do folks have an informed opinion or just a gut reaction? am curious where people stand.
what is it about video? in particular, given that embodiment dictates minds, and minds dictate culture, and culture dictates art, how did video come into the spot light? i'd be interested to hear peoples perspectives on this (and not interested in arguing into how we feel about it) social, neurological, psychological and otherwise, qualified experts and opinionated laymen alike. i have no relevant credentials myself, am an interested artist who's read a lot on this subject.
[img]http://i.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01171/arts-graphics-2006_1171390a.jpg[/img]
the brain assembles an image somewhat like a collage, using using the (entirely unpictoral) stimuli from the eyes. it recognizes patterns in the abstract stream of stimuli and assigns bits from our (warped) memories to create pieces that only estimate what we might comprehend later in our cortex. those pieces arrive and are processed at various times and are assembled in our brains. but at no time is there a complete image to our eyes. areas are constantly nullified or updated.
Actually, it is unlikely there is anything visual in the universe, without eyes to see it. Beauty and everything else literally is in the mind of the beholder (Hundert, 1995; Levitin, 2007). ie. wavelengths of light are not intrinsically visible, they are a kind of energy that our eye organs are tuned to detect. the eye organs simply send something like "yes we saw a green spot, no we didn't see a red spot" (similar to digital 1s and 0s, not similar to pixel info as from a camera). the whole image is a product of the brain's synthetic assembly. it is experienced by us as happening all at once, but may occur over several seconds.
in this respect, film (and thus video) is essentially the same as a still image. it is an entirely artificial means of representation. "time-based" motion is merely a matter of rapidly substitute frames, framed images, which are described above. as far as the brain is concerned, there is really no essential difference between watching a movie and flipping through a magazine. the frames-per-second is higher in the former case, but speed is of no real significance.
we don't see motion synchronously. if we see one person walking quickly on one side of the street, and another walking slowly on the other side, we may see three things: 1) we may construct a still image that juxtaposes them frozen in the scene. 2) we may see the fast walker as something moving fast and 3) we may see the slow walker as something moving slowly. later, our brains unify this information (in a way we don't understand, and certainly have no way to replicate mechanically). the final touch is again that we experience a cohesive scene at one time. (we always experience now-ness, as what happened a moment ago).
this isn't a guess, it is just basic neurology. not that we have to represent sensory things as they are represented by the mind at all. but how did this frame metaphor, which is so arbitrary and not based on any model of reality, become so ubiquitous. why does Flash think in terms of a frames? why did video adopt frames from film? linearity does not occur in any natural phenomena, it was an invention.
non-linear things (like rivers and ongoing activities) are no more complicated than linear ones (like purchases and objects), it is just often difficult to switch mind-sets. why did we adopt the linear mind-set? did it hold some benefit? not for farming, nor electricity, but arguable for nuclear fission (given the atomic bomb as an end-er). once non-linear-ism has been discovered (it's always been there, but now we have noticed it), why do we so often choose to revert to think of the world as if it was linear? why do we actually choose to keep reverting to video? We don't revert to envisioning the galaxy as crystal spheres embedded with stars and planets encasing the Earth.
