The Institute for Predictive Images

Research Statement

Context

The Institute for Predictive Images is an art video fictionalizing a psychology experiment at the University of Lincoln. The experiment was collaboratively designed by me, cognitive neuroscientist Kirsten McKenzie, Psychology PhD candidate Heather Sunderland, and Fine Art undergraduate Kai Speed. The investigation explored body image as a multisensory representation, constructed by the brain-body, constituting the perception we have of our own appearance and supplying a sense of bodily ownership (Cash & Deagle, 1997). Body image encompasses consciously accessible internal images and associated feelings, influenced by social norms. We adopted a predictive processing (PP) account of body image, a theory suggesting all perception involves Bayesian prediction (Clark, 2016). In the design phase, we created stimuli – representations of alien creatures – asking participants to imagine embodying them. Initial findings suggest that those with elevated body image dissatisfaction tended to avoid embodying the most alien creatures, even when presented as essential for survival in the experiment.

The video, an individually authored artwork, combines essay film, Sci-fi, and the campus novel genres to explore philosophical issues excluded from empirical experimentation. It envisions Lincoln’s campus as part of a future institute sending an expedition into space to record life on distant planets. The artwork theorizes about images, bodies, and scientific knowledge by merging concepts from Deborah Levitt's (2018) writing on our contemporary audio-visual condition with ideas from psychology. Levitt claims that we are now more likely to understand images as ‘animatic’ rather than ‘filmic’ (Ibid, p.58). I assert body image to be animatic in Levitt’s sense. My video can be understood as an allegory of her theories, as supplemented by psychological concepts, but also as an enactment of these ideas, a performance - sometimes ethical - of the animatic image. Other theoretical resources drawn upon include critical posthumanism, and decolonial approaches (Wynter, 2003; Yusoff, 2018).

Research Questions

·  Can we build a theoretical bridge between Levitt's animatic image and theories in body image psychology? Does this bridge yield a coherent posthuman ethical stance?

·  Can the predictive processing framework be leveraged to support a critical reading of 18th-century European scientific voyages of discovery, one consonant with recent decolonial scholarship?

·  Can narrative form and audio-visual stylistic devices allegorise and perform these original theorizations?

Deborah Levitt's recent book, The Animatic Apparatus, diagnoses our contemporary condition as one where the distinction between reality and image has become fragile (Levitt, 2018, p.2). Techno-scientific capabilities manipulate reality at the atomic level and edit the building blocks of life through Crispr-Cas9 (Ibid, p.19). Concurrently, 'cultural simulation' has advanced: CGI, particularly with generative AI, allows anyone with a smartphone to create convincing effects. For Levitt, this means two things: life takes on the character of an image “[becoming] not a property that one has, or doesn't, but a site for intervention, production, poesis” (Ibid p.3). Secondly, as life becomes more ‘imagistic’, images develop increasing ‘vitality’ “able to give the appearance or illusion of life” (Ibid p.3). I contend that the psychological concept of body image aligns with the notion that life is increasingly image-like, and vice versa. The psychological view collapses the two concepts (image/reality). Body image is inherent to the body, being in no way an abstraction, or reflection of this physical reality. In other words, inherent to the psychological view, body image is of the body (produced by the brain-body), and necessary for embodiment, the sense of being a ‘lively’ body (Cash & Deagle, 1997). Consequently, from this perspective image and corporeal life are thoroughly intertwined, and, therefore, so it seems to me, body image provides a neat example of Levitt’s assertion that image and life are now largely indistinguishable. Undoubtedly this theoretical move, one that equates images-as-externalised-cultural-artefacts with images-as-internal-perceptions, positing them as isomorphic, is rather speculative, but it is entirely in line with Levitt’s approach. In fact, her “media ethology” (Levitt, 2018, p.5) involves tracking these isomorphisms across culture and scientific investigation; they are the very basis for her assertion concerning contemporary images per say i.e. that they possess an animatic character. Body image is an entirely consistent addition to Levitt’s varied list of examples mobilised to prosecute her case, from gene editing tools to the “virtual pop idol” Hatsune Miku (Ibid, 2018, p.92).

