Accelerate Session: What is it like to be a bat?
Inspired by Nagel’s seminal essay, this session will explore whether imagination and empathy can indeed help us bridge “the first-person consciousness problem.” Can we ever perceive the world as a non-human being does?
Art and animation, with their ability to visualize the unseen, serve as powerful tools for interspecies storytelling. Can the boundless yet slow process of animating function as a form of deep listening and ecological attunement?
Animators are not only storytellers but also actors—inhabiting, re-enacting, and embodying their subjects to understand how they move and behave, whether they are people, pigeons, or planetary systems. Experimental animation, in particular, offers a unique space for exploring non-human perspectives by creating new audio-visual languages that challenge anthropocentric narratives.
Dominica Harrison will be talking with Olivia Dugdale (UK), Boris Labbé (France) and Alisi Telengut (Canada) about ways animation offers a unique space for exploring non-human perspectives, creating new audio-visual languages that challenge anthropocentric narratives.
Follow this link to read Thomas Nagel’s essay.
13:00 – 14:00 UK time
Thursday 20 November 2025
Zoom
Follow this link to register.
Follow this link to watch recordings of our previous Accelerate Sessions.
Speakers
Dominica Harrison is an award winning, interdisciplinary filmmaker and an educator based in the UK. She specialises in animation direction and illustration, with a particular focus on hand-crafted techniques, often combining traditional image-making approaches like printmaking with 2D animation. Dominica is interested in storytelling as a mechanism of learning and social change.
Her film Chado (2021), supported by BFI NETWORK and produced by Animate Projects, premiered at Hiroshima International Animation Festival and screened at 45 festivals including Leeds IFF, London IAF and Anima Brussels. It was longlisted for the BAFTA British Short Animation Award 2021, nominated for the British Animation Awards Audience Award 2022, and received a Vimeo Staff Pick. Dominica curated and printed a collaborative short animated film and graphic novel In The Garden: Giggles In The Greenery (2024) with 11 international artists that has toured Europe with 5 book launch events and exhibition in London, Manchester, Angouleme, Porto, Berlin and Moscow.
She is currently working on her new film Re-Mind, co-written with Jon Ware, produced by Animate Projects, made with the support of the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding.
Alisi Telengut is a Canadian artist of Mongolian roots, living between Berlin, Germany, and Tiohtià:ke/Montréal, Canada. She creates frame-by-frame animation under the camera with mixed media to explore movement, hand-made processes, and painterly visuals. Her work has been presented internationally, including the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (USA), Whitney Biennial (USA), Sundance Film Festival (USA), TIFF and TIFF Canada’s Top Ten, Annecy International Animation Festival (France), VIDEONALE at Kunstmuseum Bonn (Germany), among others. Telengut is Assistant Professor in Film Animation at Concordia University (Canada).
Boris Labbé trained at the École supérieure d’art de Tarbes and the École de cinéma d’animation d’Angoulême. His latest short film La Chute was selected for the Special Screening at the Critics’ Week of the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. In 2020 he collaborated with the choreographer Angelin Preljocaj and signed the video scenography of the show Swan Lake. His films and video installations have earned him some seventy awards and distinctions around the world, including the Golden Nica Animation at the Ars Electronica Festival in Linz and the Grand Prix at the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo. Between 2023 and 2024, he developed and directed two landmark projects: Ito Meikyū, his first virtual reality project (produced by Sacrebleu Productions and Les Films Fauves) and Glass House, a video scenography in collaboration with composer Lucas Fagin (produced by the Ensemble Cairn). In 2024 Ito Meikyū was awarded the Venice Immersive Grand Prize at the 81st Venice International Film Festival.
Olivia Dugdale is a visual artist from London and a recent graduate of the Glasgow School of Art. Her practice spans across illustration and animation, with a focus on observational drawing and experimental animation techniques. Liv’s films explore the relationships between people and their environments through closely observed details that aim to highlight the poetics of everyday life.
Still: Pigeon Holding, Olivia Dugdale