EJPC 5 (1+2) pp. 31 38 Intellect Limited 2013 Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication Volume 5 Numbers 1 & 2 2013 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 1386/ejpc.1-31_1 1 edwin Carels University College Ghent short notice abstract The cinematic illusion of movement always requires a number of images. In this regard, the present article poses the question as to how far one can narrow this down, and still consider such a manifestation a meaningful cinematic experience that communicates a concise idea. Demonstrating the impact of a flicker or an electronically alternating sequence of visual impulses that arrest our attention, a thaumatrope or an animated GIF can already generate such significance. Both within the art world and avant-garde cinema, artists have found ways to maximize the potential of such a minimalist approach to the moving image. The discussion of what the minimal duration for filmic experience of any cultural significance could be, is approached here from a media-archaeological perspective. As a curator for the International Film Festival of Rotterdam (IFFR), I regularly take the opportunity to question presentation formats and viewing conventions. In 2009, for the programme Size Matters, I commissioned a number of Dutch experimental film-makers to create a film on a single roll of consumer 35mm slide film, which allowed for a maximum of 36 photographic exposures. As the width and the sprocket holes of the film inside the roll matched the regular film projectors (then still in general use), it was easy to mount such handmade films on a reel together with a feature length film, and show it to a large audience as an ultra-short prelude. Projected at the average standard projection speed of 24 frames per second, they literally flashed by before the spectators could blink their eyes. These were likely the shortest films ever screened at our festival. Keywords optical toys animation avant-garde film media archaeology flicker fusion animated GIF 31 EJPC_1&2_Carels_31-3indd 31 1/6/15 3:12:17 PM
Edwin Carels Around the same period mini-festivals and websites started devoting themselves to the format of 60-second films. Imposing a temporal limitation is of course as much a gimmick as it is an artistic challenge. Whereas the canonical film history has imposed the feature length film as the norm, the digital revolution now challenges many (if not all) of the economic and aesthetic conventions thereby implied in a pervasive and profound way. Over the last decade, the proliferation of game consoles, smartphones, urban screens and online viewing eroded the self-evidence of any standard format. While media consumers incessantly exhibit their short sequences of moving images via applications such as Vine or Instagram, audio-visual artists now face the multiple choice of conceiving their works to be viewed on either a monitor, as an application, in the gallery, or on the skin of a building (Lord and Marchessault 2007). The bewildering variety of these formats, devices and platforms, as well as the ubiquity of so many types of screens, resonates in a similar range of screening durations, most frequently verging towards shorter forms. We are always on, and yet our attention span is paradoxically becoming shorter and shorter (Crary 2013). The means to arrest someone s attention via instant messaging has been redefined with the option of filmed images and animations. This may be said to correlate with a common characteristic of many audio-visual formats today: a radical compression of content due to limitations of length. The animated GIF is a case in point. Introduced in 1987, the Graphics Interchange Format has evolved into a popular animation medium, inciting both consumers and Net-artists to create their own variations. It took, however, more than two decades before the phenomenon became broadly acknowledged as a cultural format in its own right (Espenschied and Lialina 2009). Over recent years, there have been GIF exhibitions both online as well as in art museums and photography galleries. The format has sparked its own competitions and even auctions. This increased appreciation of what remained hitherto considered as no more than digital folklore, is partly due to the release of the new video application Vine, which allows to create and to share six-second loops with sound using mobile devices. When established art institutions began to deal with such a minor format as the GIF, the nostalgic reappraisal gained in signification. This suggests that even second-long animations can enter the canon of visual culture. Although by now the GIF is clearly established as a contemporary form of found footage film-making and a new type of animation, film festivals generally find it hard to incorporate miniature loops beyond websites and social media, as such fleeting miniatures prove hard to commodify in the form of tickets sales. However, it is possible. At IFFR we have integrated compilations of GIFs since 2012, by displaying them on a very large videowall, and incorporating them in a collaborating art gallery as ultra-short videoloops. From a traditional historical perspective, the parameter of a paying audience used to be a simple way to discern the start of cinema culture. First there was a lot of experimentation; with a paying audience it became an entertainment industry. With the global marketing of their one-minute films, either in projection or in kinetoscope format, it is as much due to their entrepreneurial skills as through their technical improvements that the Lumières and the Edison company entered the pantheon of film history. In contrast, the experimental practice of researchers such as Étienne-Jules Marey, or the prototypes of adventurous inventors like Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince remain known to media-specialists only. Yet from a media archaeological point of view a less causal genealogy of moving image devices and practices that is gradually 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 32 EJPC_1&2_Carels_31-3indd 32 1/6/15 3:12:18 PM
