Eyot

http://www.last.fm/user/eyot08
The unconscious provides frames through which consciously perceived data is interpreted and evaluated. The task of art, music, literature, psychoanalysis and advertising, is to penetrate and manipulate these structures. The effectiveness of any of these fields has very little to do with conscious perception. The most blatant use of subliminals is of course found in advertising, but in art is goes a lot further back. The most usual technique is EMBEDDING of words or pictures in the ground of the advertisement, behind the figure (or obvious focal point). This technique was a favorite with 18th Century artists, and must later Dali, Escher etc. A subliminal imprint of the word SEX can even be found in a Rembrandt. This is the most common of a vocabulary of eight words (including CUNT, FUCK and DEATH) which are very frequently embedded in advertising copy. The word is either painted on a photoengraving plate with asphaltum and briefly immersed in acid, or lightly airbrushed into a photograph in hair, folds of clothing, etc., or written onto a transparent overlay, photographed alone at about 1/2,000 of a second, then double exposed over the art layout at around 1/100 of a second. The zenith of obscenity was reached in the daily newspaper photograph of Vietnam atrocities, which often had an extraordinary mosaic of SEX's scrawled subliminally over them. To sell war better? To make it more palatable? More erotic? The other technique used very often is incorporating ANAMORPHIC images into the copy. This is high distortion, often grotesque, and only at times consciously distinguishable. One of the earliest examples in art is Holbein's anamorphic skull in the Ambassadors (1533). Frequently this method of triggering unconscious response in advertising involves strange and distorted shadows in the ground.
Television and film have incorporated subliminals for a long time. They are presumed banned from television but are often so subtle that they escape censorship. A fairly recent example in film was the apparently innocuous Exorcise where the whole range of techniques was used, including death-mask embeds of two frames at 1/48 of a second. This was consciously visible to about 1/3 of the audience, and another 1/3 was vaguely aware of it upon questioning. But the group on whom the film showed most emotional impact were those who had not noticed it at all, i.e. those who had consciously repressed the images. Soundtracks are also especially important in management and control of movie audiences. Hitchcock ranked sound as more vital to the success of his suspense movies than his visual illusions.
It is often claimed that subliminal material does not really affect the subject. In fact it is true that the subtlety is difficult to specify in simple cause-effect terminology. But it can be shown that there is something going on in the unconscious by watching EEG and galvanic skin response meters, and retinascopes which measure the compulsive expansion/contraction of the retina, plus Mackworth camera which tracks the ultra-fast movements of the fovea across any scene. In addition the Poetzle Effect whereby people exposed to subliminal ads reveal their effectiveness much later by unconsciously choosing that brand out of a wide range, is statistically verified. Experiments with fovea cameras have shown that the fovea moves in a saccade from point to point in response to symbolizing content. Symbols involving death will pull the eye irresistibly towards a specific locus, and even sex has to run second in Westem culture in almost 100% of cases. Design elements - lines of movement or attention - also are vital in directing the fovea. Meaning is derived from the sequence of microsecond stops compulsively made by the fovea in its saccades. Change the sequence and the meaning changes, even though the frame content remains the same.