CTAN 522 Presentations

Hench DADA Student Works

On December 12, 2007, Animation Minors, BA Seniors, MFA first, second and thesis students in CTAN 522 presented their completed and/or works in progress for group critique.

One goal of the event was to exposure the works to special guests, USC faculty and alumni and engage discourse around the art form and inspire the students while facilitating a clearer vision of their own research and career goals.


The below research sites have all been created by students in CTAN 522.




1. Visualizing Science and Visual Effects group

2. Documentary and Animation group

3. Visualizing Science and Art group

4. Visual Effects, Stereoscopy and Perception

5. Character Animation, Performance, Kinetics and Dance group

6. Facial Gesture and Emotional Resonance through Animation and Cinema group

7. Consciousness and Sound

8. Death, Time and Animation

9. Fine Art, Cinema and The Virtual Window group


As an international and multi‐cultural program the John C Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts has incorporated into its curriculum a theoretical and critical approach to the development and research of digital art forms as well as an historical understanding of how traditional media, drawing, painting, sculpture, video and installation art have transposed or been incorporated into animation or art in motion.

We have constantly strived to merge new technologies with traditional practice and to encourage the study of the human form, organic media and gesture as a way to explore complex ideas and emotions across a temporal medium. We truly believe the art form of animation developed as a way to reflect our own physical and mental evolutionary process.
Alisdair Foster wrote in his paper Art in a Post‐Newtonian Paradigm, “Art is the language of perception and science has delivered perception as the only reality." In this context animation has become one of the most pervasive art forms of the 21st century and as Hench‐DADA’s founding chair stated “the core language of digital media today.”