Short notice 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 Thaumatropes used by J. Plateau around 18 Courtesey of the G.U.M. (Gentse Universitaire Musea), J. Plateau collection. Anorthoscope by Susse (Paris). Courtesey of the G.U.M. (Gentse Universitaire Musea), J. Plateau collection. 33 EJPC_1&2_Carels_31-3indd 33 1/6/15 9:02:43 PM
Edwin Carels Fantascope by Ackermann after a design by J. Plateau. Courtesey of the G.U.M. (Gentse Universitaire Musea), J. Plateau collection. replacing the teleological history of cinema (Huhtamo and Parrika 2011) these pioneers could be considered the instigators of cinema as an ultra-short viewing experience, the reproduction of just one moment, one gesture, one motion. Both experimented with multiple exposures on a single glasplate: Marey opted for superimposition, Le Prince for a grid of sixteen consecutive frames. Both switched to celluloid film as soon as it became available. Thus, 100 years before the GIF entered popular consciousness, Marey, Leprince, and several others, had already presented very short sequences of about a dozen photographic images. Going back further in the history of the moving image, optical toys such as the thaumatrope (1825) and the phenakistiscope (1833) have recently regained theoretical (and popular) interest in light of current developments. Both were invented as scientific demonstration tools for the study of what was then understood as retinal afterimages. The former consists in a cardboard disc with a picture on each side and strings attached to its diametrically opposite points. The images seem to combine when the disc is whirled by the action of the strings. The spinning discs rapidly became a cultural trope, with the commercial recuperation of these experimental technologies in the first half of the nineteenth century. Also labelled as philosophical toys, such optical devices arguably foregrounded the inner physiological workings of the eye and the mind, thus drawing attention to the embodied nature of spectatorship, as addressed in Jonathan Crary s Techniques of the Observer (1990) a milestone in the field of media archaeology. Inspired by the thaumatrope, Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau was able to demonstrate what the human eye needed in order to synthesize the analysis of a movement with a simple instrument: a turning wheel with regular slits on the edges, which he called phenakistiscope. This illustrated disc immediately became a popular form of home entertainment when marketed in London from 1833 onwards. For a smooth animation effect, Plateau used sixteen (in some cases up to twenty) images and intervals per disc. 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 34 EJPC_1&2_Carels_31-3indd 34 1/6/15 3:12:27 PM
Short notice 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 Although the phenakistiscope s rapid alternation between a larger number of images allows for a smoother and more realistic effect, the thaumatrope s two images suffice to trigger the same effect perceptual psychologists now call the flicker fusion in the eye of the beholder. In this respect, we can consider the latter as the most minimalist form of image produced through motion, with only two sides of a cardboard disc that are combined when spinning a string attached to opposite points. In spite of its severe limitations this form of two-phased animation made considerable cultural impact. As a kind of kinetic caricature, the toy commented on political events, but in all its simplicity also stirred philosophical debates, pro- and anti-cartesian (Herbert 2013). In most history books, the thaumatrope is referenced as just the first step in a genealogy of an ever-expanding sequence of moving images, from two, to sixteen, to 24 images per second. This traditional evolution of moving images evidently emphasizes the progress towards longer, linear and often more narrative sequences. However, from the point of view of the current surge of short audio-visual s and animated GIFs, the thaumatrope can be said to represent the forerunner of contemporary loops and very-short image cycles within our audio-visual culture. Since the algorithmic turn, the concept of film as a linear strip of individual frames is no longer a relevant parameter. Even when there is no action on a monitor, the digital image constantly flickers, it is animated. Therefore, as Eivind Røssaak has recently pointed out, the use of the interplay between stillness and motion must be recontextualized (2011: 11). The digital image is, ontologically speaking, based on a separation or discontinuity between input and output; it is no