"There is a superstition - or belief, or scientific truth supported by experiment - which says that cinema is the art of stimulating a part of the brain that normally functions during sleep, by bombarding it with static images juxtaposed so as to create the illusion of movement. Video, on the other hand, in which the image is liquid, is said to stimulate another part of the brain which functions only while the body is awake. Whether the distinction is scientifically valid or not is irrelevant here. What is interesting is the suggestion that we can intervene to provoke virtual images by using the brain's compensatory mechanisms. A group of people who are involved in manufacturing special effects for the Lucas company in Hollywood discussed with me the possibility of making "personalized" animated films exclusively out of such images. The principal obstacle is that the brain needs twenty or thirty seconds to process the first image, but once the first image is reconstituted the others can run off in animated series using the same basic pattern. We went further, though, and from these flux-images we imaged film sequences in which abstract animated images would provoke different responses in each one of us."
excerpt from Raúl Ruiz's Poetics of Cinema
