Post for Class March 3^rd 2010

(Nicole and I switched weeks)

Upon reading the Crétien van Campen article for this week, I remembered what Danielle had posted last week, about her difficulty in deciphering a figure from Arnheim’s chapter on Shape. On page 70, Arnheim gives the reader Figure 42, which appears to be two completely opaque shapes, one a rectangle and the other a square, lying on top of one another on the page. Danielle described her struggle with the figure: she could recognize that the figure as a whole was made up of two parts, a rectangle and a triangle. Arnheim describes that, “At first glance, the figure may look awkward, strained, not in its final shape. As soon as it appears as a combination of rectangle and triangle, tension ceases, the figure settles down and looks fortable and definitive. It has assumed the simplest possible structure compatible with the given stimulus.” This amalgamation of the two shapes into one definite form, however, is not how Danielle saw the shape. Instead, upon first glance, she “looked at it and saw the rectangle as a layer above the triangle. I then told myself this was impossible because they were both the same color black and sitting on the same plane (the page of the book). After I told myself this, the rectangle at second glance, still appeared on top of the triangle.” For Danielle, these two “overlapping planes”, as van Campen calls them, were not perceived as “one whole or one Gestalt” (van Campen, 133). Instead, her perception of the form was focused on a figure/ground relationship. Personally, I was able to form that one whole Gestalt for the figure, though I admit it was not easy. But Danielle’s questions of whether other people also saw a figure and a ground in the form, and if so, which shape was ‘on top’ of the other, was illuminated for me as I read into the van Campen article. Specifically, as I read the perceptual rules of the figure-ground phenomenon, as established by Rubin (given by van Campen on page 134), I began to think about the various abstract artworks I have seen- and to wonder about the figure-ground phenomenon in relation to them.

My mind instantly went to the paintings of Mark Rothko. Rothko’s paintings use color and shape to distinguish different parts of the canvas. To be honest, while I have always loved viewing Rothko’s work, I have never truly understood or tried to analyze his paintings. As I began to consider the rules governing figure-ground relationships, I found myself trying to apply them to the Rothko paintings I could recall. I ponder the rules’ applicability in Rothko’s work- do I really perceive one block of color as a figure and another as the ground? And if so, do I also perceive depth between them? In this case, I think that the use of color must also really affect my perception of the work, as the visual forces put into play by the simultaneous contrast of the colors must surly affect the visual balances I perceive therein.

Another artist that comes to mind is Olafur Eliasson. Eliasson plays around with the paradigms of perception in a multitude of ways. He manipulates light and shape to produce forms that seem ethereal and confusing- and the result is often extremely unnerving. Multiple Grotto for example—you can walk inside this structure, which is lined with mirrors. The glimpses that you see of the outside world appear fragmented and are then reflected back on themselves within the mirrored spiked interior. In this way, Eliasson causes a perceptual confusion, messing with the familiarity of shape and form, forcing us to observe otherwise the normal forms of people walking around outside the sculpture in an entirely new way. I think this is extremely interesting, especially if one takes into account the ideas about the task of the observer, and what previous experiences the observer brings to his or her observation. The manipulation of otherwise familiar objects must have repercussions on the associations one will have with those objects.

Another work of his that I’d like to mention briefly, though it has little to do with the ideas that I initially addressed in this post, is one called Take Your Time. In this piece, Eliasson deliberately manipulates the physical processes of visual perception. The light in the exhibition is one wavelength, an orangey-yellow. This causes every hue in the room to become a version of that wavelength, which in itself is interesting. However, if one remains in the room for long enough, shadows will begin to appear as a purple—the opposite of the yellow wavelength of light in the room. The effect is eerie and visceral; Eliasson literally changes the way the observer views the world. The more I ponder Eliasson’s deliberate attempts at changing the visual processes of his observers, the more I feel as though his works are a true test of the gestalt principles of visual perception- and a sign of their power.

Reading Arnheim’s initial words on meaning and shape in the beginning of his chapter on Form make me want to question the applicability of these gestalt theories to work like Rothko’s and Eliasson’s. The shapes formed by the blocks of color in Rothko’s paintings do not seem to “represent something, and thereby be the form of a content,” (96) as Arnheim describes it. And the non-specificity of these geometrical shapes seems to preclude their ability to “tell us about their individual selves” (96) and to teach us “automatically about whole categories of things” (96). In other words, shapes are one key aspect of the dynamic series of associations we make as observers. I have a hard time relating that to my experience of a Rothko painting. When I see the forms and the colors, I am not directly reminded of other boxes or squares I have encountered in my life. However, it must be true that my perceptual processes are following the rules we have been discussing- because I do have a dynamic and definite reaction to the paintings.

