Achronologies,Materiality and Mechanics of Time in Optical Moving Image Systems

Introduction

Time is an integral component of the moving image across its diverse modes of creation and experience, from animation, film and video to expanded cinema and kinetic image sculpture. But as viewers cognitively and physically engage in the experience, they are not always aware that they are entering into a complex relationship with time. It takes a certain amount of time for the moving image to unfurl and be experienced; the moving image itself is a kind of constructed time generated through a technological device and the timing of the sequential display of the images is crucial to the viewer’s perception of the movement. A moving image work is also developed and experienced in a particular time period, that is, a present moment carrying entangled echoes of the past, while simultaneously reaching toward the future. These are examples of the many intricacies and cross-connections of time, simultaneously engaging with human experience and technology.

In this article, I rethink the relationship between time, animation and media history through an analysis of two of my cross-disciplinary moving image works. Hollow Lens (2019) and Ghost in the Machine (2019), abbreviated from here onwards to Ghost, invite us to speculate on possibilities for experiencing time in different ways. These works question whether revealing the mechanism generating the time of the animated image can bring renewed criticality to contemporary experiences of time and how it is technologically constructed and mediated. Through this I argue that, counterintuitive to the effect of exposing the device, these artworks continue to hold an unfathomable element and cast a perceptual spell on the viewer.

Time’s integral role in animation and media archaeology will provide the framework for the moving image system artworks. In parallel to the complex relationship between animation, reality and fiction, time is explored across multiple realms of reality, materiality and imagination. The ‘magical novelty and the foregrounding of techniques’ (Buchan, 2013: 4; Thompson, 1980: 109) of animation allow the medium to conjure a time unrelated to the Kronos of the real world. Yet animated time can never fully escape the real. Its reliance on the durational and perceptual experience of the viewer positions it within a chronology of real-time. Reflecting on these two different but simultaneously unfolding temporalities, this article explores time in two different ways. The first relates to the navigational structure of the article, moving backwards and forwards through specific devices of media archaeology at different historical junctures. The second relates to the time generated by the artworks and the durational experience of the viewer.

As Siegfried Zielinski (2013: 26) notes in his essay on expanded animation, the labyrinth of the past can present possibilities for discovering ‘new in the old’. Oscillating between the 16th and 19th centuries, the moving image devices explored in these different chronological timeframes serve to understand time in a new way. The medley of historical devices reveals the construction and experience of time of each era. The moving image artworks incorporate these interwoven media histories, speculating if this might facilitate a criticality towards time experienced in the present moment. This approach adheres to the concept of ‘pervasive animation’ proposed by Suzanne Buchan (2013: 9), in that it aims to increase awareness of the permeating impact of animation in visual culture. Investigating time as an integral part of my animation artworks is a way of revealing and contributing to this cultural impact. These artworks explore ways in which to make different forms of time visible. Revealing the mechanism of time (the device generating the time of the animation) serves to establish a new criticality towards temporal experiences of contemporary animated images. It also invites reflection on how animation processes might be applied to generate new awareness and understanding both within and beyond the field of visual culture.

Akin to Zielinski’s (2013: 26) prismatic approach to expanded animation, the interrogation of time in relation to Hollow Lens and Ghost spans a range of overlapping historical, mechanical, material, digital, optical, aesthetic, philosophical and perceptual ideas. In this article, a variety of theoretical standpoints are interwoven to develop an argument for an expanded context of device, image and viewer, and the importance of revealing the device’s mechanism. These include Wolfgang Ernst’s (2016) discussion of the micro-temporalities of technological devices, Zielinski’s (2013) discourse on optics and Barbara Stafford’s (2016) call for a more conscious attending when engaging with media devices. Exploring differences between mechanism and device, media archaeology and optical time, the article brings together theses from a range of disciplines such as Paul Virilio and Ernst’s discussions on technological speed and human perception, and 19th-century physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey’s endeavour to chrono-photographically capture lost time.

The artworks themselves also incorporate an expanded methodology. The animated images are derived from various sources of optical media such as webcam streaming and may therefore risk being perceived as overly prescribing to real rather than fictional worlds of animation. These artworks, however, transform the once real into an optical fiction of time. Noting Zielinski’s (2013: 26) description of the praxis of projection as the production of ‘illusions of the real’, my projected animations are not simply optical representations of the real world. Instead, these artworks re-present a different way of knowing time. The cut, spliced, extracted and streamed real-time image sources are transformed into an alternative time through the materiality of the device and the perception of the viewer.

In this way, the discussed artworks relate to Tom Gunning’s (2013: 55) defining aspect of animation – the ability of the moving image to transform. Gunning reminds us of the continuous change and transformation in moving image histories, recently foregrounded by the arrival of digital technologies. He acknowledges the difference between the captured reality of lens-based images and conjured images belonging to a world of fantasy. But instead of focusing on dichotomies of real and illusionary, Gunning highlights the role of movement and perceptual transformation within animation, whereby the viewer experiences a new form of image through the technological device (pp. 54–55). My optical systems can be framed in a similar context of transforming the image and perceptual awareness of the viewer. The technical devices of these image systems transmute the real to the unreal, aligning with Gunning’s (2013: 55) ‘fantasy of metamorphosis’ which is ‘unconfined by . . . forms of actuality’. In this way, these artworks are explored as a re-animation of time.

