Ludic Animation: The Animist Ontology of Play
Research seminar on play – with ensuing ludic workshop

Friday, October 24^th 2025:

• 09.00–12.30  Seminar held at Nobelpark, Building 1481, Room 341
• 14.00–17.00  Optional workshop in the parish church of Mårslet

We all know it even if we don’t care to admit it: dolls are alive, things sense things, toys talk to us and to each other. Play entails animation and, conversely, animation implies an element of play. The concept of ludic animation celebrates this vital interdependence in search of an animist ontology of play. To the animist, the vivacity of games is not illusion or pretence but a material ensoulment, embodied in realities of play. This is the animist life of toys.

After a half-day seminar of playful papers from invited contributors, an animist workshop (optional) allows participants to experience ludic animation in the field. We will go to a local village whose medieval parish church used to stage the Ascension of Christ in a quite ludic fashion, “as an embodiment of the sacred emerging amid the ludicrous” (Joe Moshenska).

Programme:

09:00–09.15: Introduction to Ludic Animation by the organizers: What is the Animist Ontology of Play?

09:15–10:00: Keynote by Prof. Joe Moshenska, English Literature, University of Oxford (author of Iconoclasm as Child’s Play, 2019): Criticism as Play: Ludic Animation and the Object of Research.

10:10–11:05: Postdoc. Lieke Smits, Centre for the Arts in Society, Leiden University: Playing with Ice and Fire: A Moving Image of Mary.

Prof. Henning Laugerud, Art History, University of Bergen:
Playing with Words – Words of Play: The Dangers and Realities of Playful Pasts.

11:15–12:30: Associate prof. Laura Katrine Skinnebach, Art History, AU:
The Animate Interplay of Playthings and Playspaces.

Postdoc. Mads Vedel Heilskov, Art History, AU: Bodies in Motion: Some Medieval Theories on Movement.

Associate prof. Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen, Art History, AU:
Ludic Locomotion: Marionettes Move, Figures Fly, Toys Transform, Wheels Roll.

12.30–13.10: Lunch at campus.

13.10–14.00: Tram (Letbane) to the village of Mårslet

14.00–17.00: Animist workshop in the parish church of Mårslet, which possesses a Himmelsloch in the late medieval vault for raising and lowering airborne effigies of Christ, the Devil, angels and the Holy Ghost. We will test the ludic potential of flying figures, strings, holes and other spatial features, guided by workshop collaborator, director and author Nynne Roberta Pedersen Pedersen.  
Members of the audience may sign up for the workshop during the morning seminar (no previous registration required).