Olafur Eliasson: Multiple Grotto (Interior view)

Olafur Eliasson: Multiple Grotto

Olafur Eliasson: Take Your Time

Mark Rothko: No. 14, 1960

Thoughts on Right-Left Bias in response to Jenna's response to Sarah.

(this got pretty long so I thought i'd post it on the main page)

This issue should yield insight on the nature vs. nurture question. I didn't know exactly where to look, and I'm sure Elizabeth would have the answers, but until then: I found this abstract of a study done on french vs. tunisian children (who write from right to left in arabic). It doesn't address the issue of a gestalt tendency, or the phenomenon of asymmetry in adults, but tests for ipsilateral bias in line bisection (the tendency to mistakenly identify a midpoint to either the right or left side of a line or circle), clockwise direction in circle drawing, and something called "outward tendency for horizontal displacement in dot filling" which I'm afraid I don't understand.

http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a713754473

The study found a bias in children after the age of 7-9 (those who have learned to read) paralleling the directional movement of written text.

That may or may not prove anything about the idea "anisotropy of physical space" on a horizontal axis as presented in chapter 1. Written script can move from right to left, from left to right, from top to bottom, and even from bottom to top (I'm not sure if any culture has developed bottom-up writing organically, but I know that Labanotation, the system developed to notate dance and movement, starts at the bottom of the page and moves upwarddddlllllly)

On the other hand, the hands of a clock will always move counterclockwise, in order to mirror the direction of movement on the shadow of a sundial as the sun moves from east to west. For readers of a left-to-right alphabet (or I should say for people who experience a left-to-right anisotropy and I don't know if I'm using that word correctly) the hands of the clock would seem to be moving in accordance with a "natural flow.' Which would mean that someone who experienced a right-to-left anisotropy experiences the hands of the clock as having to overcome resistance as they moved "against a natural flow." This is at odds with our inherent understanding of time as a force which moves effortlessly from past to future. It seems unlikely that an opposite conception of time could develop organically. Which implies that in certain right-to-left cultures, a standard clock would be seen as out of sync with the movement of time itself. And so thank God for the digital watch.

Before leaving the analog clock: clockwise movement contains both a fall from top to bottom (12:00 to 6:00) and an ascendance from bottom to top (6:00 to 12:00). I'm not sure how to synthesize the idea of monodirectional movement around a circumference with the idea of a top/bottom anisotropy (again not sure if I'm using that word correctly). The momentum generated by circular movement makes the 6:00 to 12:00 motion less burdensome than a vertical lift.

Top to bottom is a non-cultural bias, as it incorporates our awareness of gravity (a counterexample would have to come from a culture which had developed in a weightless environment, such as those which are the future of space space space travel). Horizontal bias seems to have both cultural and non-cultural origins, and it'd be fun to get specific about what exactly influences what.

An interesting example from the world of conceptual thought: if you imagine a river flowing down-hill, you will almost certainly picture it moving from left to right.

Second to last thought: the sun always moves from what we call east to what we call west. In our culture we conceptualize this trajectory as movement from left to right, but this is a map-making convention. A right-to-left-reading person could view the sun's east-to-west trajectory as movement from right-to-left. Note that according to the windroses on our culturally biased MAPS, which place west to the left and east to the right, the sun actually moves in the OPPOSITE direction of our written text. A reader of arabic or hebrew could derive comfort from such a map, as he or she could conceive of script as moving in the same direction as the sun. Alas, for similar consolation, a reader of english would have to move to the southern hemisphere, and flip his or her atlas upside down.

Last thought: It seems like it would be worthwhile, if it were possible, to study composition and directional movement in the art of those cultures that had not yet developed a written alphabet.

Please excuse this completely subjective comment on an obscure art form...