Within animation and media archaeological contexts, much attention is placed on the image and viewer. This article widens this focus to explore the moving image as a form of time in an expanded realm of image systems, which includes the device as well as image and viewer. The devices are a significant part of my artworks exploring time and the projected animated image. Hollow Lens and Ghost present a form of optically generated time, one of movement and light, which I term ‘time-light’.

The concept of time-light emerged during my investigation into opto-mechanical histories of projected moving image devices and the practical development of the works. By gleaning and embedding specific elements of these histories into Hollow Lens and Ghost, a constellation of technical, scientific and visual culture knowledge within the apparatus became apparent. The elasticity of time explored in these works is therefore located in the technological and optical histories informing their design, as well as the real-time experience of the device.

In this article, the concept of time-light is framed within the technological context of an animated image. Referencing Gunning’s premise of the ability of the animated image to transform, time-light is a key element in the process of transformation that occurs in Hollow Lens and Ghost. Time-light transports information from the image source onto or through the material components (lenses and mirrors), which change it into another form of image. This metamorphosis is both optical and perceptual and is dependent upon time. But time-light also possesses an unchanging quality. The same lens refracts the light of the animated image in the same way whether one is witnessing a projected moving image performance in the 16th century or in a gallery several hundred years later. The imaged world changes of course, as does our understanding of it, but the optical process occurs in the same way. It sits outside of time. Once the viewer’s cognition is engaged, however, this process changes from timeless to time-full. It moves from Aionic time to that of Kronos (Zielinski, 2013: 48). Time-light therefore remains a constant process within an ever-changing world of devices and images. While viewer perception in these animation systems is important, time-light and its optical process provide the devices with an independent presence, one which has potential to make explicit our techno-human relationship with time. Now that the framework for the artworks has been established, let us turn our attention to the works themselves.

The moving image works

Hollow Lens

Hollow Lens (Figure 1) emerged from an inquiry into durational time. As with the optical logistics of a telescope visually transporting the far away near and into our perceptual realm, this work optically condenses long durations of time to bring an otherwise imperceivable duration to our senses. A hybrid system incorporating a device, an image and a viewer, Hollow Lens reanimates historical media by combining contemporary real-time technologies with a 16th-century technology of water lenses to create its projected moving images.

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Figure 1.

Hollow Lens (2019). Glass, steel, aluminium, 3D printed carbon fibre nylon, laser cut acrylic, LED, PCB, raspberry pi PCB, LCD, water, stepper motor, pump, plastic tubing, dimensions variable. © Deirdre Feeney. Photo: Andrew Sikorski.

The device is comprised of two optical image systems interconnected through an electronically controlled pump mechanism. The system generates two small-scale projected images, approximately 20 cm wide by 12 cm high. The images are derived from LCD screens showing two real-time webcam feeds from different parts of the Atlantic Ocean (Figure 2). ¹ The LCD screens are translucent, allowing light from the LEDs to travel through the screens and project the real-time images through the objective lens system and onto the wall. This lens system includes two hollow water lenses (Figure 2) and, as the level of the water rises and falls in these lenses, the amount of refracted light transmitted through each lens changes and affects the optics of the projected images. For instance, the water rising in one lens slowly darkens its projected image, creating an optical effect of the ocean scene transitioning from day to night. The decreasing water level in the other lens has the converse effect – the appearance of night giving way to the dawning of a new day. The digitally controlled pump mechanism regulates the water levels, which in turn creates the optical illusion of the continuous cycle of day and night. The shorter duration of this cycle, normally unfolding over 24 hours, is optically compressed through the lens and thereby rendered visible. The device therefore materially generates a form of animated time, while the Atlantic Ocean scenes on the LCD screens continue to unfold in real time. In this regard, Hollow Lens serves as a mediating device. Its optics siphon an invisible duration from real time, making it visible in the form of the projected animated image.

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Figure 2.

Hollow Lens (detail) (2019). The system’s device featuring water lenses, additional objective lenses, streamed images on translucent LCD screens and LED light source. © Deirdre Feeney. Photo: Andrew Sikorski.

My material investigations into optically compressed time began with using lenses to create composite moving image projections. I considered these ‘real time’ composite images not just in terms of present space and time, but as a way of gathering images streamed across parallel spaces and time. To compensate for a life lived between two different continents, I created a realm somewhere between the two – one that is both physically present and virtually re-presenced through streaming technologies. Of course, since Hollow Lens was developed, live video streaming during the Covid pandemic has changed our relationship with space and time, and the post-pandemic viewer might have a different relationship with the real-time LCD images of Hollow Lens. But the streamed pixels on the screen was not the end objective for Hollow Lens. Instead, the translucent LCD functions as a threshold between two forms of time: the time of the distant location unfolding in its own surroundings and an optical time generated at the site of Hollow Lens. The latter is a time physically re-formed by the transfer of image-light through the device. The materiality of the image system enables this physical re-presencing for the viewer.

The conversion of an imaged event, such as the Atlantic Ocean scenes, from one time to another reveals an unfixity of time. Akin to Lev Manovich’s (2002: 36–45) concept of variability of the new media object, the digital components of Hollow Lens allow a transmutability of time and the animated image, whereby the duration of the real-time scenes on the LCDs is reformed through the electronically controlled water lenses. The digital components (the code controlling the rate of flow of water through the pump mechanism and the streamed images) of Hollow Lens have potential therefore to be transformed into ‘infinite versions’ of time (p. 36).

