Bergsonian Perception
Thought this was interesting in the context of the Mark Hansen chapter on Jeffrey Shaw:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/#4
The first 6 paragraphs of section 4 provide a synopsis of Bergson’s theory of perception. In particular, the following exerpt from Matter and Memory is pretty fab. It makes me think of Étienne-Jules Marey or, kind of by extension, this amazing digital work on seeing movement as an object in the “recreating movement” project:
http://www.recreating-movement.com/
From the Standford site:
If you abolish my consciousness … matter resolves itself into numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers. In short, try first to connect together the discontinuous objects of daily experience; then, resolve the motionless continuity of these qualities into vibrations, which are moving in place; finally, attach yourself to these movements, by freeing yourself from the divisible space that underlies them in order to consider only their mobility – this undivided act that your consciousness grasps in the movement that you yourself execute. You will obtain a vision of matter that is perhaps fatiguing for your imagination, but pure and stripped of what the requirements of life make you add to it in external perception. Reestablish now my consciousness, and with it, the requirements of life: farther and farther, and by crossing over each time enormous periods of the internal history of things, quasi-instantaneous views are going to be taken, views this time pictorial, of which the most vivid colors condense an infinity of repetitions and elementary changes. In just the same way the thousands of successive positions of a runner are contracted into one sole symbolic attitude, which our eye perceives, which art reproduces, and which becomes for everyone the image of a man who runs (Matter and Memory, pp.208-209).