The video performs the blurred line between real life and images through diegetic ambiguity. The 3D figures, body scans of the psychology experiment team, have an uncertain status in the narrative. These 3D actors may straightforwardly represent the expeditionists or they may represent images, avatars created for interstellar travel using an undisclosed 'projection technique’. The narrative never resolves; the 3D models symbolize both image and 'real' body, echoing the image-body hybridity of actual body images. Also, in a more general point, the 3D figures, as well as many of the landscapes in the video are manipulated (sometimes created) utilizing Unreal Engine and Blender, a reflexive choice enacting the new image-vitality enabled by these tools (open source ‘3D creation suites’).

Another way Levitt discusses the new indistinction of image and life is by charting the ontological ‘ungrounding’ that accompanies it (Ibid. p109). Our perception of 'reality' (material life) no longer adheres solely to a traditional ontological framework, one composed of a bedrock foundation and fixed categories, something Levitt argues is characteristic of ‘cinematic images’ but is seen as a malleable appearance to be transformed (Levitt, 2014, p.125). Levitt terms this state “an-ontological” (Levitt, 2018, p.4).

The prevalent view of images as vital contributes to this modern an-ontology. Images appear life-like because they have severed ties with a singular reality. This is why Levitt contends that animation, narrowly defined as "a medium," (Ibid, p.58) epitomizes the entire image regime she describes. Animation, hypothetically at least, does not rely upon indexicality, “[w]here the indexical ideology of cinema posits a necessary relation between the image and, in Cavell's terms, the world, animation must always create a world” (Ibid, p.59). Even when the animator deploys a realistic style, this avoids the indexicality of cinema, being a simulation built from the ground up, utilising its own resources, whether individual pen-strokes, or pixels (Levitt, 2014, p.130).

Empirical findings on body image support Levitt's idea that images no longer index a singular, fixed reality; body images are adaptable, not constrained by a predetermined physical form (van der Hoort, Guterstam, and Ehrsson, 2011). In Virtual Reality, body swap illusions demonstrate the flexibility of body image, allowing for the perception of altering physical features or swapping bodies with a digital avatar (Serino, Polli, and Riva, 2019). The success of these transformations is measured by the participant's ability to feel ownership of the modified body. This flexibility in body image also enables changes in physical shape, such as amputees adapting to the loss of a limb. PP explains why this might be the case. Perception, according to this framework, anticipates the world, including one's own body, based on prior knowledge and experience. Self-generated models, therefore, largely shape our perceptions. This contrasts with the view that sees perception to be passive, as the world imprinting itself on the brain (Clark, 2016, p.13). Unlike this confirmatory view PP opens the door to understanding perception as adaptable, and generative. When it comes to the brain-body perceiving itself (as in body image) it is possible to alter that prediction simply by changing or rewiring the incoming sensory information (Ibid, p.197).

The video connects the question of indexicality to body image, intertwining image ontology and body psychology. The script traces this conceptual fusion, especially in those sections where one member of the team quizzes the others, at different stages during the mission, about their embodiment. These questions are inspired by those asked in actual body image experiments, an incorporation of scientific vocabulary into the Sci-fi scenario. The focus in these sequences is on how the team copes with predictively driven transformations into alien forms. They find that their sense of embodiment can flex in multiple ways, is not constrained to the ‘standard’ human body-map. These sections implicitly argue that body image lacks a fixed indexical referent. Also, as I have made clear above, the status of the 3D actors within the video is undecidable: it is never confirmed whether they are representations of real bodies or representations of images (digital avatars created to be projected to other planets). The point being that what goes for bodies also goes for image-artifacts; both have become decoupled from the notion of a singular referent.

These sections, then, articulate the video’s thesis: embodiment and contemporary image-artefacts both participate in Levitt’s animatic regime to the extent that they are the result of acts of poesis, or (self) making, they are not bound to the re-production of a pre-existing reality.

I have argued that perception-as-prediction allows flexibility, but the predictive machinery often leads to perceiving a rigid and singular reality (Kesner, 2014, p.3). Again, prior experience and knowledge are key. We tend to 'see' based on past experiences, even if biased (Hung 2023). PP, therefore, provides an account of why human perception and conception might well contain biases. Hung’s study investigates prejudice including racism, both conscious and unconscious, and therefore provides a bridge between PP and various anti-exclusionary theories, including those that posit the scientific endeavour itself to be vulnerable to prejudicial distortion (Haraway, 1997). My video explores the notion that 18th-century scientific voyages of discovery, as they were closely tied to colonialism, can be said to have exhibited biases, ones already charted by decolonial scholarship such as Wynter (2003) and Yussof (2018). My video explicates these existing decolonial critiques utilising the vocabulary of PP, as contained within Hung’s account of prejudice.