longer a static and stable given. Without this fundamental discontinuity, computer algorithms would not work (Røssaak 2011: 190). Yet again, these characteristics can be traced back to long before the first electronic images. In 1829, before introducing the phenakistiscope, Plateau invented the anorthoscope, an instrument consisting of two rotating discs that allow for the compression of an anamorphic drawing on one disc into a more recognizable graphic figure. When revolving at the right speed, the shutter effect of the four slits on the second disc reconstruct a distorted figure that paradoxically appears to stand still, in spite of its rapid swirling. Renowned film historian and media archaeologist Tom Gunning will not consider start the genealogy of the moving images with the thaumatrope or the anorthoscope, as these rotating devices in his view do represent a virtual image, but not yet a moving one (2012: 510). Contrary to him, I would like to suggest that the composite nature of the anorthoscope s ephemeral image (consisting of a recomposition of scan lines) is very much akin to the electronic screen of contemporary media technologies, where not a whole frame but every constituent pixel can be modified, and thus the animating changes in the image can be extremely small. The same effect of flicker fusion is exploited here, only in a much more refined way. In 1833, the year of Plateau s successful release of the phenakistiscope, scientist Charles Wheatstone first presented the combination of two slightly different images to a pair of eyes, using a device he called a reflecting mirror stereoscope. With the subsequent invention of photography, and then in 1849 of a more user-friendly lens-based stereoscope by the Scottish scientist David Brewster, stereoscopy became a popular craze on an international scale. Like the thaumatrope, the stereograph is based on merely two images, shot simultaneously with two parallel lenses. Put on view next to one another, these two images evoke the illusion of virtual depth in the brain. For Crary, this 35 EJPC_1&2_Carels_31-3indd 35 1/6/15 3:12:27 PM
Edwin Carels binocular technology represents a major shift in the western visual regime. Although distinct from the optical devices that represented the illusion of movement, the stereoscope is nonetheless part of the same reorganization of the observer, the same relations of knowledge and power, that those devices implied (Crary 1990: 118). There is one particular subcategory of the stereographs that does involve animation in the sense of a constant flicker effect. Unlike the standard stereograph, these shots are not made with two parallel lenses opening at once, but rather individual exposures for each. They can also be produced with a single-lens camera that makes a lateral shift. Due to the time it takes between the alternating exposures, there is always a slight difference between the two images. The changes that occur in between can be accidental or deliberate. An image component such as a carriage or a pedestrian on the left side of the stereograph can appear removed on the right side. When viewing both images at once with a stereoscope, this combination of absence and presence triggers a dynamic on/off effect, a flicker. This particular category of stereographs may well be considered an even more radical form of animation. Whereas with the thaumatrope, the anorthoscope and the phenakistiscope, the flicker is triggered through a manual operation, here it is entirely internalized in the viewer s head. Animator Norman McLaren has famously located the animation effect in the interval between images, emphasizing that what happens between the frames is more important than what can be seen on each frame (Solomon 1987). From Joseph Plateau s persistence of vision to the contemporary theory of flicker fusion, defining animation involves as much an understanding of the process of perception as well as of the production of movement. No awareness of movement is possible without the activity of one s own awareness, as our brain actively probes for the minutest changes it can perceive (Anderson and Anderson 1978). While still using filmic terms, the most rudimentary and yet essential definition of animation is based on this capacity of distinction: Movement, or change, of the created image in recorded time (Wells 2011: 28). Thus, any cinematic motion minimally requires the perception of some form of difference between two images. According to the French theorist and curator Philippe-Alain Michaud (2006), what is essential about cinema is precisely what is not reproducible: its flicker. In this account, just as one cannot reproduce the effects of a colour field painting with all its textural nuances on a two-dimensional photograph, the flicker cannot be experienced but as a discontinuity during projection (2006: 123). As film is discontinuous by nature, Michaud considers it important not to limit film to the illusion of continuous movement. The author pays special attention on the various types of film-makers who maximize on this specific characteristic of discontinuity. For example, avant-garde works such as Stan Brakhage s hand-painted films or Peter Kubelka s stroboscopic assaults made up of black and white frames (see Gunning in this issue), radically deny the illusion of representational movement. In a similar vein, Paul Sharits projections of the sole dynamic of the grain on the film stock found a more contemporary (and indeed sellable feature length) equivalent in Derek Jarman s Blue (1993). There is, particularly in avant-garde cinema, a tradition of films that restrict themselves to a form of minimalist differentiation. All these examples, however, add a strong sense of duration to the experience of flicker fusion. They require a theatrical setting, still affirming the traditional context of a cinema screening for a ticket-buying public with film that has a specific duration. Otherwise, when the moving image experience requires only a flash of 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 36 EJPC_1&2_Carels_31-3indd 36 1/6/15 3:12:27 PM
