Notes from the Underground Part Five — Escaping Muybridge's Curse (Can We?)

(about two kinds of aided perception…)

In the previous article "Knowing Enough About Seeing To Let 'The Other' Draw Accordingly," [1] I tried to show that if we want to look at our looking, we are faced with difficulties, and are likely to come to the realization that our seeing is very ambiguous, elusive, even utterly unknown and mysterious.

It seems that, when trying to pay attention to attention itself, we fall almost inevitably in some sort of circularity: trying to look at our looking is looking too, so that we are using the very tool we are trying to examine as the tool with which we do the examining itself!

We obviously need another way, an "oblique progression" as Merleau-Ponty called it.

If "catering to the appearing as it appears" is the goal, it is also the means!

Indeed, if, when faced with ambiguity and confusion, we accept those "as is" and no longer try to set order where we (think we) see chaos and disorder, but instead, accept those as they give themselves to us (to "me"), if we try as best we can to depict them "as is," we enter a different way of working, a different way of seeing. (Here, as I have shown before, we need to reverse our habitual way of proceeding, from "look, understand, do" to "look, do, in order to maybe understand.")

To trust that one's "not knowing" has more to offer than the ready-made "solutions" provided by others is an important step in becoming an artist, and a responsible human being.

An old friend, a remarkable philosopher by the name of José Huertas-Jourda, used to tell his students "trust your darkness." This is very appropriate to what I am talking about. (José has a lot to do with some of the ideas I am presenting here. He is the one who introduced me to Husserl 30-odd years ago, and his own thinking has uncovered many of the aspects of our "living present" that I am presenting in these articles.)

This inherent ambiguity we all can see as being the core, or at the core, of our own perception and it is possibly our greatest ally in our search for meaning, but it has often prompted many to search for (external) help, often accepting shortcuts and approximations, "simplifications" that bring with them their own sets of problems, and that most certainly do not provide any genuine answers. ("If you did not learn it by yourself, it is merely a borrowed plumage" goes an old Zen saying.)

In my previous article, I hinted at the possibility that we may have been (willingly) misled by Eadweard Muybridge's work and by the approach to animation that was (still is) derived from it.

[2]

[2]

We have been under the spell of those images, as they gave us the impression of explaining motion in a way that can easily be applied to creating animation. However, this "understanding" is far from being reliable, it is not even based on the way we ("I") see and experience motion, it is a fabrication needing the "out-of-human-time" images provided by a camera.

It is a "borrowed plumage."

This I will call "aided perception #1."

Muybridge's images are not very relevant to the way we see motion; they mislead us into assuming we understand how motion is made visible, how it works, but this is not motion as we perceive it when we are immersed in "ordinary" experience, it is motion as it is captured when time is frozen and the mechanical "viewer" is totally passive (an experience fairly unusual to us to say the least, and hardly available without the aid of a camera).

(That type of "understanding" of motion posits it as an isolated "tic-tac-toe," while we experience it much more in terms of a "swoosh" totally immersed in an infinite context, both in terms of space and time.)

Above all, this process singles out a subject and keeps it artificially isolated from its context. (Remember what I talked about in the previous article when I mentioned that in perception, the differentiation between figure and ground is far more ambiguous than we often realize, and each often fades into the other, refusing to maintain a supposedly distinct identity.)

I'll say it again in plain language: the eye does not work like a camera, and we do not all see the same thing!

What and how we (really) see has very little to do with "photo-realism," and yet, very few of us are at all aware of that. ("The problem with realism is that it has very little to do with reality," said Giacometti.)

Annie Dillard found some fabulous material in a book called Space and Sight, by Marius Von Senden.

The book gives detailed accounts of how people who were blind from birth reacted to their newly acquired sight (through the removal of cataracts by surgery). These reactions showed unmistakably how much "seeing" is an acquired faculty, not an inherent one.

Dillard integrated those stories in an excellent book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, the account of a journey that I wish would be more common amongst aspiring artists, and to which art schools should definitely "submit" their students ("Know Thyself").

One of the major points she makes is that "seeing is very much a matter of verbalization," which is exactly what I have been talking about in my previous articles.

If we don't have a name for "it," a name by which to differentiate "it" from the context, we can't see "it." (This does not mean we don't see anything, far from that!)

In fact, even that context/ground from which we differentiate "it" via verbalization is itself constituted by our world view, a world view which is no less rooted in our distinct culture as is the "figure" itself.

Even "space" is an utterly meaningless concept (note: a "concept!") for people who have not yet acquired this culturally induced way of seeing.

