Will Luers contributes to current debates on AI by engaging with Jeffrey West Kirkwood's Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotics. Luers examines the parallels between AI and cinema technology as "thinking machines," both structured around intervals that produce perceptual and conceptual unities. What we have, in cinema and AI no less than human cognition, "is a reevaluation of the unity of consciousness."
We take for granted the layers of mechanized intervals that shape contemporary experience, just as we overlook the gaps between letters, words, and sentences when we read. We get from here to there while scrolling, reading, watching and listening and somehow we don’t fall apart in confusion. It seems humans are made this way, and technology has evolved around our ability to cognitively put the pieces of the world together again and again. Jeffrey West Kirkwood’s book, Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotics around 1900, provides a fascinating and deep exploration of the history and implications of this discrete nature of machine mediation, from the industrial to the digital revolutions, with implications for the coming artificial intelligence revolution. Kirkwood argues that the invention of cinema marks a critical technological and cultural pivot, transforming machine intervals of “stops, breaks, pauses, gaps” —previously considered artificial disruptions opposing human consciousness—into the fundamental mechanisms enabling the coherence of human perception itself.
How do we experience a movie as continuous? Kirkwood explores how the regularity of gaps between frames creates the illusion of movement and how discrete edited shots, especially through continuity editing, establish the immersive illusion of a cohesive story world. The author begins by examining early cinema's strobe effect, which disrupted viewer perception and caused cognitive disturbances. He highlights how this "flicker effect" became central to early critiques of cinema, as it unnaturally impacted human perception and cognition. The author then details the technological evolution that addressed these issues, emphasizing the critical improvement of introducing precise intervals between frames. Standardizing projection at 24 frames per second, coupled with a regular shutter that briefly casts the screen in darkness, transformed cinematic viewing. This innovation significantly reduced the flicker effect, facilitating smoother audience immersion into narrative worlds. Kirkwood argues that the maturation of cinema into an art form capable of seamless narrative immersion reoriented the scientific understanding of how discrete units of information give rise to the unity of consciousness. The societal concern with movies shifted from its physiological disturbance to a problem with the medium's very immersive quality, which too easily resembled our inner life. Critics debated the potential for cinema to introduce dangerous thoughts into the population through its seductive power, but they also began to consider the potential benefits of idle daydreaming. As the cinema experience improved, movies transitioned from cheap entertainment in shopping arcades to filling large theatrical halls with grand entertainment that lasted up to three hours. The succession of absences was no longer seen as something to avoid but instead became the conceptual foundation for the possibility of a “thinking machine.”
Kirkwood identifies in the theoretical writings of French filmmaker Jean Epstein an early insight into the role of the cinematic interval, which offers human consciousness not merely an extension of the senses but a novel machine intelligence through which to think. In his 1946 work The Intelligence of a Machine, Epstein examines cinema’s discrete and discontinuous mechanisms, proposing them as a framework for generating new continuities of thought and subjectivity. A passage from the chapter The Interchangeability of Continuity and Discontinuity encapsulates this idea::
"Discontinuity becomes continuity only once it has entered the movie viewer. It is a purely interior phenomena. Outside the viewing subject, there is no movement, no flux, no light from the mosaics of light and shadow that the screen always displays as stills. But within ourselves, we get an impression that is like all the other data of the senses, an interpretation of the object, that is to say, an illusion of ghosts." (Epstein 10)
Kirkwood emphasizes that the form of "discretized 'intelligence'" Epstein identifies in cinema is not exclusive to film alone. Rather, it developed alongside technologies traditionally viewed as distinct from analog media such as cinema. Kirkwood points out that cinema is analog, but in many ways it is proto-digital. The shutter gave birth to cinema as an art. And as an art, a cinema theory emerged. The cinema artist or director began to be evaluated on the artful techniques of manipulating the intervals between frames, shots, and sequences and not just on the filmed content. The manipulation of frames leads to the manipulation of speed (fast and slow motion) and the direction of time (reverse motion and repetition). The absence between frames and shots, gaps completed in the inner world of each viewer, points to the rich role of subjective association in the cinema experience. Public fears around cinema shifted to its psychological implications, its methods of fantasy, and its power to overtake inner life. "Discretization”, Kirkwood writes, “is the hallmark of artificiality, but it was also the primary gateway to consciousness as a scientific object of study." (Kirkwood 7)
The brain research from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that Kirkwood uncovers is fascinating in showing how technology led scientists to describe the unity of experience as a kind of illusion produced by the brain's activity, rather than some direct connection to reality itself. In the way cinema technology came to create a unified experience, the mystery of consciousness lies in how the physical brain unifies cognitive experiences despite receiving fragmented and filtered sensory signals. Electrochemical firings translate, filter, edit, and shape these inputs into the continuous character of consciousness—whether we are daydreaming, navigating a walk in the city, reading a novel or watching a movie. This new understanding led to a reevaluation of the unity of consciousness—not as a direct mirror of reality, but rather as a brain-crafted illusion. The epistemological structures underlying theories of mind in the 19th century were entirely revised. The machine processes that humans built into technology were found to be already part of the human operating system.
