{"id":30451,"date":"2013-12-27T14:51:20","date_gmt":"2013-12-27T14:51:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=30451"},"modified":"2013-12-27T18:06:07","modified_gmt":"2013-12-27T18:06:07","slug":"30451","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=30451","title":{"rendered":"The Image and the Eye"},"content":{"rendered":"<p id=\"top\" \/><em>E.H Gombrich<\/em><\/p>\n<h3>Visual discovery through art<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>It is in this direction that I propose to look for a solution to the problem\u00a0 of visual discovery in art. Its most striking effects presuppose a degree of\u00a0 plasticity in the way we &#8216;see&#8217; the world which leaves recognition unaffected.\u00a0 This must be connected with the wealth of cues at our disposal for coding our\u00a0 visual experience. The painter, like the caricaturist, can teach us a new\u00a0 code of recognition, he cannot teach us to &#8216;see&#8217;. &#8211; p.29 <em>In a way, the artist abstracts the common and exaggerates the peculiar.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Yet it is clear that if it were not for this instability it would make no\u00a0 sense to say that the painter can impose his vision on our world. He does it\u00a0 at those vulnerable points where coding is more or less optional. &#8211; p.35 <em>We could say that the artists playground is where cues are redundant.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Moment and movement in art<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Successive impressions do in fact persist together and are not wholly\u00a0 experienced as successive. Without this holding operation we could not grasp\u00a0 a melody or understand the spoken word. &#8211; p.48 <em>The overlapping of sucg wholes is what provides a sense of continuity.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>We can scan our surroundings for information and retain the result of\u00a0 previous scannings together with the anticipations of future impressions, which can become critically important in confirming or revising a percept. &#8211;\u00a0 p.50 <em>This is reminiscent of Dennett&#8217;s theory of consciousness and related to the feeling provided by traditional animation, where revisions are requested in the form of subtle impulsions. Again, overlapping (in the mind of the beholder) matters!<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Just as music unfolds in phrases, so action unfolds in phases, and it is\u00a0 these units which are somehow the experienced moments in time, while the\u00a0 instant of which the theoreticians speak, the moment when time stands still,\u00a0 is an illicit extrapolation, despite the specious plausibility which the snapshot has given to this old idea. &#8211; p.53 <em>So what constitutes punctuation and when is it experienced?<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Balanced objects can remain static where lopsided ones will fall any moment,\u00a0 and so the tendency is to seek for the reassuring balance and to expect a\u00a0 rapid change where it is absent. It is curious how easily this experience is\u00a0 transferred, as if by analogy, to other configurations. &#8211; p.55 <em>This might be related to generic configurations: a moving object will not generally be positionned exactly in the center of the image.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>The mask and the face<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>We enjoy this game and we rightly admire the painter or the caricaturist who\u00a0 can, as the saying goes, conjure up a likeness with a few bold strokes, by reducing it to essentials. But the portrait painter also knows that the real\u00a0 trouble starts when you have to proceed in the opposite direction. However skilful he may have been with the first rough outline, he must not spoil the sketch on the way to the finished portrait, because the more elements he has to handle, the harder it is to preserve the likeness. &#8211; p.119 <em>This is related to the uncanny valley and the zombie line.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>The sky is the limit<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>True, it is only in moments of uncertainty that we become aware of the constant productivity of the system, but if I understand Gibson correctly the hunt for invariants is always, at least to some extent, a process over time that responds to the match or mismatch between anticipation and information.\u00a0 In normal circumstances these anticipatory phantoms and the incoming information fuse so readily and so efficiently that we are neither aware of\u00a0 the visual stimuli nor of our visual expectancies. Only when this fusion is\u00a0 inhibited by external or internal causes do we actually see what I have described as pre-images as distinct from after-images (which are generally\u00a0 attributable to purely physiological processes). &#8211; p. 170 <em>So proximal perception might come up either when not enough information is available or when we sufficiently concentrate to discard other overwhelming cues.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Perhaps I may go beyond his paradox by suggesting that the less information\u00a0 is given, the more what I would still like to call &#8216;the beholder&#8217;s share&#8217;\u00a0 comes into play, provided of course the search for meaning is suitably\u00a0 guided. The visual information the painter can simulate may never actually\u00a0 duplicate the information we pick up from solid objects close by. But is it not possible that he can mobilize the system to produce the same phantom\u00a0 sensations which come into play in those processes of search or probing for\u00a0 simplicity precisely in situations of inadequate information? &#8211; p.171 <em>In this sense, a painting is less an illusion than a stimulation of those visual browsing habits that guide us on the way to perception!<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Mirror and map: theories of visual representation<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>There is no fixed correlation between the optical world and the world of our\u00a0 visual experience. There is the influence of past experience and of\u00a0 expectations, the variables of Interest, mental set and alertness, not to\u00a0 speak of variations in the observer&#8217;s physiological equipment and in the adjustment of the perceptual system to changing conditions. &#8211; p.178<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Standards of truth<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>According to my formula, perspective enables us to eliminate from our\u00a0 representation anything which could not be seen from one particular vantage- point-which may still leave the question open as to what can be seen. &#8211; p.256 <em>We may go further and incorporate binocular vision and motion, but still keep the idea of the negative principle.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>There is an important difference between my inability to see a person&#8217;s eyes\u00a0 because he is too far away and because he turns his back to me. The first\u00a0 fact depends on the structure and quality of our visual equipment, the second\u00a0 on the physical behaviour of light. &#8211; p.261 <em>This is related to the aperture problem.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>Eyesight, illumination, atmospheric conditions, the nature of the objects\u00a0 themselves-their colour, their texture, their contrast with their\u00a0 surroundings-these and other variables play a role here, even if we do not\u00a0 take a pair of spectacles or binoculars to upset the principle either by\u00a0 magnification or, if we turn the binoculars round, by reduction in scale but\u00a0 increase in relative luminosity. The painter cannot take recourse to similar\u00a0 methods, and thus the observation of the perspective of disappearance has\u00a0 led him inexorably onto the path of introspection, of the exploration of his\u00a0 subjective visual experience. &#8211; p.262 <em>This suggests that painters fill in with their expectations what lies below the threshold of what they can see.<\/em><\/li>\n<li>The standards, I argued, are based not on a comparison of the motif with the\u00a0 image but on the potential capacity of the image to evoke the motif. In this\u00a0 reading of the history of image making, the artist has no more privileged\u00a0 access to his visual experience than has anyone else. But he has trained\u00a0 himself to watch his own response to the image as it grows under his hand. If\u00a0 his aim is a matching of the visual world, he will follow up any device that\u00a0 suggests it to him. If his work is successful, we may infer that it also\u00a0 suggests such an experience to other beholders. A feedback loop is set up\u00a0 which leads to an ever closer approximation to the desired effect. &#8211; p.271<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>E.H Gombrich Visual discovery through art It is in this direction that I propose to look for a solution to the problem\u00a0 of visual discovery in art. Its most striking effects presuppose a degree of\u00a0 plasticity in the way we &#8216;see&#8217; the world which leaves recognition unaffected.\u00a0 This must be connected with the wealth of &#8230; <a title=\"The Image and the Eye\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/?p=30451\" aria-label=\"Read more about The Image and the Eye\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[621],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30451","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30451"}],"version-history":[{"count":18,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30541,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30451\/revisions\/30541"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.labri.fr\/perso\/barla\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}