Book review: Motion and Representation: The Language of Human Movement

In Motion and Representation, Nicolás Salazar Sutil investigates techniques of recording and capturing human movement and the movement ‘languages’ that emerge at the confluence of mathematics, computer engineering, kinematics, and the arts. This book approaches language and movement in a broader context by analyzing a calculus of bodily motion, a geometry of dance, movement notations, postalphabets (i.e. animations in text messaging), motion captures, data flows, and computation of networking. In other words, focusing on the synthesis of machines and humans, Salazar Sutil explores a history of mathematical/computational language that captures, records, and represents movements taking place inside and outside of human bodies. While he shows a history of technological mediation of/in motion, this book reflects and expands the relationship between technologies and a knowledge of motion.

Motion and Representation is organized into 4 parts and 12 chapters. Salazar Sutil opens the language of movements with a consideration of the representation of kinetic space and temporality. In the first part, he explores ways in which a fleeting movement is captured in a still image, such as graphic drawing, chronophotography and computography, and addresses how body and space are mutually constructed and how temporal experiences are manipulated in processes of capturing movements. In the second part, Salazar Sutil introduces a modern model of mathematical space that represents continuous changes of objects and bodies. His understanding of movement does not consider thought and body in separate domains. Rather, he conceptualizes a language of movement as an integrated system arising from an internalized mental activity. The second half of the book investigates the process of inscribing the pathway of a specific moving object and ways in which the integrated movement of both bodily and mental motions is objectified in an inscriptive medium. Here, Salazar Sutil considers three forms of inscriptional technologies: a written record (notation), a visual record (animation), and a computational record (motion capture). In his last chapter, these three inscriptional technologies are combined in mixed-media forms of inscription, called ‘e-motion’. This inscription does not necessarily indicate human movements but rather all movements formed in a postdigital world, including movements between individual computers and the server, and all data flows in the interface. In 12 chapters, the representation of movement is transformed from mathematical and formal graphic in a still image to digital domains in which representation itself has become animated by new technologies, enabling representation in motion, rather than representation of motion.

Despite lacking thorough cultural interpretations of how these transformations have altered ways in which we understand movement, the major potential of this book is in its contributions to media theory. Even though every chapter concludes with the cultural implication of the new technological inscription, the wide-ranging analysis of each technology resonates with materialist approaches to media studies. First, Motion and Representation expands Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of inscriptional technology. In the legacy of technological determinism, Kittler (1999) theorizes the history of inscriptional technology, arguing that the technological capacity of storage and inscription manipulates the human senses of seeing and hearing. Salazar Sutil follows Kittler with a new topic – movement – by investigating the material conditions of inscribing movement and analyzing how the technological transformation affects our understanding of movement.

In a larger context, however, Salazar Sutil’s conceptualization of movement and language partially avoids Kittler’s technological determinism slant. According to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), an assemblage comes from between the inside and the outside, and all things are individuated by their relationality with others. Salazar Sutil’s analysis of movement moves toward an assemblage of/in motion between subject and object rather than two distinct entities of human and machine. To give an example, he spends the second part of this book explaining how the representation of movements integrates both bodily and mental movement and argues that technological media produce not only material records of movements but also cultural expressions of our kinetic minds.

In the last chapter, Salazar Sutil’s analysis touches on movements in the contemporary digital era, what he calls ‘e-motion’ (p. 190). With e-motion, ‘the way movement is conceived on the Internet’, movement is not embedded in a physical human body, but is inherently located in electronic space within global networks where abstraction and concretion are simultaneously experienced (p. 211). Internet Protocol (IP) exemplifies the total movement of abstraction and concretion in that IP enables everything to move online, including both physical movements of signal processing and linguistic operations on screen (p. 217). Thus, even though Salazar Sutil borrows Kittler’s insight on inscriptional media, Motion and Representation goes beyond Kittler’s materiality of representation by investigating Paul Virilio’s (1997) ‘trajective agency’, which is being of neither pure human nor machine through continuous motion from here to there, from subject to object, and from the outer to the inner.

Throughout, Salazar Sutil reconceptualizes motion and the language of representation. Despite the book’s title, his analysis is not limited to either the symbolic sense of language or movements created by human beings. Instead, all inscriptional modes (numbering/counting, diagrammatizing, drawing, notating/coding, and processing) become language that makes infinite motion finite. In addition, the motion captured by/in language does not necessarily belong to the anatomical and biological sense of the body itself. Based on his broad conceptualization of language and body, motion is always in between space and time, an outer form and an inner effort, and the physical performance and its record/notation; it is conceptualized as ‘a coincidence of subject and object’ (p. 236). The knowledge of coincidence is always moving from here to there, from the inside to the outside, from the physical to the virtual, and from the subject to the object. Hence, Salazar Sutil argues, the transformation from the knowledge of movement to the knowledge in motion. In this way, Motion and Representation participates in a media theory of animation, investigating what it means to be in motion.

While some readers might question the relevance of this book to animation studies, Salazar Sutil’s rich and wide-ranging analysis of representing movement allows us to reconsider what animation is. If aesthetic expression in animation has been one pole of investigation, the technical understanding of animation has been another. For example, Thomas Lamarre’s The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (2009) and Tom Gunning’s ‘Animating the instant: The secret symmetry between animation and photography’ (2014) are notable for how they reframe animation based on its technical functions. This technical understanding of animation focuses on the sense of wonder directed at the movement image, which is displaying and/or producing motion. Here, Salazar Sutil’s extended understanding of movements and representations of them points to future directions of what animation can be. If animation can be understood as a technical ordering of movements, can all examples in this book be animation? If animation cannot be detached from the concept of movement and representation, how do all historical examples in this book reframe the category of animation? At the end of the book, Salazar Sutil suggests ‘kinetopoiesis’, which entails new structures of thought through movement enabled by the creating of new dance, new mathematics, new animation, and new technology to understand, capture, and create motion (p. 235). This intriguing idea questions and challenges common assumptions about what animation is and what animation can be. As Suzanne Buchan (2013) has argued, animation is pervasive. Motion and Representation expands the pervasive impact of animation and repositions animation in representation of/in motions.