Short notice 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 a second to maximize the impact of such visual impulses, such audio-visual artforms resonate better in the gallery than in the film circuit. Famous examples are the elusive signs of Marcel Broodthaers (1970) turning his initials into a filmic lightning sketch or merely a second, or James Lee Byars (1970) appearing for a bright blimp on one single frame of an otherwise dark film loop. To elusive to commodify as a screening, such loops did find their way into the art world, and are now canonized works. Whether certain animated GIFs (or other electronic formats that require the mere blink of an eye) will reach a similar iconic status remains unpredictable. Yet, the process that might grant them such legitimacy seems to be under way. It begins with festivals and museums foregrounding their selections, and with writers and theorists raising questions that can lead to a cultural history of the attention span. In the slipstream, a revalorization of animation and optical toys moving image technologies that already circulated before the introduction of the cinema is in place. From a media-archaeological standpoint, what links the thaumatrope and the stereograph with both the GIF and some cases of avant-garde cinema, is how these manifestations maximize on the flicker effect in the most minimal way. references Anderson, J. and Anderson, B. F. (1978), The myth of persistence of vision, Journal of the University Film Association, 4, XXX pp. 3 Broodthaers, Marcel (1970), Une Seconde d éternité/a Second of Eternity, Barcelona: MACBA. Byars, James Lee (1970), Autobiography, New York: Michael Werner Gallery. Carels, E. (2009), Size Matters: ipod versus IMAX, in A. Ter Horst (ed.), IFFR Catalogue 2009, Rotterdam: International Film Festival Rotterdam, pp. 354 5 Crary, J. (1990), Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge and London: MIT press. (2013), 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep, New York and London: Verso Books. Dorikens, M. (2001), Joseph Plateau 1801 1883: leven tussen kunst en wetenschap/ living between art and science, Gent: Provincie Oost-Vlaanderen. Espenschied, D. and Lialina, O. (eds) (2009), Digital Folklore, Stuttgart: Merz & Solitude. Gunning, T. (2012), Hand and eye: Excavating a new technology of the image in the Victorian Era, Victorian Studies, 54: 3, Spring, pp. 495 5 Herbert, S. (2013), The Thaumatrope Revisited; or: A round about way to turn m green, http://www.stephenherbert.co.uk/thaumatropetext htm. Accessed 20 August 20 Huhtamo, E. and Parrika, J. (eds) (2011), Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Jarman, D. (1993), Blue, London: Channel Four Films. Lord, S. and Marchessault, J. (eds) (2007), Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Michaud, Ph.-A. (2006), Sketches Histoire de l art, cinéma ( Sketches art history, cinema ), Paris: éditions Kargo. Røssaak, E. (ed.) (2011), Between Stillness and Motion: Film, Photography, Algorithms, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 37 EJPC_1&2_Carels_31-3indd 37 1/6/15 3:12:27 PM
Edwin Carels Solomon, Ch (1987), Animation: Notes on a definition, in Charles Solomon (ed.), The Art of the Animated Image An Anthology, Los Angeles: The American Film Institute, pp. 9 Wells, B. (2011), Frame of reference: Toward a definition of animation, Animation Practice, Process & Production, 1: 1, pp. 11 3 SuggeSted citation Carels, E. (2013), Short notice, Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication 5: 1+2, pp. 31 38, doi: 1386/ejpc.1-31_1 contributor details Edwin Carels is a lecturer and researcher in the arts at the KASK/HoGent (University College Ghent Faculty of Fine Arts). As a writer Carels publishes essays on media-archeology, visual arts, film and animation. Since more than a decade he works as a film programmer and curator for the International Film Festival of Rotterdam. He is also affiliated with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, where he has curated several large exhibitions. Most recently the show El Hotel Eléctrico (2014) was the final instalment of his Ph.D. project Animation beyond animation a media-archaeological approach to the use of animation in contemporary art. Contact: KASK/HoGent, University College Ghent Faculty of Fine Arts, Papegaaistraat 53, 9000 Gent, Belgium. E-mail: Edwin.Carels@telenet.be Edwin Carels has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd. 1 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 3 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 5 5 38 EJPC_1&2_Carels_31-3indd 38 1/6/15 9:06:30 PM