Reading is a particular engagement with letterforms guided by the audiences familiarity with written and textual languages, a distinct and parallel mode of engagement from their visual perceptions: an encounter that resolves the visuality::legibility dynamic into a natural hierarchy where legibility always dominates. In contradistinction to how motion graphics overlap with some of the concerns established in graphic designs use of typography, their superficial relationship to established methodology does not alter the essential difference that movement and development-over-time makes for lexical recognition. Motion typography allows a delay in this assertion of order without undermining or challenging it by presenting the process of lexical recognition as the emergence of legibility: the separation between the recognition of language, and the ability to identify and read the contents presented. This procedural demonstration expands the autonomous and internalized activity of recognitioninterpretation into the emergence of letterforms, allowing the transition from illegible to legible to become an expressive subject. This excess arises in the three modes kinetic, graphic, and chronic that define this semiotic process immanent in/as the making sense of letterforms in motion. The distinct engagements with non-lexical dimensions of typography and design these modes provide have their foundations in static typography and the printed page, but exceed them because the addition of motion is transformative, allowing the presentation of interpretive processes through animated motion.
Betancourt, Michael. "Postcinema, Motion Perception and Glitch Movies." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 15 (2018): 202208. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i15.242
The next Exploding Cinema event at The Horse Hospital in London on 21 April 2018 will be screening Going Somewhere: Episode One. Look at their Facebook page for more information!
The journal Utsanga.it has a theoretical essay of mine on defamiliariazation (Brechts Verfremdungseffekt) and glitch art (technical failure). Here is an excerpt:
The postcinematic aspects of the Unheimlich glitch cannot be under-emphasized. It is precisely a product of post-digitality violating the established ontological order of cinemathe differentiation between Modernist conceptions of medium-specificity and the convergent break-down of those boundaries by computer technologycoupled with the expansion of its dispositive by the emergent identifications of ambivalent meaning posed by a metastable articulation. The specifically Unheimlich (uncanny) dimensions of digital materiality for cinematic ontology (as demonstrated by the glitch) resides in displacements of established lexical expertise that become apparent in defamiliarization. It is not mere materiality, but its role in interpretation that is essential. Connections to the formal medium masks the ideological and lexical dimensions of post-digital challenges, effectively emphasizing materiality to the exclusion of both critical and normative modes adaptation to immanence and maintenance of familiar order.
