perks. The show remains open at HOME in Manchester until Mon 17 Jul 2017. The guide of the exhibition is available as a PDF.

Hey Houston! Just about a week until BAHFest proposals are due, and we need to see more! We'd especially like to see more proposals from women. So, please do us a favor and nudge your nerdy friends.

In the last post, I described my requirements for a 2D discrete physics system I’m working on. Now that I’ve laid out what the system should do, let’s turn to the implementation.

Given a space with some walls, a set of objects, and some forces being applied to the objects, we want to develop an algorithm to figure out what happens during the upcoming timestep.

Attempt 1: Force by force

Let’s start with a quick and dirty algorithm to get a feel for how this would work. We treat each force separately, regardless of other forces, and apply it recursively:

def time_step():
  for force in forces:
    if can_move(force.object, force):
      move(force.object, force)

def can_move(object, force):
  # Walls can never be moved
  if object.is_wall:
    return False
  # Compute where the object would end up
  moved_object = object.moved_by(force)
  # For each pushed object, check whether it can move
  for pushed_object in objects_colliding_with(moved_object):
    if not can_move(pushed_object, force):  # recursive call
      return False
  return True

def move(force, object):
  object.move_by(force)
  for pushed_object in objects_colliding_with(object):
    move(force, pushed_object)  # recursive call

This gets the basic situation right: a single force being applied will result in a bunch of objects being pushed along. Where it breaks down is if there is more than one force:

Whoa, what happened there? First, the force on the red object was applied, and it pushed the orange object along. Then the force on the orange object was applied, and because it still has empty space ahead of it, it moves another square to the right.

Maybe we can fix this by keeping track of which objects have already moved during this time step, and forbid them from moving again? Nope:

Again the force on the red object was handled first, pushing the orange object away. But when we got round to the force on the orange object, it was not allowed to move again, so it lost its chance to push back against red.

Clearly, this approach is too simplistic. If we want forces to be able to add up and cancel out, we need to explicitly code that in.

Incidentally, there’s another problem with these recursive algorithms. In general, two blocks can have shapes such that they can push on each other:

This would lead to infinite recursion if we’re not careful. To break the cycle (and turn the force graph into a tree), we can keep track of which objects have already been dealt with, and bail out without entering the recursion as soon as we encounter one of these. I’ve left this code out for simplicity.

Attempt 2: Adding up forces

Let’s try an algorithm that performs two passes. In the first pass, it computes the net forces that act on each object, by adding up all the forces that act on them directly and indirectly. In the second pass, it moves all the objects according to the net forces acting upon them, until nothing can move anymore.

def time_step():
  # Reset net forces
  for object in objects:
    object.net_force = (0, 0)
  # Pass 1: Compute net forces recursively
  for force in forces:
    propagate_force(force.object, force)
  # Pass 2: Move objects according to their net forces
  change = True
  while change:
    change = False
    for object in objects:
      if try_move(object):
        object.net_force = (0, 0)
        change = True

def propagate_force(object, force):
  object.net_force += force
  moved_object = object.moved_by(force)
  for pushed_object in objects_colliding_with(moved_object):
    propagate_force(pushed_object, force)  # recursive call

def try_move(object):
  if object.is_wall:
    return False
  if object.net_force == (0, 0):
    return False

  # Restrict net forces to the four allowed directions
  force = object.net_force.clamp()

  # Only move the object if the space ahead is free
  moved_object = object.moved_by(force)
  if objects_colliding_with(moved_object) == []:
    object.move_by(force)

This gets the above situations right. In the first case, the net force on the red object is (1, 0), so it wants to move right. The net force on the orange object is (2, 0), but this gets clamped to (1, 0) and it also moves by just one square:

And the cancelling out works because the net force on both objects is zero:

But we now have a more subtle problem. Look at this:

What?! Yes, this is what the algorithm says. The force propagates from the red block to the blue and teal ones, so we get a net force of (1, 0) on all three blocks. After that, the teal block doesn’t care that the blue block can’t actually push it forwards, so it happily flies off on its own.

How do we fix this? Somehow we need to keep track of the reason why the blue block had to move in the first place, and only move it if that reason is still valid. But in general, there is no single reason: multiple forces might be acting on it from different directions.

All in all, I didn’t manage to find a satisfactory way to make this algorithm work. Better luck next week?