As I was reading Wade article I found myself relating strongly to his description of Gestalt psychology derived from mosaics. It harkened back to conference week of last year’s Narrative Neuropsychology and the challenges I faced with communicating the significance of the correlation between my paper on The Diving Bell and The Butterfly with the stained glass I had made to go along with it. Had I read this article then (or had just familiarized myself with Gestalt psychology), it would have been a far easier task. I often failed to draw the viewer’s attention to the fact that there are more dimensions of perceptual stimuli than immediately meets the eye, and, further, that it was this element of layers of stimuli that mirrored the layers of my intentions as an artist. The elements of stained glass that are most salient to the eye are the color and shape of the pieces and the overall picture. It is interesting to apply Gestalt to the actual design of a stained glass, because the individual pieces themselves are the fundamental building block of the piece yet they are integrally tied to their context. Indeed, it is rarely the piece itself but what surrounds it that gives a piece its significance. For example, if you remove a piece from the template, say you decided you wanted to change it, you have no choice but to make an identical piece to replace it, or else you have to change every other piece you have made. You could change the color or the opacity of the glass, but the shape is forced by it surrounding pieces. Another option would be to cut the piece into smaller ones and thus create more grout lines to distract from an off shape. A piece may itself be defined by the pieces around it, but the grout lines define the relationship between the pieces. The impact a stained glass has is reliant on the viewer’s perception of lines, giving the borders of the glass pieces an equal amount of importance as the pieces themselves. As Wade remarks when comparing pixels to tesserae as individual components of a whole, “They were not laid out with the linear regularity of pixels in computer images, but often were arranged in curves to convey the continuity of contours in the scene represented”. In my own work, I like my lines to be graceful, flowing, and indefinite. It is important to me that I can follow my grout lines from any point in the mosaic to almost any other point. Because that is my aesthetic, my individual glass pieces mirror that, and are themselves flowing, alternating rounded and pointed. The whole is perceived to have a fluid dynamic to it because it is inherently composed of parts with identical characteristics. To illustrate this point, I converted a picture of one of my glasses to grayscale. Although the vibrant colors that more clearly demarcated the outline of the tree are gone, the shapes and the lines characteristic of the ground, tree, and sky remain, making the design visible even though the theme of all the parts are very similar. Also noticeable are the variety in opacity, another element of stained glass that relates interestingly to Gestalt.
The reason I think it is appropriate for me to lecture about the artistic virtues of stained glass is that the significance, at least in my pieces, lies in neither the perception of the whole nor the attention to the individual components, but to the relationship between them. As I mentioned above, the perception of the whole is dictated by the parts because the parts have the same aesthetic as a whole. This is unlike some of the examples given in the Wade article such as the portrait of Max Wertheimer made of open and filled dots or the mosaic of lozenges that create ambiguous cubes. I am fascinated by the phenomenon of Gestalt grouping when applied here, and hope that I am not finding meaning here that is undeserved!

Rectangle or Triangle?

As I started reading Arnheim I was intrigued by figure number one. As I read his description of how we look at the square and the dot as a whole I started looking around trying to find other things that we see as a whole while figuring out the distance and symmetry. When he started going into how we are looking at his book but also seeing the room around us, I became disoriented. The book became harder to read as I became consciously aware of my environment while not trying to look around. My surroundings were out of focus and I started to have to focus on not seeing them to continue reading. His idea: " What a person or animal perceives is not only an arrangement of objects, of color and shapes, of movements and sizes. It is, perhaps first of all, an interplay of directed tensions" started to come into focus for me. He mentions that the black circle is "striving" towards the center, but for me it was moving more to the right side. I wonder what makes it different for different people? Maybe the first glance makes the difference? Maybe I am just weird? The two images reminded me of conversations I've have had with people about symmetrical verses unsymmetrical things. I have always favored non symmetrical artwork when it comes to paintings and sculptures but I seem to like architecture that is more symmetrical. I have friends who hate symmetry and friends that love it. I wonder if this is just plain preference or if it individual perception and vision that makes us like one or the other. He begins to answer my questions when he talks about whether the forces are physical or psychological. He states that there are physical molecular and gravitational forces that hold the objects and images together but none that would make the black dot appear to be drifting more or less towards the center of the square. This leads him to the conclusion that it is all psychological. Which then leads me to the conclusion that what I am seeing is not "weird" but just how I see it. This half answers my question though, according to Arnheim is is all psychological but still I want to know why do I see it that way? What makes my vision "weird" or "different"? After looking at the provided figures 1-5 and continuing to read I got to his description of balance. Balance enters into how we read and look at a painting. " Balance is a state of distribution in which all action has come to a standstill… In a balanced composition all such factors as shape, direction and location are mutually determined in such a way that no change seems possible… Under conditions of imbalance, the artistic statement becomes incomprehensible." This gave me a mission. I pulled out a old art history text book and started looking at the images. I was now conscious of my eyes and tried to figure out where I looked first, and if the image seemed balanced. I found most of the the images to be balanced and my sight focused first on center figures and then drifted outward to a landscape or other figures in the background. These easy images to look at made me want to search for an image lacking the balance that Arnheim deems necessary for the comprehension of a painting. I came across, Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi (see image at the end of my post), it stood out because of my immediate acknowledgment of how off center the figure of Susanna is but how you are immediately pulled back towards the right as the man in the red cloak comes into view. Even though he pulls you back the image was hard to look at and hard to focus on. I felt I could't focus on one section while also not able to look at the image as a whole. I think part of this is because of the man above her and his dark clothing, the strong detail on the stone behind her and her nude flesh tone that are all positioned on the left side of the painting, leaving the right side, a strain to view and somewhat lost and empty. Here I understood Arnheim but yet again started to wonder if other people would find this painting balanced or not ?

