James Turrell

“I make spaces that apprehend light for our perception, and in some ways gather it, or seem to hold it… my work is more about your seeing than it is about my seeing, although it is a product of my seeing.”

James Turrell (born May 6, 1943) is an American artist primarily concerned with light and space. His work, described as “not about light, or a record of light; but rather light itself – the physical presence of light made manifest in sensory form,” engages viewers with the limits and wonder of human perception.

Informed by his training in perceptual psychology and a childhood fascination with light, Turrell began experimenting with light as a medium in southern California in the mid-1960’s. The Pasadena Art Museum mounted a one-man show of his Projection Pieces, created with high-intensity projectors and precisely modified spaces, in 1967. Mendota Stoppages, a series of light works created and exhibited in his Santa Monica studio, paired Projection Pieces with structural cuts in the building, creating apertures open to the light outside. These investigations aligning and mixing interior and exterior, formed the groundwork for the open sky spaces found in his later Skyspace, Tunnel and Crater artworks.

Turrell often cites the Parable of Plato’s Cave to introduce the notion that we are living in a reality of our own creation, subject to our human sensory limitations as well as contextual and cultural norms. This is evident in Turrell’s over eighty Skyspaces, chambers with an aperture in the ceiling open to the sky. The simple act of witnessing the sky from within a Turrell Skyspace, notably at dawn and dusk, reveals how we internally create the colors we see and thus, our perceived reality.

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TL;DR
I actually did research on James Turrell back in year 3 for my VC3 project, but ended up not working on him as it proved too much of a challenge then, to fully grasp his work. Glad to be able to revisit his work and I’m really excited at the possibility of applying some of his ideas.

Perception

Perception

[per-sep-shuh n]
noun

1.
the act or faculty of perceiving, or apprehending by means of the senses or of the mind; cognition; understanding.
2.
the result or product of perceiving, as distinguished from the act of perceiving; percept.
3.
a single unified awareness derived from sensory processes while a stimulus is present.

Perception may be categorized as internal or external.

• Internal perception (proprioception) tells us what is going on in our bodies; where our limbs are, whether we are sitting or standing, whether we are depressed, hungry, tired and so forth.
• External or Sensory perception (exteroception), tells us about the world outside our bodies. Using our senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste, we perceive colors, sounds, textures, etc. of the world at large. There is a growing body of knowledge of the mechanics of sensory processes in cognitive psychology.
• Mixed internal and external perception (e.g., emotion and certain moods) tells us about what is going on in our bodies and about the perceived cause of our bodily perceptions.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight.”

Ways of Seeing by John Berger was a book I picked up during the summer holidays and it made for an extremely stimulating read. The book and the ideas presented in it will serve as the basis for this project.

To summarise 167 pages of content – The whole book is based on the premise that the way we see things is affected by our knowledge and beliefs.  An image is a sight that has been recreated or reproduced. It is a set of appearances, which has been removed from the place and time of its first appearance. I’ve always been fascinated by conundrums and this apparent disconnect that Berger highlights (between that which is seen and that which is known) is very worthy of delving into, as a practitioner of the visual arts.

In particular, I find this paragraph below to be very reflective of visual media and our indiscriminate consumption of it, in this day and age (especially poignant since the book was published in 1972).

“In the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information of a sort, and, like all information, it is either put to use or ignored; information carries no special authority within itself. When a painting is put to use, its meaning is either modified or totally changes. One should be quite clear about what this involves. It is not a question of reproduction failing to reproduce certain aspect of an image faithfully; it is a question of reproduction making it possible, even inevitable, that an image will be used for many different purposes and that the reproduced image, unlike an original work, can lend itself them all.”

Visual media comes at us through almost every avenue of our lives these days. What do we make out of it? How much of it is real (if at all)? I will be steering my project in this direction – exploring context and its misappropriation in current visual media.

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TL;DR
This project will revolve around images, and how removing context can result in it having inherently different properties.

The Science of Seeing

The Eye
The outer shell of the eye, called the sclera, is the white rigid spherical shell that gives the eye its structure. The sclera itself is opaque to allow light into the eye. It merges in the front with the transparent cornea, which is the window of the eye. The cornea has an index of refraction of about 1.37. Immediately behind the cornea is the aqueous humor, a clear watery liquid which supplies the cornea with the nutrients it needs since blood vessels in the cornea would affect the optical clarity.