In This Corner of the World – Kono sekai no katasumi ni (2016) – is a film caught between worlds. It is caught between the desire to represent a troubled period in Japanese history using traditional animation techniques, and the difficulties in finding funding for “independent” anime that requires innovative uses of social media technologies.

Sunao Katabuchi’s anime film, released in the UK on June 28, is an adaptation of Fumiyo Kouno’s historical manga. It has become famed as much for its rich attention to historical detail as for its record-breaking crowdfunding in Japan. The unusual historical subject matter – Hiroshima during World War II – is part of the reason for the crowdfunding of In This Corner of the World, which eschews anime’s usual genres in favour of a female-centred story set against the increasing privations of war.

However, coverage seems to suggest that the film was funded solely through crowdfunding. This was not the case. Instead, this money was used by Katabuchi and his collaborators at the MAPPA studio to create a pilot film that could be used to gain support from more traditional film funding sources. The film eventually had a budget of over US$2.5m.

The association between In This Corner of the World and technological innovation is surprisingly at odds with Katabuchi’s use of traditional anime production techniques. It is a slice-of-life film about a woman named Suzu. The film takes us from Suzu’s girlhood as an aspiring artist to her life as a mother and wife in wartime Japan.

It focuses on her life in Kure, a port town in Hiroshima, adjacent to the site where the atomic bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945. The film focuses on the everyday aspects of Suzu’s life, and as the war increasingly intrudes into her world, Suzu uses her artistic talents to provide herself (and the audience) with moments of fantasy and escape from those harsh realities.

Anime’s 2.5-dimensional worlds

To represent this world, Katabuchi chose to use some old-fashioned anime techniques. Anime has a long association with traditional 2D cel animation. In particular, anime is often similar to the kinds of stylised animation made by companies like Hannah-Barbera in the US. This style of animation is usually called “reduced” or limited animation and these techniques produce the highly stylised and stylish worlds familiar to anime fans.

Typically, anime features simplified characters moving in front of static background drawings. One of the unique aspects of anime is that these backgrounds are often highly detailed (frequently recreating real-world places). This has become a hallmark of anime art, seen everywhere from the dense cityscapes of Akira (Katsuhiro Ōtomo, 1988) to the lush forests and landscapes of Studio Ghibli’s films.

By layering cels depicting movements on top of these painted backgrounds, anime imagery is given depth and, often, greater realism. However, digital production has irrevocably changed this process. Anime production is increasingly done on computers, which can more seamlessly integrate foreground and background images, producing what is known as 2.5D anime.

Recreating long-lost Hiroshima

Katabuchi, however, decided to retain traditional background art for In This Corner of the World. Using watercolours on paper, his team went to extremes to produce detailed, historically accurate background art. They painstakingly researched pre-atomic bomb Hiroshima as part of this process. Their project became, in part, one of historical recovery, because the atomic bomb destroyed much of what they wanted to depict.

Their access to photographs from the time only solved part of the problem, leaving gaps in their drawings of Hiroshima. To solve this problem, Katabuchi copied photographs and then he and his team did interviews with local people who had lived in the Hiroshima as children, before the bombing. Showing the local people their initial watercolours, they used their testimonies to recreate long-lost buildings and streets, reproducing memories of the Hiroshima that was obliterated when the atomic bomb fell.

As a result, In This Corner of the World is a new member of a long-standing tradition of filmmaking in Japan known as hibakusha (atomic bomb survivor) cinema. Anime has been an important part of this genre, perhaps most famously seen in the harrowing recreations of the bombing featured in Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen, 1983).

However, the fact that MAPPA had to use new social media to support and promote this film suggests a strength of public support for hibabuksha cinema, with the public directly donating to its creation. This is still unusual in Japan, and particularly in anime. On the other hand, MAPPA and Katabuchi are both well known in anime circles. Their presence was part of what encouraged the public to donate to MAPPA’s campaign. The use of Makuake, the crowdfunder, to help finance the film therefore reveals new ways for anime creators to generate support to tell stories that are located outside anime’s usual genres, but these systems still rely on the star power of anime directors.

By carefully balancing history and innovation, traditional and new kinds of anime production, Katabuchi and MAPPA have been able to produce a new kind of hybrid film. In This Corner of the World shows how anime can be used to reproduce and preserve the past in the midst of a fast-changing animation industry.

Rayna Denison has received funding from the AHRC, GB Sasakawa Foundation, Japan Foundation Endowment Committee and Daiwa

More fish.