Animation was the foundational laboratory that first spatialized time in audiovisual media

Evidence

What MTV does to music, therefore, is not some inversion of that defunct nineteenth-century form called program music but rather the nailing of sounds (using Lacan’s carpet tacks, no doubt) onto visible space and spatial segments: here, as in the video form more generally, the older paradigm — that lights up in genealogical hindsight as this one’s predecessor (but not the basic influence on it) — is animation itself. The cartoon — particularly in its more delirious and surreal varieties — was the first laboratory in which “text” tried out its vocation to mediate between sight and sound (think of Walt’s own lowbrow obsession with highbrow music) and ended up spatializing time. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 655

Categorization

• SEED: A genealogy claiming cartoons prefigured MTV offers a strong essay angle: tracing the animation-to-music-video lineage as a spatialization history.
• XREF: connects to: Interpretive animation means giving life and vitality to historic sites — Freeman Tilden, Interpreting Our Heritage, 474