T
he performance of the animated body represents the movements of an en-tity that does not exist in the profilmic, ‘real world’. It is a conceptual meta-object that never existed in the way it is depicted in its animated form. Referring to her experience of creating both puppets and animated characters, Liz Walker of Faulty Optic believes that it is the viewer who gives life to the character:I think that we must all have this inbuilt need for pretence. It’s like when you play with toys when you are a kid and you go through various scenarios with them and for that moment they seem to be real. I think that we have all got that innate ability to give life to inanimate objects and I think that it is something that gives us real pleasure in being able to do that as well.1
The argument that the viewer reads intentionality and motivation from the actions of a fictional character has been verified by the psychological study of animacy: the process in which causality is ascribed to moving forms, however abstract. In Brian Scholl and Patrice Tremoulet’s review of studies in perceptual animacy2, the example is given of two small, animated squares. One square moves across the screen and touches the other square. The second square is then seen to move. Despite looking at abstract squares, which lack a physical form, the viewer concludes that the first square has hit the second one and that the second square moves as a consequence of impact. Scholl and Tremoulet assert that causality behind the movement of the sec-ond square is perceived and not inferred or projected by the viewer onto the object of their perception. Referring to simple ‘launching’ motions, such as the example of the squares above, they argue that: ‘Like recognizing speech or recognizing a face, recognizing physical causality in such situations seems phenomenologically just to
‘happen’ quite automatically.’3 Ka Nin Chow qualifies particular types of motions that
1 Walker, interview.
2 Brian J. Scholl and Patrice D. Tremoulet, “Perceptual Causality and Animacy,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, no. 8 (2000): 299-309.
3 Ibid., 306.
Figure 73. Birgitta Hosea, illustration of Scholl and Tremoulet’s ‘Launching’ motion, 2011.
4. Reception: The performative viewer
can be seen to represent ‘liveliness’ in ‘multimedia artefacts’ as follows:
showing reactions to stimuli (reactivity), transforming according to their internal rules (autonomy), evolving over a period of time (generativity or metamorphosis), or even producing divergent outcomes subject to chance or intervention (contingency).1
In the EyesWeb expressive gesture analysis research at the University of Genova, they have examined the minimum amount of information needed to identify human motion.2 One study concluded that only twelve dots are necessary for us to recognise human movement.3 The angle at which the dots are placed gives the viewer subcon-scious clues about posture and the way in which the dots are positioned in relation to each other gives information about the kinematics of the figure. The dynamics of their movement – direction, velocity, acceleration and deceleration - creates different forms of movement to which the viewer ascribes learned meaning such as ‘male’ vs.
‘female’, ‘happy’ vs. ‘sad’, ‘nervous’ vs. ‘relaxed’.4 This research confirms that our perception of a character is informed by non-verbal cues, which we subconsciously compare to our previous embodied experience of movement.
This act of decoding non-verbal signs is historically and culturally specific. We make sense of the world outside our own bodies, through language, visual and cul-tural codes that we have learned and can share with others because they have a basis that is collectively understood. This is even the case for radical, avant-garde texts, as Susan Bennett asserts. These also rely upon our prior knowledge and previous experience in order to make sense of them. If they were totally new, we would have nothing to compare them with and would not be able to understand them.5 In The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that it is our prior, lived,
1 Chow, “An Embodied Cognition Approach to the Analysis and Design of Generative and Interactive Animation,” 7.
2 Donald Glowinsky, “Keynote Speech” (paper presented at the Moves 08: Movement on Screen Conference, Manchester, 2008).
3 For another study in which point-lights are used to delineate the movement of joints and measure how affect is perceived from the arm movements of knocking and drinking actions see Frank E.
Pollick et al., “Perceiving Affect From Arm Movement,” Cognition, no. 82 (2001): B51-B61.
4 Glowinsky, “Keynote Speech.”
5 Susan Bennett, Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), 49.
4. Reception: The performative viewer
sensual experience that is the source of all knowledge.1 We compare the movements of bodies that we see to our own personal, lived experience of movement:
I cannot understand the function of the living body except by enacting it myself, and except in so far as I am a body which rises towards the world.2
When we watch an actor perform, we read the character’s intentionality through their gesture. The portrayal of a character role is achieved through the assumption of a particular physical appearance, vocal performance and types of movements. Even though it is a fictional situation, we ascribe a causal link between their movements and the mental or physical stimuli that triggered them.
