Science of Perception

Current scientific thinking about visual experience tends to conform to what could be called the ‘standard view’ (SV). SV can be summarized as follows:
1.
There is an external world full of objects and events with properties that exist independently of our seeing them.
2.
Our visual system creates an internal representation, or model, of objects and events in the external world, and it is this model we subjectively experience.
3.
Our visual experience of the world is, therefore, distinct from the objects and events in the world itself.

Many vision science textbooks endorse SV by claiming the biological function of vision is to accurately represent or model the real world, assuming there is a given state of reality to represent. In what is one of the most widely referenced textbooks on vision, Stephen Palmer states
the evolutionary purpose of vision is achieving vertical knowledge of external objects and events, in order that perception is ‘…consistent with the actual state of affairs in the environment.’ Meanwhile the eminent neuropsychologist Chris Frith , writing about how the brain ‘creates our mental world’, says: ‘When I look at a tree in the garden, I don’t have the tree in my mind. What I have in my mind is a model (or representation) of the tree constructed by my brain.’

Artists who have thought deeply about these matters have explicitly rejected SV, and the various ontological assumptions it entails. Georges Braque (1882-1963), the co-founder of Cubism who spent much of his life analyzing visual experience, said towards the end of his career: ‘You see, I have made a great discovery: I no longer believe in anything. Objects don’t exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them, and between them and myself.’ For Braque, objects in the world don’t exist independently of our perceiving them; the object and our experience of the object are one in the same. He wrote: ‘A thing cannot be in two places at once. You can’t have it in your head and before your eyes.

(adapted from http://goo.gl/pey4wV)

Friedrich Nietzsche

“To learn to see- to accustom the eye to calmness, to patience, and to allow things to come up to it; to defer judgment, and to acquire the habit of approaching and grasping an individual case from all sides. This is the first preparatory schooling of intellectuality. One must not respond immediately to a stimulus; one must acquire a command of the obstructing and isolating instincts.”

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TL;DR
In this quote that I came across and found interesting, Nietzsche describes ‘seeing’ not as a rudimentary reflex, but a series of processes that one can assume control of. The quote kind of describes what I want to achieve with my project – through awareness and the subsequent command of obstructing and isolating instincts (perception), gain control of one’s seeing.

Markus Raetz

Markus Raetz, born in 1941, is one of Bern‘s most famous contemporary artists and a key figure in the generation of “researchers of artistic perception”. His multi-faceted work playfully revolves around the processual nature of our experience of reality and makes us aware that, by using a great diversity of media and techniques, reality changes in relation to our standpoint.

Since the 1960s, Raetz has created numerous works, including more than 30,000 drawings. His work focused on drawings and paintings in the 1960s and 1970s, and continued with sculptures in the 1980s and 1990s, beginning with the sculpture Der Kopf in the Merian Park in Basel (1984). The principal topic of his work is the nature of perception. His works do not focus on what they portray, but on how they are perceived. They often require interaction by the viewer, and can be understood only when viewed in motion or from different angles.

Raetz is equally adept at producing print and three-dimensional artworks. The line as an element of design is not only manifest on paper but likewise in space. Thus lines form words, for example, which change their meanings relative to where the beholder stands, sometimes even into the opposite. This exhibition of prints and three-dimensional artworks thereby unfolds semantic fields and sensitizes our perception into finding new options for interpretation.

Billy Collins, who is presently poet laureate of the United States, has said that “a poem is like a ride,” and the poet who wrote it is “the first one to take that ride.” Raetz’s ride is a quiet one, but it makes the shifting sand we stand on pleasurable. We are moving. There are many points of view. But we hold our binoculars and gaze at whatever is out there.

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TL;DR
Raetz’s work evokes minimalism in the simplicity of the forms he creates. The perceptual shifts that one experiences when viewing his work is gradual and determined solely by the position the viewer chooses to take at the instance of viewing. Something to consider when producing my final artwork: Should the perception change introduced be one that is gradual, or one that shocks and provokes.

Allegory of the Cave

In the theory, Plato describes a cave, in which prisoners are kept. These prisoners have been in the cave since their childhood, and each of them is held there in a peculiar manner – they are all chained so that their legs and necks are immobile, forced to look at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is a fire and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, on which people can walk.

These people are puppeteers, and they are carrying objects, in the shape of human and animal figures, as well as everyday items. The prisoners could only see these flickering images on the wall, since they could not move their heads; and so, naturally enough, they presumed the images to be real, rather than just shadowy representations of what is actually real. In fact, the images on the wall would be so real that the prisoners would assign prestige among each other to the one who could recall the most detail about the shapes, the order in which they appeared and which might typically be found together or in tandem. Of course, this was hollow praise, since in fact the images were not real.

Then Plato offers a twist in the plot – what if one of the prisoners were to be freed and made to turn and look at the fire? The bright light would hurt his eyes, as accustomed as he was to the shadows, and even in turning back to the wall and its flickering images (which would be only natural), the prisoner couldn’t help but notice that they weren’t real at all, but only shadows of the real items on the walkway behind him.

If the prisoner was then taken from the cave and brought into the open, the disorientation would be even more severe; the light of the sun would be much more brilliant than the fire. But as his eyes adjusted, the newly freed prisoner would be able to see beyond only shadows; he would see dimensions and reflections in the water (even of himself). After learning of the reality of the world, the prisoner now sees how ‘pitiable’ his former colleagues in the cave really are. If he returned to the cave and rejoined them, he would take no pleasure in their accolades or praise for knowledge of the shadow-figures; for their own part, the prisoners would see him as deranged, not really knowing what reality is and would say of him that he left the cave and returned with corrupted eyes.

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TL;DR
Plato’s allegory of the cave resonates very strongly and the basic idea even mirrors what we see today. Without knowing the context of visual media we consume, are we certain that what we read/view is real?