International Conference on Animation and Comics
Ink and Motion #3 
Invisible Animation
8-10 April 2026, School of Arts

Ink and Motion – International Conference on Animation and Comics, intends to provide a common ground in which artists and academics can explore the intersectionalities between animation, comics and other forms of artistic expression (i.e. videogames, photography, live-action cinema, music etc.).

The third edition of Ink and Motion – International Conference on Animation and Comics will take place from April 8 to 10, 2026, at School of Arts of the Portuguese Catholic University, Porto. The theme for this year is Invisible Animation.

With Invisible Animation, we propose to address and problematize the phantasmagorical nature of animation and question its multiple relationships with that which is unseen. Since the appearance of the first animated works by Émile Reynaud and Émile Cohl in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, animation has been linked to the phantasmagorical trait associated to both a strive to reveal the invisible by giving the animated the appearance of autonomous life, and, on the other hand, a tendency to conceal its creative processes and the animator's own body. These dimensions of revelation and concealment constitute one of the foundations of the practice of animation, which Pierre Hébert calls the “dramaturgy of simulacra” (2006). The invisible is not only what is off-screen, but what structures the very matter of animation: time, interval, gesture, imperceptible transformation, technical and conceptual work that is rarely seen.

On the one hand, we are interested in animation's ability to produce the non-existent, the imaginary, as well as its potential to make the uncapturable visible: from its use for scientific purposes, such as molecular animation, to documentary practices, which find in animation a way to represent and illustrate the incomprehensible or distant from the viewer (be it a temporal, spatial or psychological distance). We thus highlight the growing importance of documentary animation in the thinking of authors such as Annabelle Honess-Roe (2013), for whom this device lends itself to the visualization of “invisible aspects of life, often in an abstract or symbolic style, (...) [allowing] us to imagine the world from someone else’s perspective”. On the other hand, we propose to unveil what remains hidden within its practice: the creative processes, the materiality of the artistic gesture, marginal and experimental techniques, such as direct animation, pixilation, and mixed media etc. We propose to reflect on the practice of animation in its frame-by-frame dimension, based on André Martin's (1953) definition, which led animator Alexandre Alexeieff (1970) to compare the work of the animator to that of a biologist: “[F]or animators—those microscopists of the cinema—the substitution of images contains the very fabric of their art, just as, for biologists, the behavior of cells contains the secrets of living organisms.”

The theme Invisible Animation also invites reflection on the dynamics of invisibility as underrepresentation inscribed in the history of the medium itself and the forms of resistance that emerge from it, for example in what concerns gender and identity issues, especially in relation to questions of women's authorship. The invisibility of animation itself, often relegated to a minor and childish genre, is also considered, as well as its expansion into related arts: the animated evolution of live-action cinema through special effects and its relationship with comics and other forms of artistic expression.

Ink and Motion – International Conference on Animation and Comics is organized by CITAR - Research Center for Science and Technology of the Arts. We are pleased to invite participants to engage with their research in a cross-disciplinary event bringing together national and international speakers.

Call for abstracts: until January 30th, 2026

Areas and communication topics:

- Animation and the Documentary
- Animation and Memory, Post-memory and trauma;
- Animation and Science;
- Animation/Comics and Censorship (political, economic and self-censorship);
- Animation and Academia;
- Representation issues through an intersectional prism;
- Expanded Animation;
- Animation and the Archive;
- Labour issues in the animation industry;
- The gutter and the inbetween as narrative devices;
- Liminal spaces and the Uncanny;
- Pentimento in animation: marks of drawing;
- Music/sound effects and the relationship to the animated image;
- Ephemeral drawings: the homogenization of authors’ concept drawings, the loss of uniqueness in gestures due to industrial and digital standardization;
- The contamination between animation, cinema, and visual effects (VFX);
- Film conservation: restoration, preservation, and obsolescence of media;
- Practical productions processes: the “scaffolding” of Animation, below-the-line, etc;
- Animation as invisible choreography in the work of experimental animators such as Len Lye, Norman McLaren, and Pierre Hébert;
- Pre-production underdrawings;
- Centralization of distribution circuits and monopolies in Animation, Games and Comics;

Other related topics are welcome.