An actor has a recognisably human body that is easy to relate to, but an animated being never lived. Suzanne Buchan argues that film, with its use of human actors and photoreal locations, is experienced as phenomenal and relates to our previous experience; whereas animation is noumenal: it shows a world of the imagination that has not been directly experienced and has been accepted through an a priori suspen-sion of disbelief.3 Laura Ivins-Huley continues that the viewer is well aware that they are watching an animated character rather than a human actor, but we have learned to decode the ‘illusion of intention and motivation’4 behind particular movements and cinematic conventions and we project this back onto the character. Indeed, research into perceptual animacy demonstrates that only minimal clues are needed to perceive a humanoid figure in motion. In their work on theatrical presence, Roy Connolly and Richard Bailey present examples of studies in cognitive science and assert that the same sensorimotor processes are used to decode both fictional representations and actual phenomena, thus ‘perceptual imagination is understood to employ the same abilities as regular perception.’5 From this they conclude that, ‘Illusion and reality are
1 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 23-5.
2 Ibid., 75.
3 Suzanne Buchan, “The Animated Spectator: Watching the Quay Brothers’ Worlds,” in Animated Worlds, ed. Suzanne Buchan (Eastleigh: John Libbey, 2006), 16.
4 Ivins-Hulley, “The Ontology of Performance in Stop Animation,” 3.
5 Roy Connolly, and Richard Ralley. “Something Real is Needed: Constructing and Dismantling Pres-ence.” Studies in Theatre and Performance 30, no. 2 (2010): 214.
4. Reception: The performative viewer
not a contradiction, because reality is not in the object but in our involvement with it.’1 Consequently, an animated character has the same potential for perceived presence as a live performer or an actor on film. Although one is based on an illusory body and the others have a ‘real’ body, in either case, a character is a fictional construct that was manufactured and never lived. It is constituted in the mind of the beholder who fully engages with it.
In classic narrative texts – of literature, theatre, animation or film, the viewer expe-riences by proxy what the character expeexpe-riences through a process of identification or empathy. In his Poetics, Aristotle argued that identification with an ‘admirable’ char-acter provokes empathy in the audience as well as strong emotions of ‘fear and pity’.2 These feelings purge the spectator of excess emotions and, thus, engender a state of
‘pleasurable relief’3 or katharsis. Comedy, on the other hand, Aristotle saw as an “imi-tation of inferior people”, indeed ‘the laughable is a species of what is disgraceful’.4 Therefore, in Aristotelian terms, comedy can be seen as an encounter with the taboo that reinforces the moral codes of the spectator. In his book, Character Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage, Edwards Burns argues that the implication of this is that in order to feel these emotions of fear, pity or moral superiority, the viewer is required to evaluate the character being portrayed through the lens of her own lived experience; to compare what is seen performed with what she already knows:
…we fear the situations of those like (homoios) ourselves. Pity, by extension, is what we feel for others. For fear to be evoked by a character’s situation we must be able to classify ourselves with them; a kind of annulment of difference takes place… 5 In other words, that which is seen on stage or screen is partially a projection of the self. Burns uses the example of William Hogarth’s portrait of Sarah Malcolm, which shows a woman seated alone in a room, to consider this proposition.6 A dead woman
1 Ibid, 215.
2 Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Heath Malcolm (London: Penguin, 1996), 10.
