The summer is here and with it the conference season. That’s right! Instead of holidays, academics have conferences (and holidays after them if they are lucky). In any case, my new research on comics is finally seeing the light of day.
In the above image, you can see me present about motion in comics at the Visual Language Conference we organized at Tilburg University on 27-28 June 2024.
You can download the slides by clicking here.
And click here to download the preprint of the first section of my talk: Mark the unexpected.
I will also present on Mark the unexpected at the CogSci 2024 conference!
Super quick summary of what my work is about: Understanding the difference between what is animate (alive or sentient) as opposed to inanimate (not alive nor sentient) is essential for humans, both for our ancestors and for us today. We know that animates are expected to move toward a goal because of their sentience, just like you move intentionally toward a train station every morning. Inanimates, on the other hand, are more associated with aimless movement because they lack intentionality. In my research, I show that when inanimate objects are moving toward a goal in a comic, they need to be marked by motion lines indicating movement more often than animates. This is because the motion lines unambiguously tell us that inanimates are moving in an goal-directed way, which is unexpected from them.