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)

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.

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  ;_;