Hollow Lens sits within frameworks of expanded animation and media archaeology in different ways. The perceptual change of day turning into night in Hollow Lens aligns with Gunning’s (2013) key attribute of animation – metamorphosis. It is also reminiscent of the glass slide and analogue special effects used by magic lanternists from the early 19th century (Huhtamo, 2013: 267). In place of the hand-painted glass slide, the streamed image from the translucent LCD is projected through the objective water lens system. In his description of dissolving views, Erkki Huhtamo describes how two slides with almost identical scenes would create a continuously changing projected image, citing the example of how ‘the day was made to turn into night’ (p. 269). In a discussion of expanded animation, Zielinski (2013: 31, 34) details how early technologies used water or air to create hydraulic and pneumatic systems to animate the non-human ‘soul’. His example of the mechanical flautist presents a striking similarity to the hydraulic component of Hollow Lens. Zielienski details Apollonius’ flute-playing automaton, which functions by changing levels of water to establish the air pressure for making the flute sounds. The hydraulics of Hollow Lens optically produces its animated image rather than a pneumatically generated sound. However, these hydraulic interlinkages demonstrate how historical undercurrents of a wider conception of animation continue to affect contemporary experiences of the moving image, even if they occur across different sensory realms.

The ocean landscape in Hollow Lens was specifically chosen because it could perform as a substrate for observable change across durations of time. Holding different cycles of time, a landscape’s inescapable engagement with light reveals a 24-hour cycle of day changing into night and longer durations of seasonal change. It was also a water-based landscape that initiated reflection on how to optically compress long durations of time. Inspired by daily walks along a river’s edge, I noticed slow subtle changes in the landscape as each day, week, month and season passed: the rise and fall of the river’s water; a summer meadow flooding and freezing; the ice melting, revealing its coloured landscape and horizon once again. I reflected on how the slow changes in nature are unobservable from an ‘instant’ view – they incorporate the time of nature, a kind of light-time, but also a phenomenological time of experiencing the world. This also occurs when the tide washes in and paints the mirrored sky, only to sweep it back out again, as if the beach is soaking up the sky. But in this case the spatial mirroring has a much shorter duration, allowing the phenomena to be observed. The shorter duration renders it visible. Hollow Lens investigates possibilities for making visible the slower change of nature, in particular the 24-hour cycle of day turning into night. Like the optical logistics of a telescopic, this work explores how lenses can be used within an animation artwork to extract this invisible process of change, optically compressing it so it can be observed in the form of an animated image.

Amongst the many historical media underpinnings of Hollow Lens are the optical images of Renaissance natural magician Giovanni Battista Della Porta (1535–1615), who used lenses to project moving images during his theatrical performances (Borelli, 2014; Kodera, 2014). However, a major difference between these historical and contemporary systems lies in their perceptual realm. In Porta’s system of natural magic, the causes of how we see the image remain covert whereas, in contrast, the decloaked optical device of Hollow Lens explores whether sensory engagement and awareness can induce a criticality in the viewer. In contrast to Porta directing the attention of his audience away from his optical tools to evoke astonishment in his audience, Hollow Lens shifts the viewer’s attention towards the causal mechanism to critically engage the viewer with the optical process.

Ghost in the machine

Ghost (Figures 3–5) combines the 19th-century optical mechanics of Charles-Émile Reynaud (1844–1918) and ‘astronomical’ time into a moving image system that projects reconstructed movements of a ghost gleaned from an early 20th-century film, The Magical Press (Booth, 1907). ² This work emerged from reflecting on the constant motion of the earth’s orbit around the sun. On a sunny afternoon when the sun was halfway between autumn and winter, a circle of light moved across my studio wall. The quivering luminous shape, reflected from a water glass, moved slowly to the right, gradually vanishing. This moving image of light, created by the earth’s rotation around the sun was a visual reminder of the concept of time derived from earth’s orbit constantly in motion and how this continuous flux of light and shadow is transmuted into time as a form of structure and measurement, its units of minutes, hours and days forever passing us by.

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Figure 3.

Ghost in the Machine (2019). Glass, steel, aluminium, 3D printed carbon fibre nylon, LED, motor, gear box, PCB, acetate, dimensions variable. © Deirdre Feeney. Photo: Andrew Sikorski.

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Figure 4.

Ghost in the Machine (detail) (2019).The system’s device featuring image carousel, polygon mirror, objective lens and LED light source. © Deirdre Feeney. Photo: Andrew Sikorski.

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Figure 5.

Ghost in the Machine (detail) (2019). Still image frame of the projected ‘ghost’. © Deirdre Feeney. Photo: Andrew Sikorski.

Although Ghost specifically references Reynaud’s projecting praxinoscope device, the use of individual image frames in this artwork connects to other historical media devices such as the zoetrope and phenakistiscope. Since the mid-1800s these apparatuses were using individual image frames to generate the illusion of movement.

Ghost investigates possibilities for knowing time through the movement of an object around a source of light. In contrast to the Bergsonian flow of time in Hollow Lens, ³ where the everchanging optics are controlled by the rising and falling water levels, this work explores time constructed through the rotation of discrete image frames within an optical system, which generate the re-animated ghost. Ghost references the mid-to-late 19th-century quest for understanding motion and time. As Gunning (2013: 63) notes, this breakdown of movement into ‘instants of stillness’ was permeating multiple fields. Common technologies across visual culture, scientific measuring apparatus and analysis of perception were all endeavouring to establish and understand the modern concept of time.

Adapting Reynaud’s use of a mirrored polygon to create an optical shutter in his praxinoscope and Théâtre Optique devices, Ghost applies similar optical mechanics to generate the appearance of movement in the image. The ghost is materially generated through an optically polished aluminium polygon and image carousel holding 48 image frames, which rotate on a single shaft in between a series of condensing lenses, a second mirror and an objective lens. The rotational speed of the polygon and image carousel, which is electronically controlled by a geared motor, determines both the legibility and durational presence of the ghost (Figure 5). Light, emanating from a high-lumens LED, travels through the condensing lens system and image frames, reflects off the surfaces of the polygon and second mirror, and is then refracted through the objective lens to project the magnified animation onto the wall (Figure 5).

As with Hollow Lens, this system incorporates a device, image and viewer. Both works present an experience of the materiality of moving image making and, like Hollow Lens, Ghost reveals its mechanism. Although Reynaud’s original performances were staged behind a screen onto which the animation was projected, my experience of a Théâtre Optique performance featured the device placed in front of the screen. This repositioning of the device changed my relationship with the moving image because it allowed me to see how the image was being generated. I became aware of the significance of materiality in moving image making. Martin Heidegger (1962[1927]: 406) points out how a smoothly working machine renders itself invisible but, as soon as the machine malfunctions, it suddenly becomes visibly conspicuous, allowing us to experience it in a renewed way. The aesthetic malfunction of Hollow Lens and Ghost serves to restore the visibility of the device. By presenting the viewer with a sensory idiosyncrasy (the mechanistic architecture producing the moving image), these works speculate on whether the viewer might experience a more critical engagement with how we experience the time of contemporary animated images.

Influenced by industrial and scientific forms of measurement, a concept of time toward the end of the 19th century was linear, sequential and composed of equal units. To capture and display these sequential units of time in the form of a legible moving image, the technology required a momentary pause before advancing to the next frame. In between Reynaud’s development of the praxinoscope and Théâtre Optique, physiologist Marey adapted a chronophotographic device from the field of astronomy as part of his quest to analyse human and animal bodies in motion. Marey’s aim in employing chronophotography was to visually capture the sequential movement of the body through space. Although his interest in time was secondary to his preoccupation with movement (Doane, 2002: 324–325; Leclerc, 1955: 390–391), time remained an inescapable tenet of Marey’s endeavour. He realized that his chronophotographic technique of recording time would always create an unclosable gap, which he describes as the ‘between time’ (Marey, 1893: 35, cited in Ernst, 2016: 44). Fragmentary moments uncaptured during the opening and closing of the camera’s aperture were lost forever as they slipped through this gap in time. His process of visualizing movement and time would therefore always be discontinuous. Marey’s conundrum of time is particularly relevant to the optical time of the moving image system Ghost.

My adaptation of Reynaud’s rotating polygon for Ghost comes with the same cost of relinquishing fragments of time. Due to optical and size constraints of the device’s design, I was limited to selecting 48 image frames from the digitized version of The Magical Press. Like Marey, I contemplated all the moments that would remain unfolded in the dark space of irretrievable time. With only 48 frames to play with, the ghost’s re-presence would be but a spark from the past lighting up the present moment. In a few seconds she would be gone again. But Ghost also presents a gap in the viewer’s real-time perceptual experience of the animation. The facets of the polygon mirror rotate in sync with the image frames to produce an optical shutter effect. This facilitates a perceptual pause, allowing each sequential image to register on the second mirror before being projected through the lens system onto the wall. My animation system, however, has an advantage over Marey’s endeavour. For my ghost to be reanimated, its technical apparatus requires it to operate in actualized time. Unlike Marey’s quest, Ghost is concerned with producing and re-presenting time in motion, not capturing and representing it as a static image. My work therefore dynamically generates a novel form of optical time from fragmentary moments of the past. The optical mechanics of the polygon producing the momentary pause in the animated image facilitates the legibility of the ghost’s movement. Without it, the projected animation would be but a blur of motion. It is the optical interruption therefore that allows the ghost to slip through a gap in time to re-enter the present. What had been an impasse for Marey is what enables the real-time perception of my animated ghost.

Bergson would not have approved of the optical mechanics of Ghost’s rotating polygon and moving ghost light. He argued against any measurable consistency of time and was critical of mechanical motion generated though technology, including cinematic motion, which he deemed ‘artificial’ (see Gunning, 2014: 4), observing that ‘in order that the pictures may be animated, there must be movement somewhere, the movement does indeed exist here; it is in the apparatus’ (Deleuze, 1986: 22, cited in Gunning, 2014: 5). Bergsonian time would never emerge solely from Ghost’s image frames; however, as Gunning (2014: 5) points out, a paradox of mechanical motion lies in how animation depends on more than the conversion of still images into motion through technological means. In the context of transformation of the real to the realm of the unreal, the durational presence of the ghost also depends on the transformative capacity of perception, where ‘a melding of the human sensorium and the machine’ take place (Gunning, 2014: 5). When this occurs, the viewer engages, even if unwittingly, with the optical intermittency of the image frames to re-construct a new image in and of time. What is relevant for Ghost is not an adherence to ‘true’ motion of the projected image or the individual components (image frames, mirrored facets, motor) but whether the viewer becomes aware of this real-time construction. The polygon device explores more than the concept of discontinuous time generated though the intermittent motion of discrete image frames – it incorporates the durational time of both device and viewer, aiming to undo the fixity of our perception of time.

Wider context of device, image, viewer

Early on in my inquiry into moving image systems, I identified relationships between image and device, and observer and device, which did not align with my practical efforts in the studio. I noticed that within the realm of film and surprisingly, media archaeology, the device was predominantly described in terms of either image or observer and not given its own ontological standing as an equally important part of the image system. Cinema and traditional forms of animation focus on the image, and media archaeology with its array of cultural and political contexts, focuses on the perception of the mediated image. Consequently, the devices creating these different images are inadvertently hidden from view.

Media archaeology is underpinned by diverse theories of dispositif (Agamben, 2009; Foucault, 1980[1972]), urban spectacle (Benjamin, 1935, cited in Kang, 2014: 168–190) and the 19th-century observer (Crary, 1990), which all in some way explore social, cultural and institutional relations between spectator and technology. Little attention is given to the material device per se. ⁴ Exceptions include Ernst’s (2016: 4–7) material exploration of how the micro-temporalities of time-based media differ from human time. His recent proposal for a radical media archaeology of technológos argues for a re-positioning of the material device beyond the function of the system (2021: 1). Citing Walter Benjamin’s concept of ‘optical unconscious’, Ernst highlights how ‘this other perception’ (p. 45), a kind of unseen in-betweenness of the human perceptual system, can provide critical as well as historical contexts for time-based media. The transformation of realist image sources into projected animations in my moving image systems facilitates a similar alternative perception. The projected animations located between the real and unreal activate a new seeing to critically engage the viewer.

Although the development of Hollow Lens and Ghost shares media theorist Zielinski’s (2006: 3) ‘anarchaeological’ approach to finding what is new amongst historical media devices, his discussion of historical optics positions the device in relation to the perception of the image, rather than the system as a whole. Zielinski explores two subfields of 17th-century optics, still employed in contemporary moving image technologies: dioptrics which uses glass lenses and catoptrics which uses mirrors. He proposes that dioptrics relates to the ‘physics of the visible’ and problems of ‘looking through’, connecting it to the Renaissance idea of perspicere, of seeing through something in terms of insight or understanding. Catoptrics, on the other hand, he suggests, is concerned with ‘looking at’ and argues that all projection devices belong to this latter category (Zielinski, 2006: 85–86). Although Zielinski’s connection of the dioptrical lens to the term perspicere is astute, my development of Ghost and Hollow Lens suggests that it is the dioptric lens and not the catoptric mirror that is required for a projected moving image. Although the perceived and contextualized image plays a role in these systems, spending so much time with lenses to produce the projected animations, I consider a point of view beyond the image and viewer, one that concerns how light interacts with the material components of the device. In other words, it is the changing time-light that ‘looks through’ the glass lens as a kind of material ‘seeing’, which is captured and made visible in the form of the animated images.

Time-light is all around us but hidden in plain sight – it is not until it engages with the specific materiality of the lens that we become aware of it – in the form of a projected moving image. As a kind of analogue streaming, the lens systems of Ghost and Hollow Lens syphon a particular view of the real world and re-present it in a form that lies outside what is ‘real’. Decloaking this transformational process provides possibilities for bringing awareness to how the way in which we see our world is intrinsically linked to what we see in our world. As Crary (1990: 30, 1997: 63) points out, ‘visionary experiences’ have never been apprehended in some pure state, but are always mediated in some way by technical, material and cultural practices. In many instances, however, the ‘material’ remains ironically invisible through unawareness and inattention.

Decloaking mechanism and device

But the moving image device has not always been invisible. Over the last 200 years, our relationship with the image and its generating device has interwoven its way through different stages of visibility. Influenced by the changing roles of the viewer and operator of the device, the direction of attention on the moving image has often hidden the device and/or its operator in plain sight. Practices of experimental animation, cinema and art, in addition to media archaeological investigations of pre-cinematic apparatus, provide exceptions to the device’s imperceptibility, where relationships between device, moving image and viewer are made intentionally visible. Today it may appear that the roles of operator and viewer have merged, as we simultaneously navigate and view our screens, but the tech giant operators of these systems keep themselves purposefully obscured from view, invisibly influencing the direction of our attention and the way in which we engage with screen-based moving images.

The intentional visibility of historical and contemporary moving image devices brought into play an unexpected finding during my making of Ghost and Hollow Lens. Although the mechanism generating the image was exposed and I was aware of how it functioned (because I had designed it), the projected animations and their apparatus continued to cast a spell on me. After realizing the importance of the unseen transfer of time-light in my animation systems, I concluded that this continued experience was due to co-existing opposites of visible device and image, and invisible transfer of light. Within my view are the LCD screens, lenses and individual image frames and I witness their projected images, visualized before me. But I still do not see the process of what happens in between. It is this invisible process that transforms the real to the unreal, creating a sensory gap between the two visibilities of the ‘real’ material device and illusionary immaterial image. This gap between the image source and its animated time-light is a type of plenum filled with an intangible invisibility of how I see these animated images of light.

The exposed ‘operational aesthetic’ (Harris, 1990; Williamson, 2015: 38–41) of Ghost and Hollow Lens facilitates a sensing of the invisible. Awareness of what we cannot see, introduces an element of uncertainty into the experience of the animated images and their generating device. During the material and optical development of my decloaked devices, I had focused on attention as a mechanism for engaging the senses and evoking a criticality in the viewer. It turned out, however, that inattention, or that which remains imperceivable, is just as important. It seems then that the spell cast on me is due to an element of magic in these animation systems. The combination of visible and invisible elements in my works creates a cognitive dissonance in the viewer where, despite the rational effort of the viewer to understand how the image is being generated, they are sensorily presented with a scene that resists rational intelligibility (Leddington, 2016: 260).

In contrast to our contemporary experience of images, where our physical body is increasingly estranged from the workings of moving image devices, early 19th-century audiences physically engaged with the device to generate movement in the image. In other words, moving the body in real time was integral to generating the time of the animated image. While researching pre-cinematic moving image devices in various museum and archive collections, I noticed how these devices commanded that my body physically engage with them to witness their moving images and how unfamiliar this type of physical engagement was to me. My interaction with these devices brought a visibility to the interplay of my body and the specific image technology with which I was engaging (McLuhan, 1964). Rotating the polygon drum of a praxinoscope and turning the handle of a cinématographe, I became aware of the physicality of my senses, of seeing myself seeing. I understood that my physical engagement was part of the mechanism generating the time and rhythm of the moving image. This experience contributed to the development of Ghost and Hollow Lens as material generators of time, with the aim of evoking a more critical as well as embodied experience of time for the viewer.

Of course, 19th-century audiences also experienced the moving image independently from its device. During chromotrope magic lantern shows from that era, it was the performing lanternist and not the viewer who manoeuvred the mechanical slides to produce the animations. The lanternist played an essential role in these performances. However spellbound by the moving images of light, the audience’s attention was redirected from the lanternist and his device, which consequently became hidden in plain sight. By the end of the 19th century, the performer and device were more purposefully hidden from view. We see this in Reynaud’s performances of his Théâtre Optique at the Musée Grévin in Paris, where both performer and device were hidden behind the screen onto which Reynaud’s animations were rear-projected. Intentionally separated from its animation, the device began to slip out of the perceptual realm of the viewer.

The role of operator and viewer oscillated back and forth during this period. While the development of Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson’s kinetoscope ⁵ precipitated an additional shift in the role of the operator of the moving image from human to electrically powered machine, two years later Lumière’s cinématographe still required the viewer to rotate the handle to generate the moving image (Mannoni, 2000[1995]: 450–457). Overall, however, viewer and operator were moving further away from physically engaging with the device generating the images and, as Crary (1990, 1999) has noted, our relationship with the moving image shifted towards one of observation. This less embodied experience focused our attention and perception exclusively on the moving image and the device remained mainly out of sight until its reappearance a quarter of a century later in kinetic artworks such as László Moholy-Nagy’s Space Light Modulator (1922–1930) and Marcel Duchamp’s Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics) (1925).

Media theorist Charlie Gere (2006: 2) explores how art has the potential to keep open our human relation with time in the digital age, asserting that humans now play a lesser role in ‘dauntingly complex technological systems, operating at speeds beyond human control or even perception’. Today, with image devices shrinking in scale, quickening in speed and bypassing the body almost completely, Ghost and Hollow Lens endeavour to activate a more embodied cognitive awareness in the viewer, as my interaction with various 19th-century moving image devices had facilitated for me. Stafford (2016: 423), in her essay ‘Seizing Attention: Devices and Desires’, addresses the current trend in technologies to make use of our involuntary response mechanisms, causing a decline in conscious attention and awareness. In response to this scarcity of critical attention, Stafford emphasizes the importance of valuing technologies that make us consciously aware that we are attending (p. 425). She argues that, in an age where optical technologies are increasingly reduced to the single platform of the internet, it is important to make explicit how different experience-framing devices not only produce different kinds of information but make us think, feel and desire differently. In this way Ghost and Hollow Lens are mechanisms of attention used to activate sensory awareness of the time of the moving image. Although the viewer does not turn a hand crank or manually pump the water between the lenses, experiencing the material generation of the animated image in real time and engaging with how this process is occurring serves to counteract our passive engagement with the moving images on the screens of our smart devices. One of the features distinguishing my works from standard digital image projectors is that the movement of the image is dynamically created through the performative action of the material device in the real-time presence of the viewer. In contrast, contemporary digital systems project already-rendered animations or moving images, where time stored in the movement of the image is presented rather than materially constructed in real time.

Artist Julian Maire’s moving image devices also actively engage the viewer to offer possibilities for Stafford’s awareness of thinking, feeling and desiring differently. In Hollow Lens and Ghost, the device is foregrounded to remove it from the shadow of attention on the projected image. Similarly, Maire’s hybrid analogue-digital prototypes, spanning media art and performance, explore an expanded experience of image, device and viewer. His works Man at Work (2014–2018) and Random Access Memory (2011) invite the viewer to think about his devices and what they are presenting. Man at Work is a projected moving image installation, where Maire has created a projector and 3D printed image frames that rotate in front of an optical lens system. Each individual frame is a translucent plastic model of a man digging with a spade in a slightly different position, creating a continuous animated loop. Each frame sequentially positions itself in front of an objective lens system to generate the appearance of movement. Similar to my animation systems, Maire’s work engages with the materiality of projected moving image-making and his works are an achronological assemblage of deconstructed historical technologies and newly added ones, such as stereo-lithography. ⁶ By developing new constellations of technologies, Maire creates moving images with a unique optical quality while also establishing unusual contexts for experiencing a moving image, shifting our attention away from focusing solely on the moving image of light. As curator Edwin Carels (2019: 184) writes:

Understanding the characteristics of technology is essential for understanding its impact on our awareness of the world. Whereas consumer electronics become increasingly smaller and at the same time continue to expand their memory capacity, Julien Maire celebrates the sheer materiality of a deconstructivist display, foregrounding a whole configuration of machines necessary for the production of just a few images.

During the development of Hollow Lens and Ghost, I realized how perceptual experience can be transformed through various components of the device. Substituting one lens for another, altering the rotational speed of the mirrored polygon in Ghost and changing the code of the pump mechanism to alter the rate of water flow in Hollow Lens, all significantly impacted my perception of the image. The mediating device controls not only how we see, but what we see. Decloaking the device therefore brings attention to its role in constructing the fictional reality of time. My artworks produce a kind of ‘reality effect’ (Virilio, 1991: 24). Merging the factual and the virtual, they activate a shift from the ‘real’ to a conjured world of animation. Hollow Lens and Ghost materially and optically construct a fictional temporality within the durational time of the viewer. These works fuse mediated and real-time perception. In contrast to the instantly available digital image, Carels (2019: 181) notes how Maire’s work ‘cultivates the slow process of image recuperation’ and in doing so, mixes our perception of real time with mediated vision. Like Maire’s projections, the visual fictions generated by my systems have the potential to disrupt our sense of what is real regarding our understanding of time. In this way, these decloaked systems allow us to sense time rather than rationally understand it.

Also relevant to the decloaked mechanisms of time of Hollow Lens and Ghost is William Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time – a five-channel video installation in the centre of which sits a large sculptural ‘breathing machine’. In Refusal, Kentridge activates what Michelle Bastian (2017: 41) describes as a ‘critical horology’ ⁷ by exploring diverse concepts of time such as Einstein’s treatise on the relativity of time, a universe of images travelling across space and time and 19th-century industrial efforts to control time in the form of a pneumatic clock network in Paris. Kentridge describes the breathing machine as the ‘engine’ or motor force behind the moving images in his installation (see YouTube, 2017, 0:52). Referring to how systems of the body can function as a type of human clock, he describes the machine as a kind of lung that expands and contracts, citing how Galileo used the ‘clock of his pulse’ to measure the time of pendulum swings (1:29). Kentridge’s installation makes us aware of our embodied connection to time and how we as humans interconnect with the technological apparatus of time, which in this artwork performs as a pseudo generator of animated images. The term pseudo is applied here in contrast to Ghost and Hollow Lens, which have significantly different operating mechanisms. In Refusal, the viewer realizes that Kentridge’s machine is not actually producing the images – its continuous mechanical movement only gives the appearance it is doing so. Where the projected animations in Ghost and Hollow Lens are generated in real time by means of the material mechanism, Kentridge’s moving images unfold in time independent of the device. Refusal therefore reveals that the illusion of the mechanism’s function of creating time in the form of the moving image is more important than the actual capability of the machine. Although Hollow Lens and Ghost feature actual functioning devices and Refusal explores the illusion of such functionality, all foreground the mechanism as a means of loosening the grip of any absolute understanding of time.

Temporal intertwinings and separations of device and mechanism

If device and mechanism were intertwined in early moving image systems, today they are functionally and visibly separated. Contemporary screen-based devices designed to control viewer attention and experience remain constrained by thresholds of human perception and physicality. For example, the portable screen needs to be within a certain physical dimension to remain visible and holdable in our hands and the image cannot move beyond a speed of approximately 60 frames per second. In contrast, the mechanism generating the animated image, far removed from the sensorial limits of a human viewer, operates through nano-scale materiality and distributed digital networks travelling at the speed of light. The device functions as the interface, while the mechanism is cloaked through immateriality, speed and scale.

In his survey on 20th-century machine art, curator and art historian Andreas Broeckmann discusses Virilio’s exploration of the effect of emerging technologies’ ‘sightless vision’ on human perception (Virilio, 1989: 59, cited in Broeckmann, 2016: 130). In discussing operational images, Broekmann points to Virilio’s observation that although, like human perception, technological vision operates in time, it does so at a ‘speed that decouples the machine from human reality’ (Virilio, 1989: 61, cited in Broekmann, 2016: 131). Noting the different time scales of mechanism and human engagement with the mechanism, Virilio forecasts how high-speed image devices will displace parts of our vision system. Similar to how the telescope and microscope superseded our limited depth of focus, image devices will replace the ‘limited depth of time of our physiological “take”’.

Instead of a telescope facilitating our view of the night sky, the mechanism of Hollow Lens permits a physiological ‘take’ of long durations of time. In contrast to the micro-processing speeds of contemporary image technologies, the durational scale of day turning into night is too slow for us to perceive. The animated images produced by the water lenses allow us to overcome our limited capacity for ‘depth of time’ and perceive an optical duration of day becoming night. The mechanism controlling the rate of change of the water levels in Hollow Lens optically decreases that scale. It moves within the limits of our durational range of perception and, because this mechanism is exposed, we become aware of it operating in and of time.