I use images from an anatomy atlas (Albinus, 1747), produced at the peak of European colonial activity, to generate a sequence which homes in on an incongruous detail; the engraver decorated some of his depictions with a rhinoceros, a displacement of an animal from the global South into an arcadian European landscape. This compositional incongruity symbolises those violent displacements constituting colonialism, whereby bodies, human and non-human, were extracted and monetized. Epistemologically speaking, the colonisers, including scientists, were unable to view the new lands they encountered independently from existing categories. Those peoples, other biota, and geological materials could not be viewed independently of the category ‘resource’. In PP terms this failure amounts to perception and knowledge being determined by a particularly resilient prior: any entity is a thing to be used and traded.

This moment is an appropriate one to discuss the video’s use of a refrain from Bach’s The Musical Offering, specifically the Ricercar a 6. This composition was begun in 1747, the same year that Albinus published his atlas. Bach’s music is associated with the Enlightenment, characterised by its mathematical, or scientific qualities. His work is also often described as cosmic, or celestial (Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, 2018). Given these associations, the piece appeared to be a fitting choice.  Additionally, the musical phrase exudes intrigue, serving as an entry point into the elliptical narrative of my video.

Levitt's work has an ethical dimension, suggesting that our contemporary an-ontological state can be progressive, can challenge socio-political norms (Levitt, 2018, p.109). Her stance, I think, aligns with critical posthumanism, which contends that problematic norms stem from the humanist tradition (Braidotti, 2013, p.13). This tradition implicitly presents a white European, cis-male, and heterosexual image of humanity, with further exclusions related to body image (Klee and McKenzie, 2023). Critical posthumanism also challenges the strict distinction between humans and non-human entities (Haraway, 2016, p.134). Posthuman thinkers contest hierarchical and isolationist human definitions, revealing their inadequacy in relation to the true ontological nature of reality. Rather than distinct, hierarchically ordered individuals, reality is presented as a condition of self-organising flux (Braidotti, 2013, p.3). These thinkers suggest ethical gestures, offering glimpses into this flux, can provide moments to defy norms and foster changes in thought and action (Braidotti, 2020, p.164). Levitt argues that such gestures can emerge in media representations. (Levitt, 2018, p.123).

I have argued that, within the PP framework, psychology's understanding of body image mirrors Levitt's animatic image—blurring categories of corporeality and image, and importantly, that body image is not indexically fixed but flexible. The video, by tacitly endorsing this view, makes this truth accessible to audiences, empowering them to challenge problematic humanist norms. The video's ethical gesture occurs in the narrative and through animated transformations of the 3D characters. The expeditionists’ travel to other planets taking advantage of the flexibility of body image to project themselves far beyond our solar system, but also to merge with the alien critter(s) they meet. They adopt a tentacular embodiment and at times an oceanic fluidity. In so doing they slough off any conventionally human form, but they also become a networked entity, part human part alien. This is presented, eventually, in a positive light: a “fair deal”, a renewal of experience, and knowledge.

The ethical revelation is also enacted at the level of direct-perception, by employing two experiential illusions within the video-form. The hollow mask illusion and an audio illusion, using 'sine-waves' for an alien voice, are incorporated. Sine-waves are used by psychologists investigating speech recognition (Davis, nd). In these experiments a section of speech is subject to compression, leaving a sentence as a collection of apparently random whistles, groans and pops. But these sounds retain enough information that the speech in the original recording can be recovered. In the video, I provide strong cues - subtitles - which help the audience to hear the sense in the sine-wave. The subtitles prompt the correct ‘language prediction’. Encountering the illusion exposes the predictive mechanism, providing an affective appreciation of the relationship between sensory noise, sense-making through priors, and, importantly, the potential for alternative perceptions. It reveals the malleability of all perception, particularly the self-perceived body, emphasizing that individuals don't represent fixed categories. The optical illusions in the video exemplify a posthuman ethical gesture, offering an experience of the contingency of humanist norms and a glimpse into the protean potential of reality.

