Over the last three weeks each of the lecturers have presented us a different definition of movement. This has been really helpful, as the broadness of ‘movement’ makes it easy to latch on to the first definition you come to. I spend the three weeks exploring the concept of movement and motion to find a direction that I thought was interesting and that had enough scope to be turned into a concept for studio.
To me, one of the core aspects and abilities of Creative Technologies is to translate a complex concept into something more accessible. The technology allows the project to exist and function, either in a physical or digital space where an audience can experience it.
The art side of Creative Tech informs the concept, and the conscious and subconscious effect the piece has. It develops the message, and can elicit emotion and thoughtfulness.
These two hemispheres do no work apart, but instead feed to and from each other In a constant feedback look. As a concept informs the specifics, so too do the technicalities affect the aesthetic. This dichotomy is at the heart of the creative technology discipline, and a practitioner must have ‘a foot in each’. Technology and art are hugely broad terms, and each project will enlist one or more previously discrete practices into each category. The outcome of this hybrid practice is greater than the sum of its parts, and not only the work but the workflow itself is unique and distinctive.
This is the aspect of creative Technologies that I am most passionate about – creating moving and thoughtful outcomes that have a valid message or question, and communicating that in a way enabled by technology. The thoughtful and critically creative application of technology can create incredible, impossible experiences for audiences. A conceptual and ideological synaesthesia, a potent translation between once disparate pillars of human experience.
One of my main influences from the lectures was “Meeting the Universe Halfway” [2], a book by Karen Bard. The book is about Agential realism, that existence is secondary to an intra-action, and those agents exist because of the action, not the other way around. This seems counterintuitive and farfetched, but if you take a second to ponder it you begin to look at the world differently.
I like to think there is a difference between ‘knowing’ and ‘believing’ – knowing being conscious thought and memory, and believing being the domain of the subconscious.
By focusing it seems like we can manually interface with our subconscious. You can convince yourself that no object exists without intra-action and that agential realism is the true mechanic of our universe, in a real and tangible sense. You can bridge the gap between knowing and believing, and for a moment your world changes because you’ve changed the way you perceive it. In that moment, things have deeply different instinctive (subconscious /believed) feeling, because you are able to believe a theory like agential realism, instead of just knowing and accepting it, and it becomes the truth that your brain runs on, the unconscious absolutes of your reality.
But the things experienced and intra-acted with exist differently now because they are being perceived and intra-acted with differently. The act of engaging with an agent creates and defines that agent; that is the core idea of agential realism, demonstrated by thinking about agential realism. I love the idea of being able to have influence over your own mind, to have the feeling of experiencing reality through another lens, one that you didn’t know could be changed.
Because of this, I was drawn to research how humans experience movement.
First, how do humans perceive or detect movement?
Movement can’t exist as an instant. It needs a frame of reference and context.
To identify a movement, we need to know something’s state in the past. With that we can tell how fast and in what direction something is moving. This isn’t just physical, mechanical movements. This could be a social movement, where ideas or opinions spread and move through people and communities, however what interests me most is the physical movement because of its effect on humans. An object moving towards you will trigger a subconscious reaction and sensation.
This has a lot to do with how humans experience time. Unlike computers, time as a human experience is not definite, as we have no internal clock running to second or millisecond accuracy.
As far as movement, an important part is what we experience as “now” – the present. According to many sources [1] our experience of now is not a linear “knife edge” but instead “has a complex texture”. This is known as the specious present – a short duration of time (less than a second) that we experience as ‘now’. One key point is that there is always a ‘center’ to the experience of the present [1], with the trailing events moving from ‘now’ to ‘now but not central now’ to ‘past’.
During my interrogation of what movement was, I had an idea for a project. The idea at first was from Physical computing as a test application for some stepper motors I had bought. I thought it would be interesting to enter a location on earth into a processing sketch and have a ‘pointer’ driver by two stepper motors point at that location. Because we live on a sphere, the location would generally be downwards. As I though more about this idea, I began to see the merits of its concept. We know that country like – for example - Germany exists, but in a somewhat abstract sense. Maybe you think of it on a map, or even as “up” - as it would be in relation to us on a model globe. What we don’t think of is literally ‘where’ a country would be.
If someone asked you where the Sky Tower or Rangitoto was you would be able to point at them. They are of a scale that we can understand. This goes back to my ‘knowing’ vs ‘believing’ idea – we know we live on a sphere (oval), but we don’t believe it. It isn’t how we relate to the world, because it’s too large.
This little pointing gadget would be a perfect example of that core Creative Technology tenet of translation or transposition. Our ability to understand the gesture of a point, and apply that to the knowledge that this technology has calculated its point to show exactly where a given location is to us can give a momentary collapse of knowing into believing. Even when thinking through the experience of interacting with this piece, you are suddenly aware of the planet, the sphere hurtling through space that we live on.
You feel yourself making the connection between the pointer aiming itself at a seemingly arbitrary point on the floor, the significance of that motion, and then the implications of where it is pointing. The planet is at a scale too large for us to believe, we can’t hold that in our subconscious. For a second the Earth shrinks to the size of a ball in front of you, and it feels tangible. This fades and as the instinctive and abstract reconcile, your experience of life and knowledge of where it takes place mesh.
This is where I found my starting point for the studio project, and what aspect of movement I wanted to focus on – the human sensation of movement and how that can be triggered to communicate an idea. Because these reactions are so deeply embedded in our subconscious, they have a large and lasting effect on us – more than a static piece of the same caliber could. Movement can tap into the most primal of human instincts.
The feeling of really ‘being on a planet’ that the pointer idea had made me feel stuck with me. I wanted to interrogate further down this path of inquiry, and see how that could link to movement. The obvious answer is our orbit around the sun. At 500 meters per second, we are all in motion, but the frame of reference and scale mean we don’t experience it. Our senses work on a smaller scale, and depend on the gravity of earth as a stationary constant.
Maybe a pointer that followed the Sun or other celestial bodies could give people the sensation of orbiting by providing an ‘artificial reference point’ for the movement.
[1] The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness from:
Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenomenology and Cognitive Science Edited by Jean, Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachoud abd Jean-Michel Roy Stanford University Press, Stanford Chapter 9, pp.266-329
[2] Meeting the Universe Halfway:
Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning
Author(s): Karen Barad, Published: 2007
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