As much as performance has embraced mediatization, what are the creative implications for rethinking this embrace and seeking to research and generate non-live “performative” outcomes that are subsequently considered and experienced as performance events?

Inevitably, it seems, any type of animation or moving image work can traces its roots back to Eadweard Muybridge. The movement experienced in simply looking at a series or line of Muybridge photos is breathtakingly simple – and that is before such images are animated within a flickbook (or other mode of animation/moving image). It is the capacity for experiencing and understanding the moving form fashioned from stillness that seems to represent such a delightful perceptual paradox.

Rather than reconstruct the history of flickbooks, animation and film in this page (see wiki link below), this page is designed to tease out two aspects of animation that are significant to dad.project. The first is the word anima and the second is the concept of persistence of vision – both of these are discussed in terms of performativity.

Anima

The root of the latin word anima (ane-) means ‘to breathe’. In English, anima is translated as “soul” or “spirit”. In any context, these words have much to do with how we understand what it is to be alive (“Our souls leave us at death and the body is emptied”), and how we communicate this state of liveness (“His spirit is weak”; “she has no soul”).

In the context of performativity the question of what is “alive” and what is “mediatised” has a strongly contested history. On one side are performance makers who insist that performance can only be experienced “in the flesh”, and that anything that is not live is a little further down the food chain. On the other side are those that suggest that the delineation of “live” from “mediatised” is fraught with ambiguity. For these artists and practitioners there is a dissolution of any performance hierarchy, and the domain of “liveness” extends well beyond “a performer on stage”. As I was writing the previous sentence I attempted to articulate “performer on stage” in other ways – “witnessing a living human being”, “watching an embodied performer” – but each configuration did not (and would not) exclude other so-called mediatised modalities like film/video, animation …

So dad.project is – in part – an opportunity for the viewer to breathe life into or animate the “static” embodied images that are presented. To make them move, to contribute to their liveness, and to experience (in a small way) performativity reframed outside of a theatrical context.

Persistence of vision

"… in permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, it reactivates the object reproduced."

Walter Benjamin

The term persistence of vision has long been used to account for how the human visual system renders movement out of a series of still images (from flickbooks to cinema). Its central idea is that a still image leaves a trace on the human retina long enough for the next image in the series to be added to the retina (and so on).

The trouble is that, like the notion of “liveness” above, there is considerable disagreement over the relevance of this phenomenon in explaining the illusion of movement generated from still images presented (quickly) in series. Joseph and Barbara Anderson have famously (and more than once) attempted to debunk persistence of vision as the reason for the illusion of movement. They argue that, at best, persistence of vision accounts for only part (what is known as “flicker fusion”) of the whole phenomenon, but not the experience of “apparent motion”. Their argument is particularly stimulating in relationship to the notion of passivity on behalf of the viewer of sequenced images (in whatever format):

“The viewer implied by the Myth of Persistence of Vision is a passive viewer upon whose sluggish retina images pile up”

John and Barbara Anderson

In talking about the relationship between TV stations and the agency of the viewer, media theorist, Scott McQuire (writing in Visions of Modernity, 1998, p.221), describes a process of “mutual imbrication”. However, this idea of overlap between the perceptual agency of the viewer, and the qualities of the image source is also useful in considering the emergence of “performativity” in mediatized geographies.

In the case of photography, early aspirations for objectivity have “ceded ground to a growing awareness of the observer’s irreducible implication in the scene observed” (McQuire, 1998 p.134). Although McQuire is talking about the observer and photographer as being synonymous, an argument for what might be described as the performativity of seeing implies that it is also the observer of the photographic outcome who is implicated in the scene. In terms of performance, this would suggest that the event is not limited to the increasingly unsettled medium through which it is presented (live/mediatised), but also involves the perceptual experiences of the viewer/observer/listener, which are imbricated in the qualities of the performance work. Thus, it is via perceptual actions that viewers are implicated in the meaning making process when witnessing an artistic event or object.

The importance of viewer perception in the construction of meaning is hardly earth shattering news. However, being aware of its presence remains useful in terms of imagining an environment or terrain for performance that is not based on a tired hierarchy in which mediatization is criticised for petrifying liveness. Seeing as performance can be viewed as a further means of rethinking the performance-mediatization hierarchy to the extent that we are actively involved in the production of “liveness” regardless of the degree of mediatization in the image sequence. This process of imbrication between viewer and event presents the possibility of small digital flickbooks existing as performance, generated or “made real” by the performative act of seeing.

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