3 This phrase is taken from Aristotle’s Politics as cited in the introduction to Ibid., xxxviii.
4 Ibid., 9.
5 Burns, Character Acting and Being on the Pre-Modern Stage, 23.
6 Ibid., 2.
4. Reception: The performative viewer
in a historical painting, she is unknowable. Burns poses the question – where is the character that we read in her?1 Is it in her physiognomy? Do we categorise her by her appearance? Do we get clues about her from the room she is pictured in or the light-ing conditions that she is sittlight-ing in? When we learn that she is a murderess notorious for killing her employers, does this change what we had thought of her? Burns pro-poses that during the process of looking at a painting, reading a novel or watching a play, our interpretation of a character is not fixed by the author, but relies on a contri-bution from the beholder. So the unknowability of Sarah Malcolm is not a hindrance to the viewer, but a space into which the viewer can insert herself: ‘a double articulation of character as a process of seeing, and a process of being seen, as a transaction between two human subjects.’2 Burns goes on to argue that character is not an essen-tial, determining factor of being, but a historical ‘mode of perception and discourse’.3 This perspective has echoes of Roland Barthes’s famous declaration in 1968 of the death of the author, in which Barthes argues that the text cannot be thought of as the
‘child’ of the author, but as a process. Meaning is created during the act of reading:
...there is no other time than that of the enunciation and every text is externally writ-ten here and now. The fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, notation, representation, ‘depiction’ (as the classics would say); rather, it designates exactly what linguists, referring to Oxford philosophy call a performative...’4
The reader completes the work. In this approach literature is defined by the act of reading, not the act of writing. For Barthes: ‘The reader is the space on which all the quotations that make up a writing are inscribed without any of them being lost; a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’.5 The meaning of the text is not fixed, but polysemic6 with multiple interpretations of it by different readers possible.
1 Ibid.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid., 4.
4 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in Theories of Authorship, ed. John Caughie (London;
New York: Routledge, 1990), 211.
5 Ibid., 212-3.
6 cf. Kim Schrøder et al., Researching Audiences (London: Arnold, 2003), 130.
4. Reception: The performative viewer
The notion that meaning is actively decoded in a dialogue between sensor and sensed is influenced by the phenomenological philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. For him, the act of perception itself is one of exchange between the human subject and the object of their sensing:
The sensor and the sensible do not stand in relation to each other as two mutually exclusive terms, and sensation is not an invasion of the sensor by the sensible. It is my gaze which subtends colour, and the movement of my hand which subtends the object’s form, or rather my gaze pairs off with colour, and my hand with hardness and softness, and in this transaction between the subject of sensation and the sensible it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action, or that one confers significance on the other. Apart from the probing of my eye or hand, and before my body synchronizes with it, the sensible is nothing but a vague beckoning.1
In these terms, a character, or other stimulus, that is external to the viewer’s con-sciousness ‘beckons’ to the viewer and the viewer makes sense of this during the act of perception through the filter of their own embodied experience. This reciprocal process of exchange brings to mind a passage from Camera Lucida, in which Roland Barthes describes as animation his experience of viewing a photograph that was brought to life by his action and which he in turn was mentally moved by:
…suddenly a specific photograph reaches me: it animates me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction which makes it exist: an animation.2
Film theorist Vivian Sobchack examines the process of exchange between viewer and viewed that takes place when watching a film. Relating Merleau-Ponty’s theories to film and analysing how the viewer contributes to the meaning, Sobchack contends that the process of our identification with the characters on screen is performative.3 A film is presented as direct experience and structures the viewer as if they were personally experiencing the diegetic world of the film:
Watching a film is both a direct and mediated experience of direct experience as me-diation… Watching a film, we can see the seeing as well as the seen, hear the hearing as well as the heard, and feel the movement as well as the moved.4
The viewer projects her own memories, lived experiences and fantasies onto the film
1 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 214.
2 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 142.
3 Sobchack, The Address of The Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, 10-11.
4 Ibid., 10.
4. Reception: The performative viewer
and performs it into being.
As viewers, not only do we spontaneously and invisibly perform the existential acts directly for and as ourselves in relation to the film before us, but these same acts are coterminously given to us as the film, as mediating acts of perception-cum-expression we take up and invisibly perform by appropriating and incorporating them into our own existential performance; we watch them as a visible performance distinguishable from, yet included in, our own.1
An example of this came from feedback from one spectator of my Out There in the Dark performance at the BFI, who revealed that the work had triggered a visceral, childhood memory for her of frightening car journeys in the dark with her mother. She had extended the hybrid character that I had created with memories of her own.
In conclusion, the animated character is a conceptual construct that is brought to life in the mind of the viewer. This can also be said of fictional characters portrayed by human actors in theatre or film. The cognitive processes at work in the experience of viewing involve comparison with prior lived experience to decode clues about the character. Barthes and Sobchack argue that the performative viewer is central to the creation of the character, whereas Merleau-Ponty and Burns argue that there is a transaction between viewer and character. In the following section, I will present a case study of Lunch with Miss Smith in which I examined through practice, by placing the audience in a position in which it can have a direct phenomenal experience of an animated character, the extent to which the viewer performs the work.
1 Ibid., 10-11.