2 - The Neurodynamics of Technically Mediated Motion: Perceptual vs. Conceptual Animation in Artworks of Nam June Paik and Bill Viola

Summary

Stillness has always been the dark other to animation's motion. From flipbooks to celluloid film, stop-motion animation and on into the digital era, the still image has provided the foundation for motion, achieved through the brain's neurological processing that blurs images into motion when the frame rate reaches or exceeds 24 fps. These facts, well-known for over a century, have recently been given an empirical foundation by neurological research into nonconscious cognition. A deeper understanding of how nonconscious process works together with conscious perception highlights the importance of recursive dynamics to animation's effects and leads to a theoretical framework distinguishing between perceptual and recursive animation. This framework sheds light on the complex recursive dynamics that Nam June Paik explored through several of his artworks.1 Through the work of video artist Bill Viola, it also opens new ways to understand how stillness and motion may be seen as a continuum rather than a binary either/or perception. Together, these developments suggest that recursive dynamics constitute a relatively unexplored area within animation theory, providing a basis of rethinking the relation of theory and practice in artworks using stillness as well as motion to achieve their effects.

Nonconscious cognition: integrating temporal information

Although experiments with nonconscious cognition were performed in the 1960s, it was not until the late 1990s that the experimental designs were sufficiently rigorous to provide the necessary empirical evidence for this mode of neuronal processing and to identify some of the functions it performs – functions, it turns out, essential for consciousness to operate (Lewicki, Hill and Czyzewska, 1992; Dresp-Langley, 2012). Its importance for consciousness notwithstanding, nonconscious cognition remains forever inaccessible to conscious introspection. In this respect it differs both from broad background awareness of the ‘new unconscious’ (Hassin, Uleman and Bargh, 2006), which can instantly become available to consciousness when appropriate, and from the Freudian unconscious, postulated to communicate with consciousness through dreams and symptoms.

One of nonconscious cognition's functions is integrating different kinds of sensory signals (for example, audio, visual, and kinesthetic inputs) to create a coherent body representation and a coherent sense of the world (Kouider and Dehaene, 2007; Eagleman, 2012). Within a window of about 100 ms (one-tenth of a second), nonconscious cognition synchs together sensory signals coming from different parts of the brain to create an integrated representation that then becomes available to consciousness.