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Viewer Discretion is Advised: Flicker in Media, Medicine and Art

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A Media Epigraphy of Video Compression

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Abstract

Video compression can exert dangerous and violent effects on human bodies. Following flicker, a visual disturbance that results from the compression of moving images, this chapter explores entanglements between unruly bodies and disorderly images, focusing on the interplay between medicine, electrical infrastructure, and visual media. At the heart of this chapter is a neurological condition known as photosensitive epilepsy, which urges us to seek out a richer historical account of video compression that heeds its corporeality: the harmful and gratifying bodily sensations that compressed moving images can provoke, the queerness of dysfunctional media, and the sensory politics of standards and infrastructure. In conversation with disability studies and queer phenomenology, I probe the media culture of neurology to show how people with photosensitive epilepsy, along with various light-emitting and light-projecting devices, have been central to the formation of this medical field. I then examine the influence that neurological research has had on the work of a number of experimental film artists, offering a critical analysis of several works in which compressed and flickering images play a leading role. These exchanges ripple through mainstream audiovisual spaces as well as marginal paracinematic objects like epilepsy warnings and broadcasting guidelines for the prevention of flicker.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    United States of America v. John Rayne Rivello 2017, Document 1. The case was dropped by federal prosecutors in November 2017.

  2. 2.

    In March 2008, a message board operated by the Epilepsy Foundation of America was targeted by attackers who posted hundreds of messages with flashing attachments.

  3. 3.

    The International League against Epilepsy suggests the term “visual-sensitive.” Some sources, e.g. Saleem et al. (1994), estimate photosensitivity affects as many as 5–10% of epilepsy patients.

  4. 4.

    Apologia 45.5.

  5. 5.

    Panayiotopoulos (2017) has recently objected, however, that the potter’s wheel in Apuleian and Galenic times was solid rather than spoked, and would thus not have produced the intermittent flickering light normally associated with seizures.

  6. 6.

    Also note lunaticus, “lunatic” as another term for epileptic that links it to the lunar cycle (Chaudhary et al. 2011).

  7. 7.

    Gastaut’s research is fascinating not least because it presents early neurological theories of film, distinguishing “emotionally neutral” films from those with a capacity to elicit psychic reactions and proposing, for example, measurable brainwave indicators for the notion of “identification” with characters on screen.

  8. 8.

    For some similar cases, see, among numerous others, Klapetek 1959; Fischer-Williams et al. 1961; Mawdsley 1961; Pantelakis et al. 1962; Charlton and Hoefer 1964; Jeavons and Harding 1970; Andermann 1971.

  9. 9.

    In 1964, 55 cases were reported in Europe versus only 3 in the United States (Charlton and Hoefer 1964).

  10. 10.

    A notable exception is video game publisher Ubisoft who made a public commitment to prevent material likely to cause harm after a single Nintendo DS-related incident in 2007. The release of the game WipEout distributed by Sony was delayed in 2008 following a failed photosensitivity test, suggesting that voluntary screenings are perhaps not entirely unheard of in the videogame industry.

  11. 11.

    Bridget Crone (2017) is among the few who fully acknowledge their importance in the film’s making.

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  1. Faculty of Humanities, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Marek Jancovic

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Jancovic, M. (2023). Viewer Discretion is Advised: Flicker in Media, Medicine and Art. In: A Media Epigraphy of Video Compression. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33215-9_5

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