Methods

The video emerged from an interdisciplinary process, creating image stimuli for a psychology experiment. In this praxis (Nelson, 2013), connections between contemporary image theory and psychology were made. The video's script development, audio image gathering, 3D simulation, and editing allowed me to refine the theoretical framework through practical acts of doing-knowing (Nelson, 2013).

Impact

The video exhibited at Lincoln Arts Centre (Nov 2023) will tour three venues in 2024: the Collection, Lincoln, and Steam Works gallery, London are confirmed. Each screening includes an art-science workshop for young people (ages 16 to 24) with the primary goal of boosting body confidence and reducing dissatisfaction. We believe that conveying the science of body image through artistic means, such as watching the video and engaging in discussions, facilitates a more imaginative and personalized understanding. This engagement provides an initial step toward positive changes in attitudes and well-being. Encouraging feedback from the first screening-workshop supports our optimism for these outcomes.

Bibliography

Albinus, B. S. (1747) Tabulae Sceleti et Musculorum Corporis Humani. Leiden, Greek Print London (1749), Translated into English, London (1752).

Braidotti, R. (2013). The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Braidotti, R. (2020). 'Metamorphic Others and Nomadic Subjects'. In D. Byrne-Smith (Ed.), Science Fiction: Documents of Contemporary Art (pp. 161-166). Whitechapel Gallery, London: The MIT Press.

Cash, T. F., & Deagle III, E. A. (1997). 'The nature and extent of body‐image disturbances in anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa: A meta‐analysis'. International Journal of Eating Disorders, (22), 107–126. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1098-108X(199709)22:2<107::AID-EAT1>3.0.CO;2-J.

Clark, A. (2016). Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind. New York: Oxford University Press.

Davis, M. (n.d.). Sine-wave speech. MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge. Retrieved from https://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/people/matt.davis/sine-wave-speech/

Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience. Duke University Press: London.

Hung, T.-W. (2023). Why Human Prejudice is so Persistent: A Predictive Coding Analysis. Social Epistemology, 37(6), 779-797. DOI: 10.1080/02691728.2023.2237942

Kesner, L. (2014), 'The Predictive Mind and the Experience of Visual Art', Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01417

Klee, S., & McKenzie, K. (2023). Embodiment and Nomadic Subjectivity: A Speculative Report. In C. Daigle & M. Hayler (Eds.), Posthumanism in Practice. Bloomsbury Academic: London.

Levitt, D. (2014), 'Animation and the Medium of Life: Media Ethology, An-Ontology, Ethics', Inflexions, 7, 'Animating Biophilosophy', pp. 118-161. Available at: www.inflexions.org.

Levitt, D. (2018). The Animatic Apparatus. Winchester: Zero Books.

Nelson, R. (2013). Practice as Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. (2018, December 1). ‘Bach, the Universe and Everything’ [Podcast]. Retrieved from https://oae.co.uk/bach-the-universe-and-everything-podcast/

Serino, S., Polli, N., & Riva, G. (2019), 'From avatars to body swapping: the use of virtual reality for assessing and treating body-size distortion in individuals with anorexia', J. Clin. Psychol., 75, 313–322. doi: 10.1002/jclp.22724

van der Hoort, B., Guterstam, A., & Ehrsson, H. H. (2011), 'Being Barbie: The size of one’s own body determines the perceived size of the world', PLoS ONE, 6(5), e20195.

Wynter, S. (2003), 'Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation--An Argument', CR: The New Centennial Review, Volume 3(3), pp. 257-337.

Yusoff, K. (2018). A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Peer Reviews

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response to what follows:

Review 1: Accept submission subject to minor revisions of written statement.

The work adeptly navigates the interplay between representation and embodiment, exploring the role of the animatic image in sense perception in a dynamic and nuanced manner. It positions itself fluidly between these two poles, transforming the avatar beyond a mere unembodied image, while simultaneously interrogating the historical contexts of scientific representation and colonial endeavours of extractive reclamation. The author effectively grapples with the complexities surrounding the body as an 'objective' singular vision, challenging conventional modes of visualization and existence. Embedded within this exploration is an ethical dimension, highlighting the necessity of grounded connections within representation, framing the act of seeing as embodied rather than possessive.