“Anxieties about how technologies infringe or destroy the territories of the uniquely human frequently demonstrate the degree to which our working models of the uniquely human are already entirely conditioned by these technologies.” (Kirkwood 172)
Digital media, like cinema, requires on/off logic, synthesizing binary signals into perceptual unities. A web page composed of text, images, and video is transmitted as packets of binary data, traveling across multiple internet paths to arrive at its destination, where a browser reassembles the parts into a cohesive whole. The "magic" of digital media, reminiscent of early cinema's spectral phenomena, now raises similar public concerns about its impact on human subjectivity. Issues such as misinformation, dissociative behaviors, and psychic isolation emerge, spark debates about the externalization of human processes and the effects of such discrete systems on psychic and social coherence. And yet, the feared artificial and inhuman processes of discretization underlie consciousness and the sense of self. This reframing does not dispel social anxieties of new technologies. It just points to the deeply entangled relationship between humans and their machines. Kirkwood calls the phenomenon of a mind produced through discretization the "semiotechnical subject." Humans are trained to think, seek meaning and have a reflective and imaginative inner life through technologies based on the interval. Reading, calculating, analyzing and observing are all processes that require a mind attuned to discrete units of sense data and signifying absences.
In the chapter “Discrete Reading,” Kirkwood reframes the act of reading not as an innate or natural process but as an historically specific, mechanized activity shaped by technological and psychological interventions. In late 19th century studies around reading, proto-cinematic tools such as the chronoscope and tachistoscope were used to measure the intervals involved in the subjective reading experience. Fragmenting reading into discrete frames of words reveals that the spaces between words, like the later intervals in cinema, are crucial to the process of meaning-making. Reading, long thought to be the bedrock of Bildung and subjective formation, shares with cinema a reliance on the mind’s ability to synthesize discontinuous elements and patterns into meaningful wholes. Bildung, with reading as the foundation of Enlightenment ideals of education, not only shaped intellectual development and cultivated a sense of inner coherence, but also reinforced the sense of an individual soul. Kirkwood persuasively argues that the educated mind depends on a semiotechnical logic of repetition and segmentation, the mechanical processes once perceived as threats.
“As the evolution of thinking about flicker demonstrated, perceptual continuity was the effect of bridging the gaps between stimuli. Conversely, the psychological, semiotic continuity that formed something like a human subject relied on a technics that bridge the gaps that form the basis for signification” (Kirkwood 43)
The idea of intervals involved in the construction of a coherent inner life challenges traditional humanistic assumptions about reading as a purely contemplative act. The rise of psychophysics—the scientific study of how physical stimuli generate sensations and perceptions—and proto-cinematic technologies designed to measure cognitive processes put into question the idea of a naturally unified self, revealing instead that subjective unity might emerge from mechanical and discrete operations.
Kirkwood reframes cinema history as an exemplary semiotechnical system, demonstrating how technical and artistic innovations intertwine to generate new scientific insights and further technological advances. Hugo Munsterberg, a pioneer in both psychotechnics and film theory in the early 20th century, emphasized that film’s ability to produce narrative coherence through discontinuities paralleled the brain’s own synthetic processes. Discrete frames, sequences, and scenes in cinema, when received by the viewer, were reassembled into a seamless narrative that offererd the continuity of character and story. Munsterberg, like Epstein, was an early cinema theorist who had the insight that cinema’s machine intervals, once considered a modernist shock to consciousness, actually provided a “representational order that at once affirmed the interiority and individual autonomy of the viewer.” (Kirkwood 124) Far from being merely a passive medium, cinema actively mirrored the mind’s operations, providing a heuristic for understanding how meaning and continuity could arise from fragmented inputs. The implications for Bildung are profound: rather than being a preexisting unity, the self is revealed as a construct formed through engagement with semiotechnical systems. The interplay between discrete operations and their synthesis in the psyche underscores the inseparability of such semiotechnical systems and education in shaping modern subjectivity.
