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.
Hannah, you brought up the two parts of this week's readings that were particularly interesting for me as well. I found the Arnheim reading simply fascinating, that we can trick our eyes and minds into an illusory sense of motion that is so unshakable that it distorts our own sense of our body and whether it is in motion or not. The Duncker/Oppenheimer visual factors that determines how sight handles motor ambiguities were quite interesting, in that they prove so subconsciously salient that you don't think about them at all for the most part. The idea that the ground remains still while the figure moves (enclosedness), or that smaller things move rather than larger objects (size difference) seem so inherently true that it's a little strange to think that it is in fact "ambiguous." The pervasiveness of these stimuli was evident in two somewhat artistic (or at least observerly) examples, where the bridge and the observer appear to move when the bridge is fixated upon rather than the river; and the example of how streets appear to move in films as though they are characters themselves. The frame of reference becomes distorted when the point of fixation is changed, creating a false sense of movement.
ReplyDeleteIllusory movement was also rather beautifully depicted in the Livingstone chapter, where we returned to equiluminant colors. I appreciated Livingstone's slightly more neuroscientific explanation that the Where system cannot see the difference but the What system can, which creates a jittery image that is difficult to focus on. This sense of movement which she identifies in Impressionist painting can often be more "moving" and realistic in sensory terms than the depiction of static movement in a more realist painting.
In my lecture (Talking Cure) we have been discussing issues of "a coherent self" and something of what was mentioned in class the other day reminded me of our readings. That people are composed of the many "selves" that they might be, and to fully grasp someone is to have to keep their whole being in mind. This reminded me of Arnheim writing about understanding the structure of a symphony - about having to simultaneously maintain all of the parts together, rather than pieces one after the other. I like the idea of human beings as things moving through space and time, changed by everything before and after them, and composed of everything at any given moment.
ReplyDeleteWe are so sensitive to movement and motion, that a tiny floater in the eye could make me strain my neck from being startled by unexpected movement. We are so sensitive to the luminance differences in a small area of our visual field that advertisers play with our percepts easily. [ I was reading Livingstone while sitting outside with people and passed around the page with the perceptual twists that made you slow down and read eVeRy SiNgLe letter... all of the reactions were "WHOA!"]
Another example that came to mind of the artistic manipulation of motion and timing and creating correlations... The Big Lebowski opening credits scrolling, moving and changing frames sweep the viewer into the kaleidoscopic world of "The Dude."
I also really loved the Livingstone chapter for this week. I was really intrigued by what she had to say about type, and how the varying changes in size and color force the observe to slow down and pay attention. I've been working with typography for conference, and one of the things that I discussed today in conference was how our brains can attend to tiny differences. The example I was using was the minute but noticeable differences in line orientation and thickness between Helvetica and Arial. I wonder, in the cases Livingstone described, how much of a change was necessary for the slowing down effect. Could a size difference of just a millimeter or two have the same effect as the rather drastic differences depicted in her examples? I'm also curious as to how this 'paying attention' influence changes the way we see different fonts- if they're harder to read, are we more likely to attend to them, or less?
ReplyDeleteIn other news, this happened: http://current.com/technology/92376209_ispecs-apple-eyes-up-3d-future-with-projection-glasses-that-will-play-films-on-the-move.htm
Yep. Apple is following the 3D trend and developing its own 3D glasses.
Hannah,
ReplyDeletei read a recent article on photography as a shrinking career due to the large number of amateur photographers now. I think for the photographer the artist's hand shows through an even more intimate relationship between the photographer, the atmosphere, and subject. An important point in the article was that yes perhaps anyone now can take semi professional photographs of their friends and family members, but only a professional photographer is able to orient themselves in a new, foreign space and be able to capture the mood, atmosphere in relationship to the subjects within that space.