Ecstatic Truth is a one-day symposium that will explore provocative approaches to the factual - from the poetic, personal and autobiographical through to 'objective' documentary - through animated filmmaking. Animation is considered in an expanded form, as a spectrum of activities from traditional character animation to experimental manipulated moving image; from the screen-based - short film - to the spatialised - VR and installation.

Ecstatic Truth annual symposium: 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. Given that animation (or manipulated moving image) has the freedom to represent, stylize, or reimagine the world, it lends itself well to this aspirational form of a documentary. We invite speakers to respond to the idea of “Ecstatic Truth” and reflect, speculate and imagine how animated (or manipulated image) form might elicit the different facets of this poetic truth, through its unique language. We welcome speculations, poetic reflections, rigorous questioning, even fierce creative opposition to Herzog’s statement…

2018 focus: We want to explore questions of “truth” in an age where hierarchy of authority is challenged by social media’s ability to give everyone an equal voice. How can an expanded form of documentary, which pushes the fluid boundaries between fact and fiction, subjective and objective, poetic and informative, help us understand the world we live in? And in this tangle of impressions, where lies the deeper, poetic, or “ecstatic” truth, and how can this truth help us navigate the ever more complex landscape of information overload? We welcome work that challenges, provokes, questions the complex relationship between the reality we all share, and the inner worlds shaped by our own hopes, desires, prejudices, illusions, memories, perceptions and dreams….

Key note speakers: Joan Fontcuberta (conceptual artist), Susana Sousa Dias (filmmaker), José Miguel Ribeiro (animation director)

http://ecstatictruth.ulusofona.pt/

PROGRAMME, 27th September, 2018

Ecstatic Truth III: Making Sense – Between Fantasy and Fact

9.30 - Welcome, registration, coffee

10.00 - Official introductions:

- Manuel José Damásio and Dr Paulo Viveiros (Universidade Lusófona)

- Ecstatic Truth symposium organisers: Pedro Serrazina (Universidade Lusófona), Dr Tereza Stehlikova (University of Westminster), Dr Birgitta Hosea (University for the Creative Arts)

10.15 Keynote speaker: Susana Sousa Dias (University of Lisbon) (includes Q&A)

11.15 Coffee break

11.30 Panel 1. Disputed Boundaries: Testimony, Memory and the Media

• Patti Gaal‑Holmes (Arts University Bournemouth), Into the Frameless Distance
• Romana Turina (Arts University Bournemouth), Silenced History in Film: The Stubborn Ecstatic Truth from Lunch with Family to Boris
• Professor George Barber (University for the Creative Arts), The Poetic and Conflict

12.15 Q&A chaired by Pedro Serrazina

12.45 LUNCH

1.45 - Keynote speaker: José Miguel Ribeiro in conversation with Paulo Viveiros

2.15 - Q&A chaired by Paulo Viveiros

2.25 - Panel 2. Making Sense: The Politics of Portrayal

• Joan Ashworth (Independent Artist), Portable culture: animation in Stories in Transit (SiT) refugee project, Palermo, Italy
• Yijing Wang (Central Saint Martins), Ethnographic Animation: Co-Design with the Longhorn Miao

2.55 - Q&A chaired by Birgitta Hosea

3.15 - Coffee break

3.30 - Panel 3. Between Fantasy and Fact: Technological Simulation and the Real

• Melissa Ferrari (CalArts), Intersections of Science, Myth, and Phantasmagoria: Using Experimental Animated Documentary and Magic Lantern to Excavate Nonfiction within Cryptozoology
• Chantal Poch (Pompeu Fabra University), "And the Earth was Without Form": Generated Images in Terence Malick's Without Time
• Katerina Athanasopoulou (Plymouth University), Towards a cathartic unpeeling of the truth within VR documentary

4.15 - Q&A chaired by Tereza Stehlikova

4.45 - Coffee break

5.00 - Keynote speaker: Joan Fontcuberta

6.00 - Q&A/Closing discussion chaired by Paulo Viveiros

6.30 - Drinks and informal discussion