Before it died, a mouse was made to watch a great many films. From the recordings of its visual cortex taken while it watched, researchers built a program that computes how strongly the mouse's visual cells would respond to any image it is shown. On the screen, an animation plays: a cat and a mouse, chasing one another from beginning to end. They are flattened, blown apart, dropped from great heights — and in the next shot they are whole again. From the moment of its birth, animation as a medium has been testing and re-testing the boundary between life and death. The artist uses this visual-cortex program to watch the animation, then feeds the response back onto the image itself, altering it so as to excite the program further. Pixels are displaced, stretched, flattened — all of it carried out according to the program's own preferences and reactions.
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