The typical research project ostensibly begins with a question. The notion of establishing ‘questions worth answering’ which can be satisfied with confirmable answers is an orientation originally adopted from the sciences, and highlights the practical imposition of the academy to create rigor and consistency. Brad Haseman has suggested that an alternative to the posing of questions for those pursuing practice-based research in the creative arts is to begin with an ‘enthusiasm of practice’ from which useful knowledge may be generated, but returns to the need for the researcher to ultimately articulate a problem (if not a question) to pass the research credibility test. Is the illocutionary act of this retrospective ‘probleming’ not the same as a question? As the question demands an answer, the problem demands a solution. Perhaps this is the defining edge between practice as research and, simply, practice. The alignment of problem and solution (or question and answer) is suspiciously neat, and the form of language demands that they match neatly. Leaning on the experience of my own practice-based Ph.D. in creative media, this article will describe the positioning of improvisational animation production as a mode of practice-enthusiasm that can serve both as methodology and as epistemology for knowledge production in animation research (and related practices). I will discuss potential research questions related to improvisation for animator-researchers, and suggest that this mode of practice can yield useful, verifiable knowledge without recourse to the question–answer or the problem–solution formulation. In fact, the imposition of these, even post hoc, may undermine the research value of improvised practice and its epistemological clarity. The enthusiasm in this case may be the lack of answers or solutions that (at least linguistically) terminate the very origin of the enthusiasm for the practice.

The concept of the palimpsest relates in its most literal sense to the re-use of writing surfaces by performing an erasure of existing content to render the surface suitable for new inscriptions. This process creates a physical, visual and conceptual relationship between the original and the replacement texts and between their interpenetrating contexts. This metaphor has been applied in archaeology, literary theory, cultural theory, and indeed is common in the visual and plastic arts and in media theory related to contemporary digital media and the internet. This paper takes up the metaphor of the palimpsest and discusses the conceptual notion of the re-writable surface and 'temporal compression', giving examples of palimpsest in animation as well as in recent art works by the authors. We expand on theoretical potentials of machine aided physical, digital and virtual palimpsest and describe through these examples the relevance of the palimpsest metaphor in digital contexts which complicate the notion of erasure, surface and the temporal relationships captured in palimpsests. This theoretical metaphor and the practical examples contribute to a broader moment in animation and art theory concerning the constant expansion of 'animation' as a concept, which Suzanne Buchan has recently described as 'pervasive'[1]. There are relations between these practices that defy the boundaries of the media - some are clearly not 'animation', but the relation between the practices involved links them through the metaphor of the palimpsest.