Our PhD candidate Alex Widdowson presented at the annual Ecstatic Truth Symposium in Prague on April 21st. The Ecstatic Truth Symposium describes itself as "an annual symposium that explores issues arising from the interface between animation (in all its expanded forms) and documentary (conceptualised very broadly as non-fiction), with a particular interest in the questions raised by experimental and practitioner perspectives. According to Werner Herzog, mere facts constitute an accountant’s reality, but it is the ecstatic truth (a poetic reality) that can capture more faithfully the nuances and depths of human experiences."
For this 6th iteration of the symposium at the University of Creative Communication the theme was 'to attend', and Alex attended with his fantastic paper "Levinasian ethics and animated documentary practice: attending to the alterity of participants". The paper reflected on the ethical processes of his award-winning animated short film Drawing on Autism through the lens of Levinasian ethics, noting how animation as a form allows for an enhanced interaction and collaboration with the subject being depicted.
The whole paper can be viewed on YouTube on the following link. Alex's presentation begins at the 2h 33 mark:
