Peripheral Alacrity - Animation as entry into non-human temporalities by Devon Pardue

A master's thesis culminating in a project called Peripheral Alacrity; an audiovisual animation installation utilizing animation at 60fps to investigate the temporal relationship between us and fast-moving organisms on the edges of our senses. My work is informed by a deeply rooted interest and curiosity in the biological sciences and uses ideas found therein to explore the complicated relationships between humans and the rest of the living world. I became particularly interested in the perception of time across species and the potential for animation to serve as an axis into nonhuman temporalities. How are our relationships with other organisms impacted by our bodies' unique temporality? Fast-living invertebrates like insects are of particular importance because their crucial role in a healthy ecosystem forces us to reconcile with our particular disdain for their speed and our desire for control over our surroundings. That desire to oversee and pin down a version of nature that is ideologically pure has roots in Europatriarchal power structures, so I sought to create a space to recontextualize these encounters as they naturally are in our day-to-day life. The work seeks to capture this particular interaction characterized by fleeting peripheral glimpses of fast-living organisms; from dragonflies to some we only see as a passing blur, and all the abstractions in between. You’re interrupted by a flash of motion and sound from the corner of your eye and by the time you crane your head to look, it is already gone. It is less about seeing, and more about our desire-to-see creating an asymmetrical dance between the viewer and the fleeting subject.

A new media project utilizing animation at 60fps to investigate the temporal relationship between us and organisms on the edges of our senses. The work seeks to capture a particular interaction characterized by fleeting peripheral glimpses of fast-living organisms; dragonflies, hummingbirds, and some we only see as a passing flicker.

Creatures on the outer edges of our perceivable domain exist in this gray area between presence and absence. We typically interact with fast-living creatures in spontaneous vignettes. We are momentarily aware of a fly zipping by our ear, and reach out an arm to wave it away. They can hardly be considered proper social experiences, since we rarely process them quickly enough to react.

But what is this sliver of time to an organism that perceives time slower than us? One way scientists determine the ‘speed,’ or temporal resolution that different species are living is by determining a creature’s Critical Flicker Frequency (CFF).1 A more well known name for this phenomenon is ‘persistence of vision;’ it is the point which flickering light stimuli becomes so fast the observer perceives it as a steady, continuous light. We know this as the visual phenomenon that grants the perception of motion to flickering images, making our world of film possible. A human's CFF is 60Hz2, a pigeon's is 100Hz3, and a dragonfly's is 300Hz.4

Using this as a reference point we can try to identify this level of unseen agency in animal bodies. For example, birds have an average CFF of 120Hz, a time-world thought to be twice as slow as ours.5 Slowing down a recording of birdsong to more closely match its temporal resolution reveals a level of nuance to its vocalization that we don’t normally catch (see below). Animation is my process of contextualizing and grounding myself in multispecies temporal entanglements. By slowing down, going frame-by-frame to study the quality of movement on such a fine temporal scale, I can start to expose these hidden dimensions.

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