A video showing every painting on display at MoMA

I saw this and thought of our class. There's something fascinating about being shown so many images in rapid succession. Check it out.

a thought...

Nifty movement link

http://www.allmyfaves.com/blog/weekly-faves/are-you-artistic-or-logic-maybe-both/

I'm no sure about the artistic/logic dichotomy that this page talks about, but after a few of my friends and I had stared at this for a while, some noticed that they could influence which direction the figure turned based on what types of things they thought of. I noticed that it changed when I moved my head. Check it out, tell me what you guys think.

WHAT we SEE...what WE feel...

Since taking Lizzie’s Feeling brain course I have become obsessed with the mirror neural system and focused my conference work on emotion regulation. It’s only natural that Stafford’s chapter “Mimesis Again,” would prompt me to write my blog post about its relevance to visual communication and perception. Mirror neurons are potentially a neural correlate to empathy. This is all very intriguing to me being that I have an over active mirror neural system. I'm extremely empathetic to others. Lizzie brought to my attention in one of our conferences so I began researching it. I wanted to learn how I could control being too sensitive or crying all of sudden and not knowing (consciously) the exact reason behind it.

The neural organization of the emotional brain has infused the linguistic study of the role of mimicry. Mimesis orients beings both animals and humans. Identifying with another begins with involuntary shared emotion. As social beings we bounce off one another. Our perceptions of pleasure and pain are worked on day to day. We are moved to either draw experience in, making it intimate or refute it, making it distant. Our visual communication is essential to how we interact in and with the world.
Emotions are part of self-regulating homeostasis. The development of emotions starts at birth, activated consciously as well as sub-consciously. The most dramatic changes occur in prenatal development, infancy and childhood. From the moment they are pushed out of their mother’s womb they express emotion, typically they are crying and screaming. The first distinction a person can identify in a baby’s emotional state is between positive and negative affect; meaning whether they are content and happy expressed through a smile or whether they are sad or upset expressed through a pouty face or crying. Many important emotion regulatory skills and strategies are developed during the first five years of a child’s life. The emotional environment in which a child is raised can enhance or interfere with their ability to learn to regulate emotion and function with others.
In the first few months of their infant’s life, mothers claim to have the ability to differentiate between their ranges of emotions. The primary emotions are most likely discernible at this stage, happiness, interest, surprise, sadness, fear, anger and pain. Anger and pain become increasingly easily distinguished from each other when the baby is around seven months or so. For the most part after infancy emotional expression is learned from others, through observation and imitation.

When a mother and baby are interacting usually exchanging expressions, the baby is more often than not simply responding to the mother’s initial expressions. Say if the mother differed to a frown as opposed to a smile or spoke in a harsh tone of voice the baby would not automatically recognize this emotion as anger. The baby would identify that this tone of voice is un-pleasurable or very different from what they are accustomed to. Social referencing studies have proven that infants can sensibly interpret the emotional expression of their mother. Social referencing is defined as a process characterized by the use of one’s perception of other persons’ interpretation of this situation to form one’s own understanding of the situation. Ambiguous situations, are well studied i.e. reactions to strangers or reactions to strange toys. When a baby comes in contact with a stranger for the first time they will usually look at their mother’s current expression so they know how to act in this situation. If the mother reacts positively to the stranger, so will the baby. But, if the mother ignores the stranger then the baby will not react positively to the stranger.

Emotional experience originates with autonomic nervous system arousal. Sometimes emotion precedes cognition, sometimes emotion is preceded by cognition. These two systems work together. The autonomic nervous system is aroused by prominent change in this person’s world. An environmental event, the individual’s actions, memories or actions of others. Negative emotionality does not always stem from self-related experiences.

In social interactions indirect induced anger can result in disregulated behavior, behavioral constriction, or concern for the person or persons expressing the anger, depending on the child’s coping method. Children who experience sympathy frequently try to assist others in distress; in contrast, children who are anxious or distressed in reaction to others’ negative emotions often avoid dealing with the distressing situation or may even respond aggressively. Some children are able to deal with anger, aggression, and anxiety in a constructive manner in social contexts, while other children have difficulty regulating their emotional reactions and emotion-related behaviors.

The forms we see all around us mirror the deep structure of the cosmos. It is our innate cognitive proclivity to mimic and to respond to features of the ambient that correspond to our neural architecture. Stafford states that imitation may even trigger patterns among individuals in a process akin to culture, meaning cross-generational copying of social interaction.

