'Grace taking form' re-animating piaget's concept of the sensori-motor through and with slow-motion video

Abstract

Inspired by Erin Manning's use of Marey's photography to explore time and movement, this article works with slow-motion video drawn from research with two-year olds. It takes a genealogical approach, considering how the medium of film has been implicated in colonising constructions of childhood. It then deploys Bergson's notion of 'grace taking form', making the case that video's unique capacity to attend to the virtual potential of movement can be used as a de-colonising methodology. Slowing-down video enlivens data in ways that resist interpreting behaviour through the logic of consciousness, giving credence to what Olsson calls a different 'bodily logic of potentiality'. The article ends with a slowed video-clip voiced by the author as an emerging response to the entanglement between film and child development theory in order to re-animate the sensori-motor as a relational mode of engagement with the world.