Colloquium with Vera Thomann (University of Zurich/Harvard)

In HBO’s Westworld (2016–2022), a plethora of artificial animals appear – from cattle, horses and flies to scorpions and beetles, elephants, and tigers. Beyond the traditional representations of animals in Western or Science-Fiction, however, the animal characters in Westworld connect the trope of artificial animals to the history of animation: By drawing on techniques such as chronophotography, zoopraxography, rotoscopy, and stop-motion animation, the series not only anachronistically comments on the history of animation underlying its medium, but references the cinematic innovation inscribed in its own material – with the film Westworld (1973) being considered the first feature with a 2D digital animation. As I will argue, said animation techniques are employed in HBO’s Westworld whenever the theme of animatronic animal enlivenment or stillness arises, thereby shifting a fundamental problem of the series – the control of technology –into the procedures that have proved useful for providing control of animal movements in film history. As a result, the animal figurations in Westworld utilize the Cartesian beast-machine anew, so that the enlivenment of animalistic animatronics is always already connected to the artificiality of moving images.

Vera Thomann studied German Literature, English Literature and Art History at the University of Zurich and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her research interests include Contemporary Literature, Human-Animal Studies, Intermediality and Literary Theory. Currently, she is a PhD-student at the University of Zurich and Harvard Visiting Fellow at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures 2022/23.