Since the semester began, I’ve been milling over this quote from Arnheim’s introduction to Art and Visual Perception:
“Far from being a mechanical recording of sensory elements, vision proved to be a truly creative apprehension of reality – imaginative, inventive, shrewd, and beautiful.” (p. 5)
The existential implications of this sentiment are huge. Seeing is a creative act – we are creatively rendering our own version of reality based on sight. Oliver Sacks’ case studies make this point painfully clear. In both chapters, the subjects’ perception of seeing changed drastically and their sense of reality was significantly altered to devastating effect.
And what are the factors that cause us to paint and organize the world the way we do? Our cultural background plays a large role – societies teach their own how and what to pay attention to. But fascinatingly (and obviously) the neurological makeup of our eye figures largely as well.
In this week’s readings, I was inspired by conversations of how the eye organizes to create this reality. Livingstone’s fifth chapter, Acuity and Spatial Resolution: Central and Peripheral Vision was of particular interest. As a student of theatre and dance, my toolkit touches on emotion and motion so I’ll highlight those elements of Livingstone’s discussion.
Humans don’t have much resolution outside of our foveal gaze. And yet, peripheral vision is just as important. Livingstone points out that, although we think we are intimately familiar with a work as famous as the Mona Lisa, using our peripheral gaze may unlatch new meanings within the picture. Ms. Lisa, it seems, is smiling when we use our peripheral vision and simply content or possibly mysterious when using foveal vision to view look at her mouth. Livingstone follows:
“Facial expression may be more apparent in the coarse image components than in the finer ones even in real life, because they depend on deep facial muscles, and changes in the underlying muscle activity can be effectively blurred by subcutaneous fat. Therefore it may be that our ability to correctly interpret facial expressions in general is better in our peripheral vision than in the center of gaze. To extend this idea, I suggest that the image components used in identifying individual faces may be different from the image components used to identify emotional states. Images or moves of people that mimic the blurring effect of peripheral vision might aid in judging their true emotional state or their skill portraying emotional states.” (Livingstone 73)
I’m reminded of the Jean Epstein’s famous expressionist film adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher. Here’s a link to the famous funeral sequence on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vS_UxOo5tek
Aided by superimosition of images, the blurry periphal focus of this sequence (and in fact, the rest of the film) tackles the melancholic qualities of Poe’s writing better than any image could in foveal vision.
Livingstone also touches on principles of viewing motion that I found particularly interesting. She uses Monet’s Rue Montorgueil in Paris, Festival of June 30 1878 and Poussin’s The Rape of the Sabine Women to highlight her points. The eye is drawn to the Monet painting, because it’s what we might view – a fleeting moment in time. This gives the painting a transient quality. When looking at the Poussin, there are so many details in the painting that it acquires a static quality. “By the time you moved your eyes from one act of savagery to another, the scene should have changed,” she points out. The Poussin painting looks almost like a tableau vivant.
I’m interested in the idea that the Monet painting may mirror one’s memory of the event – it’s crude fleeting glance qualities may reflect our imagination. The painters of the Expressionist movement ask us to engage with their non-naturalistic visions of reality. But when probing into our brains, might this be a reality we experience on a second to second basis, simply transposed onto a canvas?
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Our vision is designed to extract biologically relevant information from our environment. Such information is delivered to the eye in the form of light values, but the product of our visual perception is not an "image," or an assemblage of light values, it is a conceptual understanding of our environment.
ReplyDeleteProof of this could be found in our peripheral vision, which in spite of its low acuity, does not prevent us from experiencing our surroundings as stable. When the gaze focuses on an object which lay previously in our periphery, we do not experience the object as having been altered, although the image has transformed from blurred to focused. A boring way to interpret this phenomenon is to say that we adapt to ignore the blur. It's much more interesting and relevant to our discussion to realize that, in fact, we don't perceive the blur at all. It simply isn't registered. What we perceive are objects in an environmental field. Using light information, we are recreating a three dimensional multi-sensory environment inside our mind, which we could theoretically close our eyes and walk through.
The idea of the Gestalt helps us understand how this could be the case. What is the minimum amount of visual information necessary for me to identify an object as an "iPod"? Once that information has been apprehended, my visual perception of the iPod has as much to do with my concept of an iPod as with the light values hitting my eye. Note that although at any given time the iPod can be in various states of focus depending on the direction of my gaze, I perceive the object as "constant," in other words, as always being an iPod even if I happen to be looking at the object from a totally unfamiliar angle (my concept of an iPod is view-invariant). So it would seem our visual percept of an object is as conceptual as it is perceptual, and based on that fact, Arnheim can go on to say that perception is a creative act. In other writings he makes the even bolder and more intriguing claim that no useful distinction exists between perception and thought.
Neuroscience would seem to back this up by asserting that the same neurons are used in Visual Perception as are in Visual Imaging. Evidence of this would be the colorblind painter who cannot think or dream in color. And the stroke victims, doubtless they exist, who could not perceive an iPod at all, even with completely functional eyesight.
I would assume a visual artist has to disassociate with their visual perception in order to reduce a scene to a series of reproducable light and color values. For example, we perceive the shiny surface of an ipod as being uniformly clear, even though it may be reflecting all sorts of bright light. The visual artist must attend to this reflections if her drawing is to be convincing. If she were to draw the uniform surface we all perceive, her drawing would ultimately appear less real.
Also I'm not sure Arnheim would call sight a creative act. The word he uses is vision, which would seem to mean something different. Sight, or "eyesight" does not necessarily imply the collection of relevant information about one's environment. It refers maybe instead to good function in the very earliest stages of visual perception, those which take place within the eye.
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