It was funny to me when Arnheim started talking about simplicity in his chapter about shapes. He states that simpler images are easier to look at because they are easier to break down and organize. I found this funny because I could only think about how simple the image of the black dot in a white square that he provided at the beginning of his book which became so complicated to me. Instead of breaking it down I seemed to be making it even more complicated. Not only did the image become complex but so did the thought processes and a black hole of questions emerged. Figure 42 stood out to me. It is a image of a black triangle combined with a black rectangle. At first I looked at it and saw the rectangle as a layer above the triangle. I then told myself this was impossible because they were both the same color black and sitting on the same plane (the page of the book). After I told myself this, the rectangle at second glance, still appeared on top of the triangle. I then decided to see if I could switch the two and see the image with the triangle above the rectangle. It definitely was a strain and my face got much closer to the book, but it did finally appear that I could switch the two and make the triangle been seen as a layer above the rectangle. Did some people see the triangle above the rectangle and some the rectangle above the triangle? Do some people see neither, and just a black strange shape? Can some people switch the triangle and the rectangle and some people not?

In the Wade's article I spent a good deal of time looking at figure 2 with the small black dots and white outlined dots that are arranged in a pattern. For some reason it took me a very long time to see that that two different groups of dots were the same just differently rotated. I saw how the below patterns fit but I didn't see at first that the groups were really the same. I liked the statement " Circles and squares are good figures in the Gestalt sense. That is, they are simple and symmetrical, and will tend to be completed if parts are missing." I liked this statement because I agreed with it and an image of a broken outline of a circle immediately popped into my mind's white board and then the lines joined like someone had drawn to fix the circle. I read on and became unsure if I agreed with his declaration that the Artists making the Roman mosaics were like scientists. I found them more the science project and his ideas and the ideas of other phycologists the scientists.

I must be Arnheim's way of writing and ideas that draw me in more than some of our other writers that we are discussing and reading. He seems to get my brain racking and sometimes even distracts me from his own book. The what Ifs, and why nots and whats!? sometimes become too much to keep reading until tested a few times.

Ooops! Forgot to post these

I realized I had forgotten to post my images of equiluminance and simultaneous contrast.

Here they are:

For simultaneous contrast, I found this image from loukregel.blogspot.com which the author called Dot Door



For Equiluminance, I found this image, demonstrating the theory from a neuroscience site via Wellesley University:

http://www.wellesley.edu/Neuroscience/Neuro320/Images/colorinthebrain006.jpg

It is difficult to articulate oneself after confronted with such a surfacing of material on visual perception. I feel it is a surfacing material because it reveals an inner dialogue that exists intuitively outside of conventions. It is material not only applicable to our individual ways of seeing (I cannot help now but be distracted by the forces of balance and shape on visual perception), but resonant as a larger matrix registered from the layers of social convention and intuitive priors. From Form As Figuring It Out, Stafford draws our attention to the reflections of the parallel disciplines of neuroscience and humanities that have until relatively recent remained as such parallels. However, within each shifting reflection Stafford reveals, “the modern dynamics of being are indelibly etched from the history of the system.” Illustrating further upon this idea is Vico’s concept of verum factum, which is the principle that ‘the true (verum) and the made (factum) are convertible’, so that we can only know for certain that which we have created. Stafford reasons that kinds of formal order- symbolism, dreams, rituals- are only intelligible to us because other human beings made them. Thus, the natural sciences can only yield approximate truths based on our attempts to imitate nature in experiments, whereas the human sciences offer exact knowledge because societies are our own creations. It is within this framework that art and neuroscience begin to reveal the hidden interior of our intuitive and instinctive ways of visual perception.