The historical trajectory outlined in Endless Intervals resonates deeply with contemporary debates surrounding AI, education, and creativity. Just as cinema once disrupted humanistic ideals by exposing the mechanical processes of thought and narrative, AI technologies today challenge traditional conceptions of psychological coherence and the very ancient notion of a unique individual soul. Critics of AI in education often claim that its mechanistic nature erodes the integrity of human-centered practices like writing and reading. Yet Endless Intervals provides a framework for understanding how even the most humanistic activities have always been built on discrete, semiotechnical processes.
Generative AI models, such as language transformers, operate on principles similar to those of other discrete machines: they assemble fragments of data into patterns that resemble human thought and ideation. Kirkwood points out that computers and cinema technology are in fact made of analog flows of light and electricity, but their machine processes signify through discretization. Neural networks, loosely modeled on the on/off firings of the brain, train on vast datasets of text, sound, and image—discrete units of binary data—to output an imitation of human language, logic and media. While lacking a synthetic self or consciousness, AI technology reflects and amplifies the same pattern-recognition processes that shape the human mind. Rather than existing as an alien force, AI can be seen as the latest evolution of semiotechnical systems that have long underpinned Bildung, the cultivation of the self through education and cultural engagement. However, this seamless capacity for technological continuity presents ethical and aesthetic challenges, reminiscent of the public’s concerns during cinema’s early days. AI’s capacity to generate seemingly authentic outputs from data makes it an extraordinarily powerful medium. This same capability poses the risk of distorting human perception by obscuring the fact that these outputs are artificially constructed, thereby presenting fabricated experiences as if they were natural or 'real.' This poses profound ethical questions about how AI-generated art is consumed and understood: Are viewers engaging with the work of a signifying human-machine hybrid, or are they being passively absorbed into its illusion of authenticity?
Kirkwood opens with the provocative assertion that his book is 'about nothing.' It is a study built around the absences that have shaped the operation of machines from the 19th century to today. Without turning away from the negative and disruptive effects of discrete machines on society, culture, and the individual, the author reframes what we understand as “human” as something that emerges from a technological evolution. AI technologies exemplify this evolution with their extraordinary ability to learn, adapt, and signify internal distinctions in ways that parallel human cognition.
What is the human psyche beyond its subconscious processing of bits of sensory data? What is creativity? Is the concept of an individual soul a constructed illusion? Endless Intervals offers a crucial perspective to such perplexing posthuman questions: the interval makes the world. Embracing the interval, those discontinuities that underpin both human experience and machine operations, may be key to retaining a sense of humanity in the face of increasingly human-like machines. Artists, in particular, could use AI to explore startling new forms of assemblage, not only emphasizing the human role in constructing meaning from fragmented parts but also revealing how humanity itself is intricately intertwined with dynamic biological and technological processes. Such artistic practices could serve as a lens to examine the interplay between the organic and the synthetic, encouraging reflection on how these processes shape identity, creativity, and perception. How novelty will manifest in emerging forms of Al art remains an open and compelling question. By positioning the interval as central to both artistic and pedagogical practices, generative AI offers an opportunity to reinvigorate the spirit of Bildung—not as a static process of self-realization, but as an ongoing negotiation with the biological, semiotic, mechanical and synthetic processes of a cosmos. This perspective acknowledges that the human self is not separate from these systems but emerges through their interplay, creating infinite possibilities for understanding and creativity. This approach underscores a fundamental truth: all signification—whether in cinema, text, or AI-generated media—is built on structured absences and discontinuities, along with acts of the imagination that fill in the gaps. It is intervals all the way down, and it is human consciousness that continuously stitches the world back together.
Works Cited:
Epstein, Jean. The Intelligence of a Machine. Translated by Christophe Wall-Romana, Univocal Publishing, 2014.
Kirkwood, Jeffrey West. Endless Intervals: Cinema, Psychology, and Semiotechnics around 1900. University of Minnesota Press, 2022.