Motion is an intrinsic component of emotion. Arnheim tells us that motion is the strongest visual appeal to attention. There is a mirror system for movement and action comprehension. I believe filmmakers are also masters of mimesis just as painters Hogarth and Greuze. I attended a film screening of “Kingdom of Heaven,” for my art history lecture and Ridley Scott definitely recreated the historical war scenes over Jerusalem between Christians and Muslims, to the T. They were so realistic; the mimicry of these actual events was phenomenal and evoked the appropriate emotions. Everyone’s perception is different, based on their past experiences or knowledge of a given subject matter. However, when people are getting killed left and right, in gory depictions with blood is gushing everywhere, we can expect to have similar feelings about what we are viewing. That is unless the person sitting next to me watching the same film is a masochist.

Perception is a moving process that activates a reaction to a stimulus. This is due to vision being animate, a bodily sampling of one’s changing surroundings that locates the viewer in a particular territory. We imitate and internally as well as externally re-create. This is true on so many levels and across many mediums and it just hit me this second fashion is just like that a cycle, everything is recycled and coming back into style slightly modified. Whoa I could go for days with this one, let me know if your are interested in reading my fifty page conference paper regarding this topic. Hahaha

A Little of This, a Little of That, a Little bit of Nothing

My goodness folks it’s happened again. The sun came out, the dresses were put on, the beer snuck its way…well…out and now there are only a few precious weeks left. Now, how did this happen? And for god’s sake, why? Though I have no serious or scientific answer I can hypothesize it has something to do with the heat, because according to Wertheimer a higher body temp leads to a speedier perception of time. This however has nothing to do with anything, because it is quasi conference time and nothing makes sense anymore.

This weeks reading threw me for a bit of a loop, because Arnheim didn’t talk about paintings! (enough). The chapter did however remind me of the various motion games I’ve played over the years, like that tunnel at Ripley’s Believe it or Not where you approach it and can plainly see that there is a bridge suspended through a tunnel which is rotating, however the minute you step on to the bridge you have to brace your self to fall because you a sure the bridge is rotating! Upon approaching the tunnel the larger object is the tunnel, which is in obviously in motion, while the bridge is as stationary as the floor you are standing on. However when you become associated with the bridge you lose the perspective of its relation to the floor and associate it with the walls surrounding it thus it appears to be spinning. Or when you are on a train and are sitting backwards to the direction of movement it becomes very easy to allow your eyes to release the job of watching the some what nauseating scenery go by and suddenly your are moving forward! It feels something akin to watching a scene in a movie shot by a poorly trained steady cam operator, your gut kind of wrenches because the movement you are perceiving is not correct to according to the settings in which you exist.

I suppose this Arnheim chapter was a little difficult for me because I have become so accustomed to his use of paintings as examples, that thinking about the human body in motion was shocking. I tried to think of mobile pieces I had seen in the past (Calder?), in reference to his mention of statues on pedestals, however I was at a loss. However I do recognize the importance of being able to navigate a statue or large sculptural piece in your own time, if the David was on a rotating base there would constantly be hoards of tourists running around and around just trying to get a good look at his eyes. Keeping art stationary, in this case, gives us the ability and the authority to take as much time as is needed to understand this angle or that.

On the subject of movement in painting Livingstone was enlightening if terribly brief. I wish that her chapter had investigated more artists and had delved deeper in to the application of equiluminance and color contrast in painting, print, and photography. Which reminds me, many of the texts we have been reading have thrown a kind of wrench in my head about photography. How do you all feel in terms of the break down we’ve been learning about as applied to painting/drawing/sculpture, applies to photography? More importantly (for me) how does the artist’s hand show in a photograph? In a painting, it could be said, we respond to the abstraction of a familiarity, or perhaps we respond to the amount of work we can see went into that piece, the time and training. Does that come across in a photo? Or do we respect (or not) photography, more now than ever before, because it seems like anyone could do it well enough?

The Stafford reading is directly related to my conference project for neuroscience, but I think I’ll save that for conference.

Movement

Livingstone’s discussion of the way advertisers manipulate our what and where systems in order to force us to pay more attention to what their ad says was both interesting, and a little off-putting to me. The tactic of disorienting one of the systems so we have to try harder to figure out what the distorted text says and, thus, spend more time looking at it and taking in what it says, is fairly ingenious, particularly since spending that time isn’t a conscious decision on our parts. Yet, the unfortunate downside to this tactic is that often the text, particularly equiluminant text, is unpleasant to look at. I know from personal experience that if a product’s ad is actively painful to look at, as much equiluminant text is, I am less likely to seek that product out, regardless of how much I absorb about the product while looking at its unfortunate ad. I admire the advertisers’ inventiveness and the insight involved in figuring out how to exploit our visual systems, but I have to wonder if their own methods aren’t backfiring on them.

