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.

Fast-living beings disrupt the predictable flow of our day-to-day life. We experience the dissonance between our desire to consciously observe/react and our temporal reality. Just barely, it slips through our grasp, denying us the satisfaction of clarity. Part of working with fast-living critters is to reconcile with these emotions, which sometimes means loosening the perception of control over our own immediacy. The disruption of routine flows creates a point of departure in which new temporalities can be explored.

We reflexively move our hand to shoo away a fly that has landed on our arm. It is an instant for us, but in that moment, is it possible we provided legitimate respite for a tired insect? Perhaps most would regard this as incriminating evidence of an insect’s eternally agitating character, but is there no delight to be had in something unexpected? There’s something unique about these interactions that they can so abruptly pull us out of our routines and our internal head and thrust us into this immediacy. Where it’s just two completely different bodies in space, and you have to try to make sense of each other.

I’m seeking value in the brevity of that interaction; the asymmetry in temporal experience and its potential to create momentum towards endless diversification. It means something that I could know or interact with beings who were born recently and will likely die soon; and in that window of time is a fully experienced life. At times all we can produce is a simple fleeting moment, and yet that sliver can contain a world of experience.

We don’t have much of a cultural language to contextualize these encounters, so I am offering a point of access where one can consider the fleeting, the ephemeral. I’ve chosen frame rate as the mechanism for engaging with this scale of time. Doing 60 drawings/second (as opposed to the traditional 12 or 24) helps us to better articulate the movement of the non-human body while staying true to its speed.

Tip

Tip