Conversing with humans and objects: On repetition and the curative power in animation making.

This article explores what happens when humans, objects, and digital technology collaborate in
creating a short stop-motion film. It investigates how animation making as a hugely repetitive mechanical process interlinks with language, communication, and learning, and how it can affect our responsiveness and readiness to communicate. The article shows how repetition can push back mental concepts and language
ideologies that may hinder communication and language learning. Instead, repetitive action can create a positive affective space permitting access to hidden resources and unconscious knowing. Enabled by an affective flow emerging from all participating parts – human and hon-human – a possibly tedious exercise can be transformed into a task of freedom. Co-authors of this paper draw on auto-ethnographic experience, collaborative methods, and thinking with new materialist theory. Their research shows that animation making can disrupt existing educational policy and implement more equal educational practice by building on human−object assemblages and their power to stimulate more-than-human communication and learning.