Since I am doing my conference work on ballet, it is less than surprising that I was fascinated by many of the points Arnheim raised in his chapter. Aside from his discussions of dance, I really enjoyed much of his discussion of how we contextualize movement and how we see it in relation to everything else around us. His descriptions of experiments where a room spins around a stationary chair, during which the observer sitting in the chair experiences a “sensation that the chair is turning…so compelling that the observer will fall unless he is tied down” (379), reminded me of sitting on a stationary train while another train goes by out the window. There is something so compelling about the sight of the windows of an adjacent train whizzing past that fools me nearly every time. I almost invariably have to look out of a window across the aisle to see whether we have, in fact, started moving without me realizing it. Even though, like the observer in the experiment, all of my kinesthetic sensations indicate that the train I’m sitting on is not moving, the visual cues are so convincing that I have to double check.

I was also fascinated by Arnheim’s discussion of our visual hierarchy, simply because I had never thought about how I categorize things before. As he so astutely points out, we see things based on a hierarchical order of dependence: “[t]he mosquito is attached to the elephant, not the elephant to the mosquito. The dancer is a part of the stage setting, not the stage setting the outer rim of the dancer” (380). It honestly would never have occurred to me to think of the mosquito/elephant relationship any other way, but once he pointed it out it seems bizarre that this is the case. And I have to wonder if this is a natural tendency or something that we just pick up on when we are very young. And if it’s a natural tendency, where on earth did it come from? Is it just another mechanism we have adapted to cope with and make sense of the world around us? Or does it serve a greater purpose?

Finally, I really enjoyed all of Arnheim’s discussion of dance, but particularly when he pointed out that “[t]he movement of the dancer can be more extensive than that of the actor, whose visual behavior is subservient to speech” (408). One thing I have noticed over the course of my conference work is just how much dancers use specific, carefully planned movements to convey extremely complex themes and situations. I realize this sounds obvious when stated so simply, but understanding to what extent this is the case has been incredibly eye opening. In depriving themselves of speech, dancers are forced to compensate with their bodies, to draw upon familiar gestures and shapes and distort them or make them their own in order to communicate. They create entire stories, entire characters out of movement, allowing their bodies to speak for themselves.

Movement

A couple days ago I came across this photograph (Miss Grace, 1898 Clarence H. White) and its peculiarity has intrigued me ever since. The slight tilt, the flattening of dimensionality (with the exception of the legs), and the blurring of the face makes the photograph at once captivating and disorientating.

While the floor and wall appear to be a continuous plane, a tension arises between the askew carpet and the dark baseboard band so that our perception alternates between the two dimensions. Against this restless motion of the background, the languid young girl is suspended diagonally across the photograph. She appears cradled within the nook of the sofa and yet mirroring the continuous planar effect of the floor and wall, her body seems to be on the same dimension as the sofa. And while this similarly tense movement between the background layer and the girl/sofa layer is occurring, the girl’s legs, positioned just below and to the right of the center, arrests all movement. Arnheim explains that “a moving framework imparts action to the whole setting and the objects it contains, and it can translate timelessness into active resistance to motion.” And so the girl’s legs are perceived not as outside the dimensions of motion, but appear as resistant, petrified against motion.

Aside from the disorientating movement, the girl’s unfocused face is puzzling. Compared to the defined gilt edges of the sofa, the girl’s head hovers, seemingly separate from her body, in an almost transparent haze. Her head is lowered and she appears wholly absorbed in her book. But even though she is distant, we are drawn to her face seeking within it any signs that we may connect with. Rather, the sofa offers up its own clarity. Stafford asks a key question, “How do we make sense of the fact that subjectivity emerges when the brain-mind simultaneously produces not just self-images and the organisms response to its surroundings but…an organism in the act of perceiving and responding to some external object?” In Miss Grace we seek out her face so as to reflect upon her state of mind and ultimately upon our own. However, this “natural impulse to stimulate the figure’s expression and so comprehend the situation” is suspended. We could say that her awkward age, suspended between girl and woman, or simply a girl lost in the realm of novels accounts for the rather distancing effect. But that is on the whole, largely unsatisfying and does not even begin to indulge my curiosity with the image.