I was looking at my friend Morgan's blog last night and I came across the following images and was truly struck by them. After seeing the images Lizzie showed us in class in relation to faces and illusions I was prompted to share the images I came across because they definitely correlate. If you read the blurb under one of the images you will notice that the photographer was striving to display natural beauty in this photo shoot which overlaps with Solso's chapter concerning faces and the expression of facial emotions and facial beauty. The idea of feminine symmetry is definitely displayed.

The Haptic in Bacon

The Scream paintings of Francis Bacon during the 1950's serves as an excellent intersection of face, motion dynamics, and expression found in this week's readings, particularly Study After Velasquez . The film frame of the bespectacled nurse shot in the eye from Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin 1925 (possibly the most famous close-up in cinema history) and Portrait of Pope Innocent X 1644 were appropriated image parts implemented into the painting's whole.

In Dynamics, Arnheim had differentiated between the inhibited image and the mobile image. This was one of Arnheim's most thought-provoking moments for me. In this endeavour he seems to abolish the notion of the atemporal visual image. It is clear that all paintings contain time and refers to movement for their very construction is through a multiplicity of convergent and divergent forces (visual, formal--the force of inflicting paint on canvas itself) which is quite literally movement while the image often implies a specific kind of movement--even frozen movement is movement a result of what he termed as "directed tension."

The claim made by Lessing in the first utterances about medium specificity that the image is in lack of time unlike literature and music is made irrelevant. The claim was founded on the misguided idea that the emotional effect of a painting can only be taken in as a whole rather than as a build up to a climax available in other "time" mediums. Well, I think this is something we've all proved as an incorrect discredit to the multivalent emotional capacities possible in the visual image through the class's heavy study on gestalt theory. And Bacon's Study After Velasquez is a visualization of painting's unlimited time elements--merging history in his aggressive brush stroke and color application that take in Velasquez's pope and a prominent piece of Soviet visual culture and most definitely merging both frozen time and mobile time in one full sweep. The result is a discordantly harmonious image--a visual fugue that elicits guttural physiognomic responses in the spectator.

The injured nurse is a frame taken from a moving picture. The pope is a frozen composition of inhibited movement, comparable to El Greco 's St. Jerome, a painting which Arnheim studies briefly in the reading. Arnheim called attention to the counterbalance of forces in the composition that resulted in the cancellation of immobility. Bacons turn the mobile immobile by slapping Eisenstein's expressive face onto the pope's bodice and thrusting the throne into a state of ambiguous ascension and descension. I had called the response to the painting as gutteral for it elicits not only visual but also physiological cues, culminating in a haptic sense. The painting acts as a function of both sight, sound, and touch. He first institutes a juxtaposition of unblended paints. The yellow is strong and true in this painting and is particulary potent in contrast to the dark space of the paiting. the interaction between the bckground of starkness with the bold yellow produces this effect of light and explosion creating an unlimited activity of engagement through color. the yellow sparks are rising out of the painting to extend the interior space of the painting into the spectator's outside world. The pope's robe of purples which emerge from the dark smokey streaks also aids in the effect. What this does is allow Bacon to introduce into the pictorial plane imperceptible effects of sensation on the body. While the face of an open-mouthed scream generates the audible noise--just as Arnheim had noted that seeing a painted boat can suggest movment--the screaming face and the painting's mode of tension channels a collective empathy in the sound and feeling of a violent force that is overtaking the painting.

Like what Arnheim had noted about St. Jerome, in Velasquez's portrait, there are clear visible forces that direct the tension and stabilize the dynamism inherent in the painting. In Bacon's the invisible are made visible and are turned against one another. In Study the forces of effect that weigh in through oblique angles in and around the body-spaces (both within the painting and outside the painting) are manipulated to obscure and implicate deformation and expression. Perhaps what's most important in this amalgam is the commentary that could be drawn out on religion and political ideology with the Pope/Soviet Prole seemingly strapped into an electric chair. For context, the nurse was shot in the film along with the baby she was taking care of--in the film it implies that the Tsarist regime is killing the future of Russia. The woman dies as a martyr to the Bolshevik movement. Are we imprisoned and punished by our own restrictive dogmatic beliefs? I think so. The implantations of Soviet visual culture and Catholic visual culture is important here for symbolic effect. I leave everyone with this question, what exactly is Bacon trying to say?

