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.

Our physical temporality attunes us to, and is attuned by, our surrounding world. Genetic temporality is ancient, even present in bacteria, and takes form as biological rhythms.1 Every cell in the body has its own ‘clock(s);’ chemical oscillators that act as a kind-of feedback loop. The most famous of these is the circadian clock, which is entrained to the day-night cycle and commands us to go to sleep or wake up. We possess a vast overlapping collection of these ‘clocks,’ which determine a number of bodily rhythms from the timing of species migration to REM phases during sleep to the blinking of our eyes. This physical temporality attunes us to, and is attuned by, our surrounding world. It provides avenues for our bodies (particular in its design) to navigate our peculiar landscape.

Digital animation, born through dialogue between body and computer, is the gestation of digital bodies. Like any body, it holds rhythms nesting within rhythms, harmonizing with others. Patterns of oscillating electrical signals carry the video file, the succession of images and their speed(s). Some of these cycles and events exist in a scale of time inaccessible to humans. We cannot see the rapid flickering of electrical signals in a television display, but a dog can.2 Non-human animals can often see the strobing electronic rhythm of our built landscape.

So given the overwhelming variety of differences across bodies, how can we start forming meaningful types of interaction within our ecosystem that honors this diversity?

We can find a mechanism, an axis of relatability, to ground ourselves in our interaction. An insect, many of which have a lifespan of one year, unable to bear the cold of winter they lay cold-resistant eggs in preparation for spring. They won't know the same kind of comfort in the familiarity of passing seasons, and yet, summer must be an incredibly powerful notion if it is only experienced once. Perhaps we can think of the metamorphosis of their individual bodies as an extension of Earth’s metamorphosis, and vice versa. It is not just the reiteration of automatic cyclical processes, it is the manner in which insects are reinventing themselves at each solar revolution.

We can think of ourselves as a tree, or a tectonic plate; many generations of them will know our individual life. These are connections that move beyond the individual-individual domain and into more broad dynamics between collectives. A local community naturally forms distinct characteristics; a kind-of group culture that is specific to certain sites. Animals manifest social learning both vertically (parent-to-child) and horizontally (between peers). Even ants share and pass down knowledge directly. In a type of tandem running locomotion, workers (typically older) will guide their inexperienced kin to food trails.

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