Indeed, they have no notion of "near" and "far" in their newly acquired visual world. "Distance" too, is a meaningless concept! ("A patient had no idea of depth, confusing it with roundness.")

Nor do they have a notion of "size," itself being also a meaningless concept.

"Shape" is another meaningless concept: a patient cannot distinguish — visually — between a cube and a sphere, but will instantly identify them "correctly" as soon as he is allowed to feel them with his hands and tongue.

As for the "realism" of photos, a newly sighted girl who saw some for the first time said something like: "Why do they have all those dark patches all over them?"

Someone explained to her that those were not dark patches, that they were shadows. And the explanation went on to say that shadows were one of the ways by which we know that things have shape.

The girl answered: "But things do look flat, they look flat with dark patches!"

(I am certain that many a painter will immediately relate to this as experientially true.)

[3]

St-Hubert 6, 1977. Graphite on paper, 14" x 17". All original artwork © Jean Detheux. [3]

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is full of amazing examples like these, and Annie Dillard manages very well to bring those "freak" experiences into the context of our "normal" life.

What she manages to do is to show that the experiences of those people who discover sight well after birth are loaded with teachings that can (if we make the effort to learn) show us how dull our habitual vision is.

Settling for the model derived from Muybridge's work gives animators ideas with which they are able to render a certain kind of motion, ideas which progressively leave the realm of the experiential and enter the one of the "fabricated," increasing the gap between our lived experience, and our symbolic world (the world as we represent it to ourselves).

This is very much in tune with the progressive dehumanization of all things in our culture, and animation, being a significant part of that culture, bears a lot of responsibility for the decline.

Animation constructed according to Muybridge's model is a very crude approximation of "the real." It is as far from "Life" as reading a printed restaurant menu can be from actually eating food.

There's a Sufi story that goes something like this: "A drunk man goes home after a party and drops his keys on the pavement. He starts looking for them until a friend, walking by, stops and helps look for the keys. They search and search, aided by the light of a nearby street light. After a while, the friend stops and says: 'I can't find them, are you sure you lost them here?'

"'No,' answers the drunk man, 'I lost them over there where it is dark, but as I can't see anything there, I'd rather search here where there is light.'"

This is very similar to what has happened to our approach to "figure drawing" and animation.

Once we surrendered our own unaided vision to the "filtering effect" of the sciences of anatomy and physiology, we surrendered the reality of our own darkness to the light of false, or at least "borrowed," certainty.

The "Mighty Principles of Animation" [4] presented by Gene Deitch are a very potent example of this, reminding me of my early days in art school when, while Pollock and de Kooning were at the height of their art, the school still imposed on us unsuspecting beginners the notion that Art had to do with figure drawing based on 19th Century norms.

In Gene Deitch's "defense," I will stress the fact that what he called "The 12 Principles of Character Animation, as developed at the Disney studio" was modified for the article title into "Mighty Principles of Animation."

That is quite a qualitative leap!!!

As I mentioned in the previous article, many cultures other than our own, and even our own in years gone by, did not — do not — rely on an a priori knowledge of the inner structure of the human body when they deal with "figurative imagery," and yet, they have provided us (still do) with images that deeply affect us today, so potent is their presence, their reality status, their "truth."

But this is rooted in the "magical" (at least in the "poetic"), not in the "scientific."

Given that we tend to credit animation with the status of "Art," we have to understand that "ordinary science" has very little to do with Art if by "Art" we understand an activity that deals with the whole of human experience, including (especially) all our subjectivity.

To draw/animate a walking figure demands a lot more than merely relying on the mechanics of the figure "out there." It demands that we connect with how we ("I") see and experience "it," bereft of assumptions, in connection with how that walking "figure" appears to us ("I") as if for the first time.

That would be Art.

"More than anything else, cinema consists of the eye for the magic — that which perceives and reveals the marvelous in whatsoever it looks upon." — Maya Deren

And:

"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." — Albert Einstein

View Paintbox [5] by Jean Detheux.

Who would today dare challenge the deconstruction of the walking of a figure offered us by the Muybridge plates, their way of breaking down the flow into a series of "logical" steps, frozen moments in time, building blocks with which, from which, we can safely "recreate" the societally approved impression of a walking/moving figure?

This convention reinforces our societal models, it conforms to what we are expected to believe our reality is made of and looks like.

However, this dissecting of motion has nothing to do with our lived experience, it is an act of faith ("ontologizing" as phenomenology would call it) based on a world that is taken for granted, an act of faith, which is challenged at all times by the evidence of our own senses!

But — and this is at the very core of all my articles in this present series — we are "hooked on mediated experience" and can hardly connect with the evidence of our own senses.

