Animation and the Nature of Perception
There are limits to what we can see. That’s obvious when you consider how much of the light spectrum is invisible to us, or how a speeding car whizzes past only as a blur, or how perceptual illusions make you see things you know aren’t there.
Here’s one more example: all the movies and videos we see are not free-flowing moving images, even though they appear so. They’re long collections of static images, presented quick enough to create the illusion of continuity.
When we use our devices to record reality, they take snapshots. Your camera captures frames, your microphone takes samples. Everything reduced to moments in time, image after image with a slice of accompanying sound.
To what extent do our perceptual systems resemble these devices? Are they just digital versions of our biological originals? Do we sample reality as they do, but so quickly that we never notice it? Or, as limited as our vision might be, is it continuous and unbroken?
The First Spinning Discs
Long before we had flat screens and smartphones, we had the phenakistiscope. Invented in 1832 almost simultaneously by the Belgian Joseph Plateau, and the Austrian Simon Stampfer.
These rotating discs had images placed around them, each one aligned with a small aperture. To…