In reading for this week's class, I couldn't help but be reminded of the time we spent on mirror neurons the other week. Solso's chapter on faces was really fascinating for me, and I think it ties in directly to what Livingstone had to say about the mirror neurons. Solso states that "Faces touch us. These faces deserve your careful attention. Study them". To me, what is so fascinating about faces is our ability to read them with such ease. Of course, there are various neurological disorders that can prevent people from being able to understand the expression on another's face, but for most people the act of understanding an expression is as simple as looking at the face. Of course, cognitively speaking there are many complex activities happening in the brain that allow us to reach this kind of expression comprehension, but we aren't aware of those processes.

The pictures of faces that Solso uses are excellent examples of this kind of immediate understanding of the feeling described by the faces. Migrant Mother, California and Weeping Woman (page 141, figure 5.4) both impart a sense of sadness and loss- even if one were to view these pictures out of context and without the titles, the observer would still understand the emotional messages.

All of this reminds me of an experiment I took part in last spring. My brother-in-law is currently working on his PhD in Sweden, and he is studying mirror neurons. I was spending time with him in the lab as we were working on a mirror neuron study together, and he asked me to do a test in the MRI machine. The experience itself was rather unsettling, as I'd spend the previous three weeks in an intensive sort of 'intro to fMRI' course with him, and was acutely aware of the fact that he was about to see inside my brain- a thought which, in itself is very strange. Before I got into the machine, he had me kind of strapped in with a sort of head gear on- this was a pair of goggles with screens on the inside, so that Benny could show me a series of images while I was inside the MRI machine.

The images were a series of faces, probably about 60 in total- but each face was of a different person with a 'disgusted' look. My only job in the first part of the test was simply to view the precession of faces. In the second part, I had to physically imitate the expressions as each face was shown on the screen. The point of the work, though Benny did not discuss it with me in any great detail because I was a subject, was to establish first that there is a kind of specialized recognition area for disgust as an emotion (there has been some debate, as I recall, as to whether or not disgust is truly an emotion), and then to establish that the mirror neurons code for both the perception of disgust and the expression of it- just as we discussed in class, with monkeys viewing someone grabbing for an item and then grabbing the item.

It sounds like a very simple test, just to view faces and them imitate them; and I suppose that it seems so simple because of the fact that this kind of research has become popularized by contemporary neuroscientists like Oliver Sacks and V.S. Ramachandran. But if you stop to think about the fact that, over the course of the barely 30 minutes I was in that MRI machine, Benny was able to actually see which part of my brain were activated by the stimulus- I am floored by the fact that we as a scientific community have been able to come so far. Thoughts are suddenly categorizable in a very quantifiable way, despite their inherently qualitative and hard-to-describe nature.

I seem to have gotten a little bit off track with this, so I will try to bring myself back to Solso. I think that part of the reason I was so fascinated by his chapter About Face was the notion of specific brain regions being devoted to this act of recognition. Surely faces are not the only things we recognize in this way. I couldn't help but thinking of my conference work, which is on typography. One of the things I'm looking at while writing my paper is the actual act of reading- and in Maryanne Wolf's book, Proust and the Squid, which is about the reading brain, she gives a great insight into the cognitive processes of reading. According to Wolf, the second stage in the half-second-long process of reading a word, is to recognize the letters. Wolf asserts that instead of there is no area of the visual cortext directly dedicated to recognizing words; i.e. there is no fusiform gyrus equivalent for letters. Rather, "Learning to read changes the visual cortex of the brain. Because the visual system is capable of object recognition, the expert reader's visual areas are now populated with cell networks responsible for visual images of letters, letter patterns, and words. [...] Donald Hebb proposed the notion of cell assemblies, groups of cells that learn to operate as working units. If a common letter pattern or a word like "bear" appears to an expert reader, it will trigger its own networks, rather than individually activating the large number of unrelated individual cells responsible for the lines, diagonals and circles within the letters."

In other words, Wolf is telling us that there is no specific spot in the brain that processes letters as the fusiform gyrus processes faces; but in some ways, the reading brain is far more astonishing. An "expert reader" (each of us in this class are expert readers, after our years and years of experience and our practice with a great number of types of texts) has a brain which has actually learned the specific organizations of lines, diagonals, circles, etc.. that make up each letter. Put even simpler: our brains have actually changed their cyto-organization, have learned the Gestalt organization of each letter- and various words or letter patterns. That, to me, is incredible. That our brains have actually adapted to the act of reading- which is not at all evolutionarily necessary.