What we (can) see does not agree with what we expect to see, with what we believe in, and the belief and the expectations almost always win out ("almost always" because "the real" has a way of not behaving totally according to our expectation; there always are cracks in our protective shell).

The problem with this "faith" in an objective world is very serious but seldom perceived as such: we are now culturally conditioned into believing in an "abstraction," constantly glossing over and dismissing our more ambiguous "lived experience," so much so that it takes often arduous training and/or severe psychological shock to find ways by which we can reconnect with our own vision, ways by which we can come (back) to our own senses.

There is a huge difference between the naive construction based on the idea of the appearance of reality (as in animation based on Muybridge's plates), and the direct apprehension of "the appearing as it appears."

In order to proceed, this naive construction takes the world for granted, it relies on an assumption that the world is always already there in a known and reliable form, a form that can be identically perceived by any and all. By the same token, this undermines — even denies — the validity of the subject's experience (accusing it of being "merely subjective!").

This naive perception posits the "idea" (culturally constituted) of what one is looking at in such a way as to have it always "confirmed" (and of course, anticipated, intended). This makes one's experience of "reality" very different from being a genuine encounter with the mysterious, a discovery, an uncovering, it relegates it to being a mere confirmation of what was naively intended in the first place, and as "this intended reality" is most often a social convention, it tricks us into believing in it even more because of the societal approval it tends to elicit. (You're a good subject when, along with the group you wish to belong to, you agree to and confirm the beauty of the emperor's clothes.)

In a real sense, our belief in this type of "objective reality" makes us members of a cult, or at best, members of a religion that posits its own brand of "objectivity" as its central object.

Of course, the more we, by way of conformism, surrender to this illusion, becoming more and more alienated from the (our) inherent mystery, the more we experience a lack, a feeling that something vital is missing. We sense a widening gap between our symbolic representation of "the real" and our lived experience of "it."

That experience of a lack often leads us to compensate for what we sense is missing, a compensation that often leads us to exaggerate secondary aspects of our work. (Animation is presently pitifully stuck on having to be funny and/or cynical, even nihilistic!) This also often drives many to substance abuse and other explorations that are far from being life-sustaining. ("Life is a bitch, and then you die!") And yet, that very experience of lack could itself be an entrance to serious work if respected/accepted instead of being merely reacted against.

Life driven by a need to compensate is hardly a fulfilling life; it borders on being a permanent tantrum!

Culturally, it is nearly impossible to make a 180° turn and start looking for the mysterious where it truly is, "under our nose" (or better yet, an inch or two behind it!).

Walter Benjamin talks about the "impenetrable as daily," and the "daily as impenetrable." (Thanks to Pierre Hébert [6] and his remarkable book L'ange et l'automate, a book that MUST be translated into English, and soon.)

What we normally call "objective reality" is in fact an almost complete invention, a fabricated illusion, which maintains its status of "reality" by way of something that approaches mass hysteria. (In very much the same way the emperor has no clothes, our "reality" has no substance.)

So, through aided perception #1, our grasp of Muybridge's work allows us to believe we now know how to dissect motion, and how to use that knowledge to create the illusion of motion in our work, a motion (and the world in which it takes place) that reinforces the societal delusion.

What most animators (and viewers) have now come to accept/expect as "real" (or at least as being "credible") is leading us all further and further away from our humanity, just as the acceptance of the conventions of the language of "live cinema" (which most often naively constitutes habitual animation's underlying structure) has greatly curtailed the potential of animation as a different language in its own right, very much in need of its own "principles" and vistas to explore, vistas no other art form could enter (at least not in the same way animation could).

Just as many artists accepted the "scientific world view" (many still do) as a basis for their work (basically, this forms the underlying structure of most people's world view — solid objects moving about in empty space- conditioning/containing their activities), animators took the same approach in their search for ways to suggest/imply motion within a context that was taken for granted.

When we draw/paint from the visible, we often overlook the importance of the distance from which we are looking at "something," too often calling on our memory and expectations to add details we cannot see because of that distance, or to negate the "distortions" caused by that distance as well. (Edward T. Hall has a great book, The Hidden Dimension, that talks very well about this and other aspects of our being in the world. Highly recommended!) This negation of the distance/space dimension is very similar to the negation of time of which we are guilty when we surrender to the Muybridge model: we posit each frozen moment as equal to every other frozen moment, while in experience, in our living present, "now you see it, now you don't!"

It is as if we lived in a world of floating icebergs and pretended that all of the icebergs were equally visible, be it above or below the water surface.

