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Thursday, April 9, 2020

A Short Narrative

Let me first note that while Arnheim's ideas certainly do resemble in certain details ideas that have come before (Plato's Ideals, Jung's Collective Unconscious) it isn't the same as those things, and his purpose in writing is not the same as those people's. Arnheim is interested in a pretty simple question, which is how do we see? and his book is more or less a survey of the science that had been done up to that point. Is it all correct? I rather doubt it.

Does it fit well with my perception of reality? Yeah, and it's possible, even reasonable, that Plato and Jung both had some vague notions of these same things (they were, after all, humans who could see, and had therefore access to a human visual cortex to ponder and examine) and constructed their towers on some of the same material. But really, Arnheim and I are mostly interested in how people see stuff.

Here are some simple graphics which, I propose, relate a short narrative:











Now, to be sure, this is just me, fumbling through my probably shoddy understanding of Arnheim's ideas, feeling my way through some graphics. To me, the "story" reads clearly. To you.. I don't know. I dare say you see some sort of narrative, especially since I told you there's supposed to be one. Certain elements are likely to "read" for you, but probably not all of them.

For reference (spoiler alert) what I intend is: figure at rest, an eye observes you observing, the figure rises, violent outburst, the figure is prone once more. Is there one figure or two, or three? Is the figure at the end victorious or dead? Unknown.

These arise out of some photographs I have taken recently, and it strikes me that the photos muddy the allegorical waters a great deal by being photographs. It is not an abstract prone figure, but a hand, or a razor. The eye is not an eye, but a flower, or a bottle cap, or a ball.

Even assuming that the abstracted graphics "read" can one successfully do the same things with photographs? Does a prone razor, followed by an ball, have the slightest chance of reading as the prone figure... observes you or will the ground truth of the pictures as what they are forever prevent that? I dunno.

Certainly if I repeat many prone figures, the hand, the razor, the dog, the branch, you will probably get the prone figure reference. Arnheim might teach that your percept of each of these photos would contain the prone figure abstraction, and I assert that by repeating different pictures of different things your percept will distill naturally into the underlying abstraction.

Similarly, if I gave you the ball, the bottlecap, and maybe even an eye, each centered in the frame, you would at least note the common graphical appearence, and might be willing to accept the idea of an eye or a peephole with a little prompting.

I don't entirely know where I am going here. I don't want to tell "Gilgamesh" with pictures of razors and tennis balls, because that would be stupid. But some sort of flow of emotion, or feeling, would be nice.

4 comments:

  1. Not THAT Ross CameronApril 10, 2020 at 3:10 AM

    In a similar vein, I need to finish reading “Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing”. A discussion of the various elements of the visual systems (B&W/luminosity & edges are a different network to colours), and how heavily intertwined vision is with memory (for us to recognise what we are seeing, we have to have previously learned It) and hence how much recall is involved in seeing. The author then goes on to give her interpretation of how art works with the idiosyncrasies of those neural networks.
    Any interesting scientific read for me, noting it only starts to get into the philosophical.
    I’d say human needs - at a most basic level - are universal. However, given the role of learning, language and culture, I don’t know if there is a universal visual language. Happy to consider other perspectives, as I too am working my way through this, higgledy-piggledy :)

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  2. noooo....
    is this yer April fools thing a week late?
    bottle caps as eyes, nooooo...
    [stone seal]

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    Replies
    1. Poets seem to think people will accept daisies as eyes!

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  3. ...OK, that's a point, but...the poet is asking me to modify my private mental image of daisies as much or as little as that mental image is willing/able to transmogrify inside my head. bottle-cap/eye thing is asking me to make a specific jump to a different based on a [fairly persuasive... concrete... identifiable] bottle-cap image that is in front of me, do that four more times, and THEN to layer a meta-narrative on top of that? this seems like something that is unlikely to happen. I'll go back two or three layers and see if this is actually the ask, or what... [horribly, the only thing that is coming into my mind is those photos of a bunch of gnarly tomatoes etc and suddenly you really it's a freaky face. omg. I may wandered off the track a bit.] stone seal

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