Moore, S., 2017.

Colliding realities: animating memories of feet and faces.

Award-winning animator Samantha Moore (University of Wolverhampton) will speak about the corporeal dimensions of memory in her animated documentary representations of the physiological and cognitive experiences of prosopagnosia (face-blind) and phantom limb collaborators.

Animation, used in a documentary sense, is generally agreed to well represent the internal: variously described as the subjective (Wells, 1997: 42), penetrative (Wells, 1998: 122) expressive (Honess Roe, 2009) or evocative (Honess Roe, 2013: 25) mode. This evocation of an internal state is often used to represent memory, and this paper will look at the ways in which corporeal memory is represented in animation practice, using the author's work on prosopagnosia and phantom limb syndrome (2015).

The concept of muscle memory is a pervasive one and despite recent a study which broadly debunks the idea (Gunderson, 2016) the kinesthetic sense of the body in space is hardwired into the cerebral cortex through the 'Penfield's homunculus' (cited in Ramachandran, 1998). Through working with people who had phantom limb syndrome we explored how their assumptions about, and memories of, their absent limb collided with their physical experience of their injury. Correspondingly in the work on animating prosopagnosia one of the recurring themes (in cases of acquired prosopagnosia) that emerged was one of memories of faces superseding the known but unrecognisable reality.

Scientists can explain how they think the brain works by mapping the cortex or understanding synaptic connection 'but they cannot convey how experience feels the way it does to us as individuals' (Ede, 2005: 3-4). The oneiric nature of animation allows idiopathic experiences of conflicting haptic ideas to inhabit the same space, and to convey that duality to the viewer. '... we recognize vision as embodied and representable not only in its objective dimensions as the visible skin of things but also in those subjective dimensions that give us visual gravity.' (Sobchack, 2004: 204).