The utilisation of 3D software to craft the images expands Levitt’s notion of 'an-ontology', blurring the lines between material bodies and digitally rendered representations. This ambiguity accentuates the visual and theoretical intricacies of indexicality. Particularly striking was the use of 3D technology to depict the sea, visually underscoring the concept. The stratification of the sea into layers symbolizes 'seas' in the plural sense, while poetically evoking the undulating motion of waves, imbuing the representation with a sense of embodied presence. The philosophical engagement with the implications of vision-perception-being through video technology is inspiring from a critical standpoint. There is much potential in the exploration of video and its use of optical illusions as a "posthuman ethical gesture." Similarly, the use of the sine-wave to unmask the predictive encounter with language was another example of using the audio-visual technology in this critical way, as well as the use of the animated soundwave at the beginning. There was no mention on the choice of using Bach in the soundtrack, which I felt needed an explanation.

One aspect that I found lacking clarity was the attempt to establish a "theoretical connection between Levitt's animatic image and theories in body image psychology." While Levitt's animatic image and a coherent posthuman ethical stance are clearly articulated, the connection to body image psychology appears less robust within the video. Although I found the work highly inspiring, I remained uncertain about its relationship to body image psychology. Additionally, I am not entirely convinced that the "predictive processing framework can effectively support ... a historical understanding of scientific knowledge acquisition." While the video successfully links the animatic image to embodiment and effectively integrates critical perspectives from decolonial scholarship into its image-use, I found myself unsure about how the predictive processing framework in particular, contributes to fostering a historical understanding.

Overall, I found the work compelling and well-executed, with only minor areas where further clarity or convincing connections were needed.

Review 2: Accept submission for publication with no amendments.

Drawing on Deborah Levitt’s animatic image theory, Steve Klee’s ‘Institute of Predictive Images’ art video offers a glimpse into posthumanist realities and body-image experiments using a combination of computer simulated imagery, voice-over narration and extraterrestrial interviews to study the effectiveness of predictive processing of images and perceptibility. Klee combines interdisciplinary studies and new media to deliver an intriguing essayistic narrative that questions activated bodies and existence. He points to ontological insecurity and perceptible variances in body image representation that require reframing to accurately serve the biopolitics of our time. 

This visual allegory partners with nature, archival ephemera, sci-fi tropes, audio illusions and digital avatars to create a set of observations on the possibility and performance of simulated objects to affect real life tensions of body image psychology. These collaborations create critical interventions in digital embodiment; abstractions - fragments - pixelations - and sound waves, initiating performance, aliveness and transformations to create protean bodies. His companion research asserts a manageable set of goals intended to activate the theoretical framework and demonstrates how digital art might motivate new practical applications to the self-perceived body. 

Klee’s images are stark and clinical using monochrome high-def digital media that is staged in a disparate visual environment that highlights its unreality; one can’t help but feel the simulated nature of the objects shown. The absence of color in his work leads the viewer back to the voice-over narration, which synthesizes his probe into a network of primary frameworks, supportive lenses and poignant inquiries. His core questions follow how the images slip; altering, merging and enhancing his life surveys. He goes further to question how these images may exist as networked entities that decenters humanist singularity and fixedness. 

The multi-voice narration leads the viewer through the image-reality simulation, and activates the objects to enliven the performance of this experiment. The text uses repetition to emphasize direction; “prosthesis is primary, prosthesis is primary,” and encourages the alien life to “embody the body” to draw us closer to the language code of this experiment. The narration enlivens perception and permits time for pause and reflection, and at the same time invites the viewer to consider potential risks of the predictive images to misguide and create disillusionment. 

What is at stake is whether predictive processing is the most effective framework to discover new findings about self-perception and body ambiguity through experiments in digital embodiment to achieve the position that “individuals don’t represent fixed categories.” Should this video circulate outside of the institution, the core message could have positive results in therapeutic settings or media platforms to promote a multiverse of body representation perceptibilities that are now knowable and less ambivalent.

What Klee achieves is a quiet unraveling of the ontological uncertainty of predictive images and a greater awareness of flexibility in the images’ vitality and performative nature. When the PP framework merges and performs digital embodiment with bodies, anima and aliens an otherness emerges to keep the viewer curious and the reader questioning.

All reviews refer to original research statements which have been edited in response.