Anna Munster

Much of our creative practice has explored ques- tions and issues asked and explored by neurology, from how we perceive to how actual brain damage affects our movement in and sensing of the world. HokusPokus developed in response to our most re- cent interest in enactive visual perception. We wanted to find a visually rich and accessible way to explore how we perceive actively in relation to and with our environment – how we see what we see and how this makes us ‘interact.’
Recently, neurologists have begun looking to magic in order to help make sense of some of most complex – yet fundamental – aspects of perception: why don’t we always see something right in front of us; why do our eyes more easily follow curved rather than straight gestures across space? There are no simple answers yet magic, which has explored such aspects of the visual for centuries, offered us a framework to explore these issues in a visually interesting way.

In this chapter we focus on the ways in which the neurosciences intersect with psychology and how, together with imaging technologies and techniques of identification, these come to constitute a complex, contemporary field of 'faciality'. We refer to our own work, which examines how the face and scientific imaging combine to create this shifting field. Here we explore the historical links between the early natural and medical sciences of the nineteenth century and contemporary obsessions with facial symmetry and 'genuine' facial expression found in neuropsychology and neural marketing. We draw upon the history of facial expression as it works its way through the early medical photographic images of hysterics' faces in Charles Darwin's The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Ideas about the face as a site for the expression of genuine and staged emotion that germinated in early neuroscience have now become part of contemporary analysis of cultural and social phenomena, such as Barak Obama's 2008 presidential campaign. In the video installation Duchenne's smile 1 we make these historical and contemporary links, examining emerging paradigms for how we imagine identity today at the intersection of expression, technologies and securitisation.

How does data 'move'? How can we both feel data moving and feel movement through data visualisation? As more of our media become data-based and driven, we need to ask: how is movement being registered through data visualisation? We need to inquire in to how specific practices of visualizing data – both analytical and artistic – constrain or help us explore all kinds of movement, including that initiated both by human actions and nonhuman forces. This paper proposes that artistic approaches using 'movement data' within experimental animation, including our own artistic work pull made in 2017, as well as choreographic and experimental cartographic visualisation practices register a 'feeling' for and of moving data. The use of 'movement data' – typically geographical x,y coordinates accompanied by timestamp data – has been an strong focus of big data visual analytic research in to geospatial movement of human, animal and inanimate objects tracked via GPS devices. However, the overall conceptual approach to movement comes from data science influenced by a mathematical (and implicitly Euclidean geometrical) framework. Here movement is conceived as series of discrete positions occupied by moving objects, connected through the sequential unfolding of time. Space, time and object then give rise to discrete data sets that can be analysed and visualized either separately or together through various techniques. However, this approach runs into many classic conceptual problems, such as how to account for movement between time instances, and how to represent collective movement heterogeneously as the differential of the relations across all this data. We argue that these problems pertain to questions of how to register the way movement moves (changes) and how data participates in such movement moving. We will explore approaches to moving data via our own artistic practice-based research developed in the audiovisual installation pull. Here we took x,y coordinate and timestamp data derived from a cinematographer's movements while shooting underwater wave sequences over several hours. This data was re-animated using 3D visualization and fluid simulation techniques. We will also look at examples from choreographic visualization (William Forsythe's Synchronous Objects, 2010). We will propose that by focusing on movement as a field of relations, artistic approaches to visualising movement data might enable a feeling of (data) moving to register. Felt movement. Experimental CGI animation. Artistic data visualisation. Relationality.