"Mechanistically speaking," Muybridge's model may be valuable, but perceptually, humanely, artistically, it is extremely limited and limiting, even utterly false ("tic-tac-toe ain't swoosh!").

From a ("my") phenomenological viewpoint, there is more "truth" in a cartoon character "spinning its wheels" on the spot as it is about to take off, than in all the highly technical renderings of a "realistic" running character made with the most up-to-date 3D software and any and all approaches based on this model!

The animation industry (and many independent authors) are aiming at more and more "photo-realism," ruling out ambiguity and confusion, hunting them down with a vengeance, and in doing so, they are progressively editing out of animation, especially out of its visible aspect, all that makes us human, all that makes our experience so unique.

It is obvious to me that as long as we will place the emphasis on the mechanical figure (anatomy, morphology, the figure totally isolated from its context, containing it all in the concept of a world made of solid objects moving about in empty space) and animation as a rendering of the motion of a 3D mechanical figure in a 3D "container," we will be stuck in the same old box, a box of our own making. (Mind you, this equally applies to 2D animation, it really is rooted in and conditioned by the world view of the animator.)

It really does not matter how much more powerful our tools will become. Whether we can animate individual strands of hair, or even, going to the absurd limit of this approach, whether we can animate from individual molecules or even from the atoms up, we are looking at the "problem" the wrong way.

One cannot create a (convincing) whole starting from the parts. One may end up with some smartly put-together puppet, but a puppet deprived of soul, always.

There's got to be more to it than that!

Bingo. [7] Courtesy of and © Alias|Wavefront.

I felt some trepidation when I first saw Bingo. Here was 3D software at its (then) best, which managed to use its power to serve the subjective experience, switching "levels of the credible" as the story dictated, no longer merely operating in the realm of the "habitual."

Bingo. [8] Courtesy of and © Alias|Wavefront.

I find that what has followed has been very disappointing for me; we seem to have gone the way of more "photo-realistic" detailing instead of the way of greater subjective leaps.

The main difference, as I "see" it, between one approach, "photo-realism," (being a response to societal models, at once derived from and enforcing them), and the other, "phenomenological, poetic, magical," (being an attempt at seeing the appearing as it appears, bereft of societal models, or at least, seeing those models as models), is that the former is a tool of status quo, while the latter is one of renewal and discovery.

Aided perception has at least two aspects, one (the most common) reinforces preconceptions, asking "me" to conform, giving me praise if "I" do, singling "me "out as a good conformist.

This, I earlier called "aided perception #1."

The other form of aided perception literally rips open the societal box and makes room for "my" contribution in such a way as to establish my subjectivity as an (the) essential factor.

This I will call "aided perception #2."

One of the best examples of "aided perception #2" I have seen lately is the Qatsi Trilogy, an exceptional example of aided-perception-based work that opens vistas, helping us see as if for the first time (if we take the journey) and renew our connection with the magic that our "ordinary reality" truly is.

I had not seen Koyaanisqatsi since the early Eighties, and it really hit me between the eyes this time, or as Godfrey Reggio would say, "Right in the solar plexus!"

The idea of leaving space between the music and the images so that the viewer can get "in there" is brilliant, it shows how forcing the music and the images to be "on" all of the time is really a form of propaganda, bordering on fascism!

It's one more example of how easily we can deny the otherness of the other, and how we can deny the mystery that we are to ourselves.

This reminds me of the two poles between which we seem to always swing, "power" and "compassion."

"Power" has been dominating animation for a very long time; one hopes compassion is now ready to start appearing more often.

How futile (or even hostile) so much of animation now comes across to me after seeing Koyaanisqatsi again. What a tremendous waste of resources and creative energy the making of habitual animation appears to be!

So little current animation contributes to this "enlightening" category, so many of the works shown in animation festivals and on AWN (for example) are trapped in some sickly obligation to be "funny" or "smart" or "cynical," and their reason for being seems to be to cater to the lowest common denominator, thus reinforcing its grip on our daily life. ("Life is a bitch and then you die.")

Surely, there's got to be more to animation and to life than that?

There have got to be many amongst us who can sense that there is potentially much more to animation than telling (funny) stories, and that, indeed, animation can be a major contributor to one of (if not the) most important aspects of life, the search for meaning.

In my next and last article, I hope to be able to show examples of animation that are working away from the "aided perception #1" model, and which contribute to the opening of the doors that "aided perception #2" may make possible.

Jean Detheux [9] is an artist who, after several decades of dedicated work with natural media, had to switch to digital art due to sudden severe allergies to paint fumes. He is now working on ways to create digital 2D animations that are a continuation of his natural media work. He has been teaching art in Canada and the U.S., and has works in many public and private galleries.