‘Human Perception and Digital Information Technologies: Animation, the Body, and Affect’

Human Perception and Digital Information Technologies: Animation, the Body, and Affect.

Editor: Tomoko Tamari
Bristol: Bristol University Press
ISBN 9781529226188 

Abstract

The book seeks to examine the ways that digital information technologies influence human perception and experience. Contemporary computational media increasingly govern our experience through their capacity for externalizing our knowledge and memories, mining data from our behaviour to influence our decision-making, and also by creating affective encounters such as emotionally rewarding sensory pleasure. Computational platforms and software have become essential to contemporary everyday life and are now almost impossible to eliminate.

In this light, it can be argued that the computational media embedded environment is becoming inseparable from embodied human experience. Thus, it can be said that human perception is becoming a product of human-machine symbiosis in a new type of media ecology. In this context, the body becomes a crucial techno-bio entity, which mediates between human perception and machine interaction. Here, affect has become a useful analytical notion with which to explore the dynamism between biological bodily responses and conscious-nonconscious neurodynamic processes. This book, then, aims to avoid overemphasizing or underestimating both neuroreductionism and biological determinism to better understand affective perception of digital moving images.

The book will be useful for postgraduate students and researchers who are working on: media and communication theory, film and animation studies, visual culture, science, and technology studies, affect theory, the body and digital humanities.

Contents

Introduction: Human Perception and Digital Information Technologies – Tomoko Tamari

Abstract

The collection seeks to better understand the ways that digital information technologies form and influence human perception and experience. Contemporary computational media increasingly govern our experience through their capacity for externalising our knowledge and memories (Stiegler), mining data from our behaviour to influence our decision-making, creating emotional rewarding and sensory pleasure. Their networks continue to expand as their capacities become faster, more efficient, more accurate, and more sensory. In this light, it can be argued that the computational media embedded environment is becoming inseparable from embodied human experience. This leads to the assumption that human perception is becoming a product of human-machine symbiosis in a new type of media ecology. This is a particularly pressing issue that confronts us, given our growing dependence on computational platforms and software which have become essential to contemporary everyday life and are now practically almost impossible to eliminate. The collection thus seeks to explore the transformations in human perception in the era of pervasive computational media. The aim is to counter technological determinism by taking on board more discursive humanities’ perspectives. The collection therefore draws on the broader scope of pieces written by scholars who have not only been working in the fields of digital media, but also on affect and body studies. Although all the pieces discuss the wider implication of contemporary computational media, they consistently focus on animation (moving images) as the key concept and the body as a field to analyse the role of affect in human perception.

Part 1. Animation and Consciousness

1. Pastures New: Atmospheres, Mud, and Moods – Esther Leslie

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

3. Moving Images and Human Perception: Affect in Hand-Drawn Animation and Computer-Generated Imagery – Tomoko Tamari

Abstract
Focusing on a Japanese animation cinema which has been widely acclaimed as an art form, in ‘Moving Image and Human Perception: Affect in Hand-Drawing Animation and Computer-Generated Imagery,’ Tomoko Tamari discusses the human perception of animation by scrutinizing ‘the affective effect’ in the dynamic relations moving images and human conscious-nonconsciousness. The paper explores the differences between digital aesthetics created by computer animation and analogue aesthetics in hand-drawing animation. While computer generated imagery (CGI) refers to the process that involves mathematical calculations within computers to create verisimilar naturalistic images, the traditional hand-drawing animation method involves symbolic expressive forms created by the animator’s spatiotemporal sensitivities. Drawing on Hayles’s discussion of the ‘cognitive nonconscious’, Simondon’s notion of ‘technical mentality’ and biosemiotics, the paper argues that there might be an inevitable incompatibility in the image formation process between human perception and algorithmic based CGI. To explore this assumption, the paper focuses on the question of ‘selectivity’ and ‘abstraction’ in both the neuronal and the technical, and emphasizes the significance of 'noise' (incompleteness and ambiguity) and ‘time’ (speed, duration, and delay) for human perception by exploring the nature of cognitive systems. The paper further considers the expansion of digital computer technology and its integration within human life by analyzing the ‘recursive dynamism’ of human perception and CGI. Tamari argues that embodied digital experiences could recursively become part of our environment and influence conscious-nonconscious cognition; in effect, become a significant part of the constitution of human perception in our digital computational society.

4. New Punctums, Proto-Perceptions, and Animated Entanglements – Tony D. Sampson

Part 2. Affective Experience and Expression

5. On Pixar’s Marvellous Astonishment: When Synthetic Bodies Meet Photorealistic Worlds – Eric S. Jenkins

6. Player and Avatar in Motion: Affective Encounters – Daniela Bruns

Part 3. Data Visualization: Space and Time

7. Animation, Data, and the Plasticity of the Real: From the Military Survey of Scotland to Synthetic Training Environments – Pasi Väliaho

8. Chronoclasm: Real-Time Data Animation – Sean Cubitt

Part 4. Image Formation and Embodiment

9. Deepfake Face-Swap Animations and Affect – Mette-Marie Zacher Sørensen

10. Deepfake Reality, Societies for Technical Feeling, and the Phenomenotechnics of Animation – Mark B.N. Hansen