In this reflection on the animation that happened, we explore how environments like VRChat challenge the limits of traditional documentary. Through the concept of operational image, we analyze new forms of testimony, emerging pedagogies, and animated practices that no longer represent, but produce real experiences.
When there is no camera, but there is testimony.
You don't have to wait long. In the first minute of the documentary video People In VRChat Share Their Darkest Moment In Life (hosted on YouTube), a user of the social platform VRChat begins to recount the death of her grandmother.
He does so with poignant honesty, describing the experience in scatological detail and sharing deeply intimate emotions. However, what we see on screen is not a human face, but an animated avatar, a version reminiscent of characters from anime like Sailor Moon.
Throughout the video, other users join in, creating a mosaic of personal confessions narrated through virtual figures: a furry, an anthropomorphic toothbrush wearing a sweater, a medieval knight, and a floating robot with a screen on its chest.
They cry, they console each other, they joke, they keep each other company. It all happens in a computer-generated environment, without visible bodies or physical cameras. And yet, it constitutes a legitimate encounter of social connection. What is said, felt, and remembered there... is real.
Certain contexts like VRChat invite us to think about animation not only from its potential to represent reality, but from an even more radical perspective: one in which animation is the event itself.
There is no prior event to document, nor a camera to capture an external event. What happens exists only within the animated environment, and can only be experienced and transmitted through it.
This type of testimony questions the very foundations of traditional documentary, which, since Barthes and Dubois, has relied on photography as a trace of reality. The camera guarantees an external reference, a world prior to the image.
But in environments like VRChat, that logic falls apart, as there is no index, but there is an event.
It is in this framework that I propose the term animation that happened: a way of understanding animation not as a medium of representation, but as an environment in which events take place. While the case of VRChat is particularly telling, it's not an isolated phenomenon, nor is it limited to social platforms or video games.
These types of environments, where the experience is not recorded from the outside but rather produced from within, are increasingly common in the daily lives of contemporary citizens. From spaces of emotional interaction to work, learning, and cultural production environments, animation no longer operates exclusively as an aesthetic or narrative resource, but as a technical and sensitive infrastructure for social and political action.
And if we think about it carefully, how far are we from interacting daily with animated assistants who guide us through bureaucratic, educational, or emotional tasks?
This growing presence of animation is not restricted to the realm of entertainment or digital culture, but extends to institutional, educational, and even clinical contexts. I personally know the case of a psychologist interested in using virtual reality devices to treat vertigo, exposing the patient to animated environments that simulate spatial imbalance.
In this type of practice, animation no longer consists merely of representing a symptom, but rather of provoking and even regulating it. The animation that occurs, then, operates directly on perception, on balance, and on the body. It is no longer a matter of narrating an experience, but of designing it.
From camera to operation
Harun Farocki detected this transformation early on with his concept of operational image: images generated not to be seen, but to fulfill a function within a technical system (military, industrial, medical). In works such as Eye/Machine (2001), Farocki shows how certain images don't document the world, but rather process, measure, and govern it. They are images without a viewer.
These images aren't born from a lens, but from a series of calculations. They don't simply seek to observe the world; rather, they seek to act within it, to execute the functions assigned to them.
Although their appearance corresponds to a contemporary regime of automation and calculation, the visual logic of these images finds surprising echoes in certain avant-garde movements of the 20th century. In particular, the proposals of the group The Absolute Film, with figures such as Oskar Fischinger, Hans Richter or Walter Ruttmann, already conceived the animated image not as representation, but as a direct articulation of rhythm, form and structure.
These abstract works, synchronized with sound and governed by mathematical or temporal principles, in some ways anticipate the functional aesthetics of contemporary interfaces: spectrograms, medical simulations, control panels, or military HUDs.
If the current operational image works without a referent and without a spectator, these pioneering animations already pointed to an image without a previous world, an image that organizes itself according to an internal, non-representational logic.
If the operational image redefines the visual status through functional execution (rather than observation), contemporary digital animation shares this fundamental logic; it doesn't need to represent an external world, because it operates within a generated, self-referential, and programmed one.
But while many operational images remain invisible, oriented toward closed technical systems, certain forms of digital animation occupy a socially exposed, sensitive, and interactive space. They don't operate in secret, but in direct relationship with users. And it is precisely here that the classic notion of documentary, which, as we have already established, is based on the index, the camera, and the exteriority of the referent, finds its pragmatic limits.
Not because it has lost its value, but because it is no longer sufficient to capture the current ways in which truth is expressed or transmitted. Eventual animation doesn't expand documentary, but it does technically displace it, interrogating it from a practice where there is no longer a lens, but rather an event.
Towards a new pedagogy of the animated
Thinking about animation as an event also forces us to rethink how we teach it. It's no longer just about mastering representation techniques or approaching reality through mimesis. Rather, it's about understanding how animation can be real without necessarily appearing so, how it can produce affect, experience, or testimony without reproducing an external reference.
In this sense, teaching animation today involves not only teaching graphic or narrative tools, but also enabling sensitive and technical frameworks where something can happen with its own meaning. A pedagogy of animation should, above all, prepare students to inhabit this regime.
Highlighted
- Barthes, R. (1980). La Chambre Claire: Note Sur la PhotographieGallimard.
- Dubois, P. (1983). The Photographic Act and other essays. Gustavo Gili.
- Farocki, H. (director). (2001). Eye/Machine [Film]. Harun Farocki Filmproduktion.
- Fischinger, O. (director). (1926–1927). R1. A form game [Animated short film]. UFA Studios.
- Richter, H. (director). (1921–1923). Rhythmus 21 [Animated short film]. UFA Studios.
- Ruttmann, W. (director). (1921). Lichtspiel Opus 1 [Animated short film]. UFA Studios.
- VRChat Inc. (n.d.). VRChat [Virtual reality platform]. https://hello.vrchat.com/
- VRChat Moments. (March 2023, 20). People In VRChat Share Their Darkest Moment In Life / VRCHAT STORIES [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IVftoNMkxg. (accessed on 20/05/2025).
