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?

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?