Stafford writes, “Art as cognitive imagery can be seen to shadow forth certain underlying truths about brain function that we still intuitively recognize today.” From Arnheim, we are introduced to such “underlying truths,” from the way in which we understand the affect of color, size, and spatial depth upon the weight of an object to our predilection for left to right movement. Arnheim is very much aware of the influence of the past, by admitting that the “interaction between the shape of the present object and that of things in the past is not automatic and ubiquitous, but depends upon whether a relation is perceived between them.” But how do we reveal the beginning of these relational perceptions? In a similar stance, Stafford takes the position of the Romantic and asks, “how does art…enable us to detect the cognitive apparatus of its original creators” and “what makes people persist in replaying formal categories handed down to them from the distant past?” These questions are indeed provoking and Stafford acknowledges the understanding that “creating, feeling, and decision-making functions some how ride atop biological systems that operate largely beyond our awareness.”

hmmm...

Stafford’s chapter concerning, Form as figuring it out leveled with me for the most part, I enjoyed the reading. The middle section highlights how the human brain’s reorganization has effected how we think, perceive and react to a given stimulus. “The disproportionate enlargement of the prefrontal cortex with respect to the increase in absolute brain size (occurring some 50,000-100,00 years ago) helped increase the ability of humans to suppress reflexive responses to stimuli, thereby increasing behavioral freedom and the chances for rational reflection.” Arnheim would state that emotion is a consequence, rather than an instrument of discovery. George Bret, tells us that, “All emotions begin from a stimulus which disturbs the balance of the organism. The response varies with the nature of the organism and is more or less complex according to the level of development.” I couldn’t help but be reminded of my conference project I researched for Lizzie last semester, regarding emotion regulation. I focused on this exact issue of automaticity, conscious and subconscious reflexive responses to stimuli and when it is okay to allow certain urges that are so natural roam freely and when it is more appropriate to control them as well as how to distinguish between these situations. Temperament, emotion and the development of self-regulation and the relations between emotional dispositions and environmental qualities shape social development.


Stafford continues the discussion focusing the discovery of mirror neurons. Ramachandran reminds us that the important implications of mirror neurons are the explosive evolution of the ability to imitate or mime complex skills enabled their cultural transmission. I must say as someone with an extremely active mirror neural system, emotionally (wise), I found this paragraph quite intriguing. In humans the most dramatic developmental changes occur in prenatal development, infancy and childhood. 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. The very early development of emotional display infants does seem to suggest that some of the mechanisms for producing emotion are innate, or strongly canalized in development. For the most part after infancy emotional expression is learned from others, through observation and imitation. 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. Although Stafford notes that we remain in the dark about the interactive context of such development, I believe the research I have conducted and have included above proves otherwise. My only question pertains to the statement she makes after in the core of this paragraph, “Perhaps this ignorance serves as a cautionary reminder of the limits of brain modularity research-despite its revelations.” I wasn’t to clear on where she was going with this assertion. She mentions the 18th century so I am unsure if we are still confronted with said limits regarding brain modularity research.


In an earlier section of the chapter Stafford praises, Gyorgy Kepes for structuring or what Kepes called the “discipline of forming” which is a fundamental part of perceiving because either we forget to remember the passing show so quickly or, the bits we do attend to, still must be actively accessed later through mnemonic re-performance. I am currently studying Kepes for conference this semester and the previous sentence emphasized an excerpt from Kepes; book Language of Vision. It is not an exact translation more so a trigger in thought of how I connected the two passages. “Every day something new is the inheritance of the last century’s disastrous urge. Continuity means development. Every period changes. But these changes have to be rooted in other than purely materialistic considerations. They have to grow from other sources. The different movements have a common denominator: a new spatial conception.” I interpreted the original statement differently from how others may swallow it. Basically the passing show is history, the various eras of and the impact they had on art at those specific times; Baroque, Gothic, Renaissance, etc. In order for new genres to be born we take the bits and pieces that we automatically form a connection with that we build upon to recreate anew.