Altering the voltage of the motor in Ghost to test various speeds of the mechanism provided the option of expanding or condensing the time of the ghost’s presence. Like Hollow Lens, this animation system creates an optical logistics of time (Shattuck, 1964: 40–83; Virilio, 1994: 5). But again, instead of telescopic optics bringing the faraway near, Ghost’s mechanism expands or contracts the durational time of the ghost. In contrast to rapidly functioning contemporary devices, the legibility of the animated ghost requires a rotational speed of approximately four frames per second. This slow frame rate creates a flickering gap in time, allowing the ghost to re-presence herself in the here and now.

Like the perceptual and operational thresholds of Ghost and Hollow Lens, Ernst (2016: 65, 2021: 23) differentiates the temporal thresholds of human and machine. He argues that time-related processes which intertwine human and machine at a micro-temporal level offer an escape from the ‘simulated time’ of media history narratives. Ernst (2016: 39) proposes that at the microsecond scale beyond the human sensory system, the ‘anthropological narrative of time . . . comes to an end, and . . . is replaced by the concept of the human as an ensemble of computable numbers’. Providing the example of neuronal latency (the processing interval between light entering the eye and the human experience of sight), Ernst proposes that technological media begins where the ‘humanities stop’. Without direct sensory experience of the micro-time of the apparatus, he argues that this time can never be known to us as real. Only ever recorded by the technical apparatus, it remains outside any human experiential narrative (pp. 39–40).

Various temporalities exist in contemporary animation technologies yet, due to their invisibility, we remain unaware of them. Our experience of digital animation, for example, does not normally involve witnessing the clock speed of the microprocessor generating CGI. Far beyond our perceptual realm, the silicon chips of these processors perform billions of operations per second. Hollow Lens and Ghost seek to bring visibility to the different temporalities of human and device but, unlike what Ernst proposes in relation to scientific measuring apparatus, these works do not present any clear line of where the human stops and the technological begins. In considering non-human processes in the generation of projected animations (the transfer of time-light which ‘looks through’ the lenses and the operation of the mechanism), human and machine time are visibly intertwined instead of being delineated. Much like the magical gap alluded to earlier, these animation systems draw our attention to the unseen time processes that occur in between the visible material components of the mechanism, so that we become cognisant of what we cannot see taking place. We become aware of the magical transformation of the real image source to the unreal experience of animation. Borrowing the sentiment of new media philosopher Hansen (2004: 10), rather than restricting the image to its surface appearance, my contemporary animated images encompass the entire process by which they are perceivable. Making these processes perceivable (even if not visible) includes what is unseen as well as what is directly visible.

What is unseen in my works is the invisible transfer of time-light, and the digital code controlling the rotating polygon and image carousel and flow of water in the lenses. Bringing attention to these invisibilities facilitates awareness of the different material and digital temporalities generating the animation, in addition to the durational experience of the image itself. These works therefore explore expanded notions of temporality by revealing the action of the mechanism. Like Ernst’s argument that the time of the apparatus cannot be known to us as real, these image systems expose fictional realities of time. But, instead of the extended line drawn by Ernst from human to machine, the inclusion of material and immaterial properties of device and time-light, as well as the perceiving viewer, facilitate a temporal porosity, dispelling any clearcut duality between them.

Conclusion

Hollow Lens and Ghost are speculative tools for making different forms of time visible. Their development serves to prompt critical awareness of the construction and mediation of time, presenting different ways of knowing the phenomenon through the optical logistics of time-light, and the moving image and its generating device. These works engage the viewer in a ‘time-critical aisthesis’ (Ernst, 2016: 38) and challenge preconceived notions of visible and invisible, digital and material, and how awareness of these hybrid interplays allows for novel temporal experience. My artworks thereby facilitate a renewed presence for the device both as a non-human entity and a decisive part of projected animation systems. The optically compressed durational time of Hollow Lens, in particular, also offers possibilities for comprehending beyond-human scales of time related to contemporary issues such as deep time and climate change.

In light of Gunning’s (2014) melding of sensorium and machine, the development of these assemblages and their media archaeological influences led to considerations beyond the material device and human sensory system. My decloaked devices explore ways in which to establish new criticality toward the time of the animated image. But the unanticipated and persistent magical effect accompanying this criticality foregrounded time-light as a significant optical process for transforming the real to the illusionary. Interacting with the changing optical components of my devices, time-light invisibly transports image sources gleaned from the real world into the imaginary realm of animation. Although the viewer does not see this transfer of image-light through time and space, there is opportunity to become cognisant of this sensorial gap in the system, to gain an awareness of what is hidden in plain sight.

The revelation of the interplay between what is seen and unseen during the real-time production of the projected animations has the potential to evoke awareness of what is simultaneously visible and hidden from view in our everyday experience of moving images. My artworks present the viewer with entanglements of optical media histories and real-time interactions between material and digital elements. Disclosing the controlled invisibility and temporal fictions of these systems imparts how the time of the animated image is constructed and mediated, and how it interrelates with the viewer’s perception. As Hollow Lens and Ghost interweave their way in and out of Aionic and Kronos time, these magical devices also exhibit an autonomous presence. In the burgeoning era of AI, viewers are becoming increasingly aware of image devices’ independent perceptual, temporal and transformative capabilities. This emerging awareness has the potential to contribute to observing the independent presence of Ghost and Hollow Lens, additionally elucidating our complex techno-human relationship with time.