Animation victims: an abridged history of animated response -- Animated history -- The movement of accessories -- Fabric extensions and textual supplements from modern and antique fragments -- The movement of snakes -- Pneumatic impulses and bygone appendages from Philo to Warburg -- The afterlife of crystals -- Art historical biology and the animation of the inorganic -- Inorganic culture -- Nudes in the forest -- Models, sciences, and legends in a landscape by Léger -- Malicious houses -- (...) Animism and animosity in German architecture and film from Mies to Murnau -- Daphne's legacy -- Architecture, psychoanalysis, and petrification. (shrink)

The biologist and founder of Umwelt-Research Jakob von Uexküll used cinematographic techniques in many ways. This article explores three of these. First, Uexküll uses chronophotography to investigate the locomotion of marine organisms and insects, making multiple exposures on a single photographic surface to facilitate comparison between different phases of locomotion. Second, according to Uexküll, observing the motions of the living being in this way renders visible the ‘conformity with plan’ that is particular to each organism. The technique of cinematography (...) is therefore original to his investigation of the plan-like character of organisms. Third, in his later works Foray into the World of Humans and Animals ([1934] 2010) and Theoretical Biology ([1920] 1926), Uexküll uses cinematography to demonstrate his theory that the life of every living being unfolds in its own perceptual world possessing of its own subjective time and spatiality. It is in this context that one has to understand the centrality of his references to ‘pre-cinematographic’ experiments on and theories of perception. (shrink)

My goal is to conceive how the reality would look like for hypothetical creatures that supposedly perceive on time scales much faster or much slower than that of us humans. To attain the goal, I propose modelling in two steps. At step one, we have to single out a unified parameter that sets time scale of perception. Changing substantially the value of the parameter would mean changing scale. I argue that the required parameter is duration of discrete perceptive frames, or (...) snapshots, whose sequencing constitutes perceptive process. I show that different standard durations of perceptive frames is the ground for differences in perceptive time scales of various animals. Abnormally changed duration of perceptive frames is the cause of the effect of distorted subjective time observed by humans under some conditions. Now comes step two of the modelling. By inserting some arbitrary duration of a perceptive frame, we set a hypothetical scale and thus emulate a viewpoint for virtual observation of the reality in a wider or narrower angle of embracing events in time. Like changing lenses of a microscope, viewing reality in different temporal scales makes certain features of reality manifested, others veiled. These are, in particular, features of life. If we observe an object in an inappropriate interval, we may not notice the very essence of a process it is undergoing. (shrink)