Kinetica Artfair

Carol MacGillivray and Bruno Mathez

Gestalt Circle is designed to explore notions of directed attention in an audience unmediated by screen. The Circle is an architectural extension of Gestalt founder, Max Wertheimer’s experiments in Phi and Beta movement [1], and demonstrates a new embodied media experience that suppresses cultural and contextual content in favor of pure movement. 

The Gestalt Chamber is essentially Diachronic, (the study of a phenomenon as it changes through time) and evokes the early animation simulators such as the phenakistoscope and the zoetrope, direct ancestors of the piece acting both as art object and experimental media. 

The Circle exists in real space as 3D objects arranged and animated purely through projected light: Although nothing in the room actually moves, the objects are revealed through serial illumination in the dark chamber, sequenced using the technique of projection mapping.  The impression of movement within the circle exploits Beta movement, sometimes called ‘pure’ movement as it is perceived without the eyes following any actual object; rather a non-object is created, followed and perceived. [2]

Examination of perception tends to look at senses in isolation, but Gestalt design principles treat perception as an embodied synaesthetic experience. By removing the mediation of a screen, and suppressing image recognition factors to create ‘pure’ movement, the kinetic artwork is designed to test the hypothesis that change is a key signifier in perception and that all change can only be perceived through attention.   Because the work is performative yet entirely replicable despite being unmediated by screen, it offers a new and embodied way of exploring the physiological nuances of Gestalt law and perceptual cognition.

[1] Wertheimer, M. Über Gestalttheorie at an address before the Kant Society, Berlin, ‘7th December, 1924, Erlangen, (1925). Reprinted by the Gestalt Journal Press, New York (1997).

[2]  Pizlo, F. J. (2000). Phi is not Beta. http://www.psych.purdue.edu/Magniphi/PhiIsNotBeta/phi1.html Retrieved 21 Nov 2011