Neuroanimatics: Hyperrealism and digital animation’s accidental mark

Digital animation is arguably a medium that can produce any image that the human brain can imagine, but is this all that it can do? It is not without good reason that animation has become a popular and enduring medium: animators and artists have long known that certain forms of simplification and exaggeration are more pleasing than others. This article will argue that animation has the ability to not only match the human imagination, but also to improve on it via the mark-making process itself, or more accurately via the ‘accidental’ mark-making process. Utilizing discoveries in neuroscience and neuroaesthetics I will examine the effects of this ‘accidental’ mark on both traditional and digital animation production and spectatorship. I will establish that there are intrinsic qualities in the digital pixel that render the digital animation medium truly unique in terms of its representational qualities. However, this unique ability does not lie, as might be expected, in the area of digital realism, but rather in the domain of the hyperreal.