Second Site!

http://www.doctorhugo.org/bodylanguagesequences/series5/index.html

I stumbled upon this site with the aid of "stumbleupon"--a nifty little add-on that my friend had plugged into Firefox. I'm pretty certain this Dr. Hugo Heyrman is the kind of guy you'd like to meet, but under really controlled conditions. I can see a dinner conversation spinning wildly in all directions with no end in sight!

(And what's with the "Dr. first name" like I know you and am introducing you to my kid?)

In any event, the work here is worth the minute or five it takes to browse through these body language "experiments." The idea here is that he sets up a series of clips that you can click through. Each click is a second or two long and looped, and focuses on a particular, quick, probably unconscious, gesture. The results are fairly interesting. There's a lot in this work about narrative choices--the story is in where one chooses to begin and end, not as much about the middle. That's why the persistence of consciousness can be such a bugaboo for some of us--it doesn't resolve well into something digestible that can be analyzed, played with, punched in the gut, whatever. It's always moving, until, like in Margaret Atwood's "Happy Endings," "John and Mary die."

What's so compelling about Dr. Hugo's little clips is they play with some of that need for making sense of what we do and say by chopping it into pieces and then hacking that into almost incompressible bits. So we get something less than human--a flurry of bizarre tics that, if you let them, can be downright hypnotic.