The Illusion of Continuity

The first time it was explained to me, Paul Virilio's Aesthetics of Disappearance kind of grabbed me. In a nutshell, it studies the nature of whatever it is that we omit whenever we record something, the perhaps infinite amount of unrecorded space between each photographic frame that remains unrecorded due to the slideshow nature of photography.  

The red line is what we see.

It reminds me of a kid asking his mom what color his guts are, and coming away disappointed because he understands that they will always be closed in, separated, in darkness, from him by a barrier that is very important to keep in one piece.  The mystery is essential and the answer lies only a few inches away.  You want to get at it, but a lot of things depend on the fact that you never will. And then you hear that the Japanese have created frogs with transparent skin, and that kind of puts everything on its head. Anyway, I began to think about it in math terms. If a film is a record of reality, and all we see in the film are select frames (thus omitting whatever comes between), the following would stand to reason:

Image (Illusion of Continuity) + Unrecorded Space (???) = Reality

But using some mathematical property that I can’t name - commutative property, maybe? - the following begs the question: after you’ve extracted 24 frames per second of reality, what can we call the unrecorded space? How much of it is there? Can you quantify it? Can you even divide time in any meaningful way (i.e. are we missing out on, say, 15 frames of reality per second?) in the first place? Or is it all just a reflection of the very natural need for the illusion of continuity?

Here’s the equation, rearranged:

Reality - Image = ???

Regardless of whether I’m thinking about this too hard, I remember it being very difficult not to imagine, for just a moment, about what a person accomplishes by removing the images from reality, as postulated above. Is burning a photograph you just took a way of returning to reality, from the unreality associated with using a picture as evidence of reality in the first place?

I don’t think so. Not exactly, anyway. It’s all a lot to process, and I don’t think that reality (the honest stuff, the stuff that disappears every second and is impossible to record) is understandable in simple mathematical terms. If it were, it would somehow take something away from what I like to call the Beauty of Life.

No, I’d like to believe that there’s no such thing as a reality we could ever figure out.  Not like the way you beat Donkey Kong. No, real life is more like Pac-man - a succession of increasingly difficult challenges that might end somewhere, level three hundred sixty nine, only nobody’s ever been good enough to make it there. It is so difficult that it exceeds whatever humans are capable of. For all general purposes, endless. Kind of like the asymptote to the line of the Ultimate - maybe we’ll keep getting closer, closer higher higher, flirting with each other as the X between gets smaller and smaller and of course we’ll never meet, we and The Ultimate.

And if I'm wrong, If we ever do, I bet it’ll be the Japanese who get there first.