This artwork draws its inspiration from the seminal motion perception experiments conducted by Swedish psychologist Gunnar Johansson in the 1970s. At the heart of the piece is a TV screen displaying a looped video based on Johansson’s original “biological motion” study. The footage features point-light displays — isolated dots of light affixed to key joints of a human body, filmed in motion against a dark background. When the video plays, a fluid, unmistakably human form emerges from these sparse dots. But when the footage pauses, the figure dissolves into an almost unreadable scatter of points. This visual disappearance is not just aesthetic—it is essential to the scientific insight the artwork explores.
The TV screen is programmed to alternate between short bursts of motion and extended periods of stillness. This rhythm mirrors the interplay between perception and cognition: the viewer must wait for motion to resume in order to perceive the figure again. The 20-second pauses build tension and anticipation, but also foreground the fragility of perception—how easily meaning disappears when information is incomplete. In this way, the piece transforms a passive viewing experience into an active one. The audience is not just watching movement but participating in the very conditions that make movement comprehensible.
Scientifically, the piece references Johansson’s discovery that humans possess an extraordinary ability to detect biological motion from minimal cues. Even without outlines, textures, or facial features, our brains can reconstruct the form and movement of a living body from just a few moving dots. This has profound implications for our understanding of visual processing, suggesting that motion is a fundamental input for the perception of form. Johansson’s work laid the groundwork for decades of research in psychology, neuroscience, computer vision, and robotics.
By turning this research into a time-based artwork, the installation bridges science and aesthetics. It highlights how the brain’s perceptual systems can be both brilliant and fragile—able to make sense of almost nothing, yet helpless when the essential cue of motion is removed. The disappearing figure on the paused screen serves as a metaphor for this cognitive blind spot. Viewers find themselves searching for something they know is there but cannot perceive without the aid of motion. The piece turns scientific insight into an embodied experience.
Ultimately, this work challenges how we understand vision, identity, and presence. It asks: when does a body become visible? What makes something recognizably human? The fleeting visibility of the figure suggests that identity is not a static property but an event—a moment of coherence in time. Through a simple mechanism of play and pause, the piece invites us to reflect on how perception is a dynamic process, dependent on both stimulus and the observer’s engagement. In doing so, it transforms a foundational experiment in visual science into a poetic meditation on presence and invisibility.