The Pupil
The pupil is the opening in the center of the iris that controls the amount of light entering the eye. The iris merges with colored connective tissue called the choroid which lines the inside of the sclera. In humans, the pupil is circular whereas horses and goats have a horizontal slit. Snakes, alligators and cats have a vertical slit.

Tiny muscles on the iris automatically adjust the size of the pupil within tenths of a second depending on the light level. It is interesting to note that the pupils of both eyes will open and close in unison, even if only one is stimulated with light. This is due to the consensual pupillary reflex. In addition, our attitude about what we are seeing also influences the size of the pupil. This effect, common when viewing pictures of attractive members of the opposite sex, can affect the pupil size by up to 30 percent.

The Lens
The lens, which is immediately behind the iris, provides fine focusing to adjust for the object distance. This process is called accommodation and is accomplished with a ring of muscles around the lens. When the muscles are relaxed for viewing distant objects, the lens is relatively flat. When the muscles constrict to view objects close up, the lens changes shape, becoming more curved.

The near-point is the closest point where the eye can still focus. This distance increases with age as the lens gradually looses elasticity. This distance usually surpasses the our arm length between the ages of 50 and 60, which then calls for corrective lenses. Cataracts, or a loss of transparency of the lens, also affect many people as they get older.

Vitreous Humor
The inner chamber of the eye is filled with a clear jellylike substance known as the vitreous humor. This structureless substance has an index of refraction close to that of water. Sometimes when you look carefully, you can see bits of cellular debris in the vitreous humor called floaters that give a faint shadow to the image you see.

The Retina
The retina, or light sensitive part of the eye, covers the back of the eyeball and is the final destination of the light. The lens and cornea actually invert or turn the image displayed on the retina upside down in the process of providing a clear image that is in focus.

(adapted from: http://www.eye-therapy.com/)

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TL;DR
Human vision is an incredibly complex process that involves the eyes, nerves and brain all working together to translate visual stimuli into visual information.

Seeing [defined]

See

[see]
verb (used with object), saw, seen, seeing.

1.
to perceive with the eyes; look at.

2.
to view; visit or attend as a spectator: to see a play.

3.
to perceive by means of computer vision.

4.
to scan or view, especially by electronic means: The satellite can see the entire southern half of 
the country.

5.
to perceive (things) mentally; discern; understand: to see the point of an argument.

6.
to construct a mental image of; visualize: He still saw his father as he was 25 years ago.

7. 
to accept or imagine or suppose as acceptable: I can’t see him as president.

Synonyms
observe, notice, distinguish, discern, behold, regard, .comprehend, penetrate, determine, know, undergo, accompany

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TL;DR

Seeing is not restricted to processing visual information/stimulus. Seeing also constitutes perception and perceived mental imagery.

Seeing depends on context, desire and expectation. Does visual information provided by the eye always yield the same stable interpretation?

Rationale

There is a disconnect in our inherent creativity and the rigidity of reality. As designers who pride ourselves on being creative, it is ironic that we subjugate creative thinking to conventions.

This project thus aims to:

1.
Disrupt convention (jolt us out of comfort)

2.
Serve as a conduit for intellectual discourse

3.
Destroy [own perceived] symbolic significance

4.
Recognise that process is the product

5.
Introduce a renewed appreciation and awareness of seeing

Concept Presentation

Overview
The everyday of modern living is dulled by social constructs and expectations. How we see and the choice of words we allocate to known objects is defined by how we believe it to be. What if we reassess our personal values and our grasp of perceived ‘reality’? Will we be able to make decisions that are removed from the bindings of “what-it-should-be” to “what-it-can-be”?

Outcome
A space in which people interact with unlabelled objects and associate them with words, based on their own interpretations, to create narratives with a personal meaning/unique spin.

Verdict
In summary, the comments I got after running the idea through CIndy were that:

1. Design needs to have a purpose (solution)
2. Simply having an idea expressed as an artwork makes for more of a fine art project
3. What do I want to communicate?
4. Why would anyone care about what I do?

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TL;DR
Seems like it’s back to the drawing board again for me  ;_;

TL;DR

TL;DR (too long didn’t read abbreviated) is a handle that I will include at the end of every post that would otherwise cost you too much of your time to read. It will consist of my summary of the page contents and/or my personal take on it.