Mailing 2: Perception

wilson hurst

Levels of Understanding

“What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” - Werner Heisenberg

“Intuition is perception via the unconscious.” - Carl Gustav Jung

Some venues have specific positions from which I like to make intermittent observations. Such

a recurring activity involves receiving knowledge of the external through the senses and

recording the associated digital data. For at its core, photography is a technologically driven art

form, used to augment perception. However, both science and sensation are limited and are

subject to perceptional inaccuracy.

Perception is the process of attaining awareness and understanding of sensory information.

There is no rigid meaning to anything. What is perceived is the interpretation of sensations

informed by their relationships to past experience. Thus, cultural conditioning considerably

influences perception. Humans are incapable of processing unfamiliar information without

injecting the inherent bias of prior knowledge. In addition, as any sensation can give rise to

multiple percepts, it is also possible that a specific sensation can fail to elicit any percept.

Manifestations of attention are experienced as different observable phenomenon that

consciously coalesces into a coherent whole. Overt and covert modalities are here in play.

Explicit attention is directing sensory apparatus, like the eyes, towards a stimulus resource.

Filtered attention is psychological concentration on a subset of available sensory stimuli.

Cognitive neural processing can augment a signal from a selective constituent of the sensory

panorama.

Working on dreams by visiting other dimensions, are we ever fully awake? We inhabit an

emotional world where facts are actually effects of the mind adding to the experiential

foundation. Although the content and purpose of dreams remain mysterious, they can be

described as a response to neural processes during sleep. When we are conscious, similar

neural processes are manifest and are defined as perception. Perception is the recognition and

interpretation of sensory stimuli based primarily on memory. So the sleeping dream state that

functions without sensory stimulation can be considered as a kind of “suspension of

perception.”

Because “conditions of art are socially and historically constituted”, they are changeable

realities. In fact, this is one of the most valued characteristics of the collective arts: unexpected

changes or shifts encountered in life can be enabled by experiencing art. Art expands the realm

of possibility in a multiplicity of directions. It is nice to get a good seat from which to observe

the entertainment, up-close to all the action. Of course, at a deeper level of actuality,

everything in the universe is infinitely unified. Therefore, by activating our affective

consciousness, we can recognize the value of any positional viewpoint. Everything

interpenetrates everything, and although human nature is indexical, ultimately all of existence

integrates in a seamless web.

___________________________________________________________________________

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print.

Descriptive Annotation

Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes last book, is his personal exploration of photographic meaning.

Here he engaged in an individual quest to define for himself what distinguished the “essential

feature of photography from other images.” (CL 03) The text deals with the structure of the

photograph as a visual system, and explores elements within categorical hierarchies and the

relationships between them. But a classification of photographs is elusive because empirical,

rhetorical, and aesthetic categories can be applied to other image forms and thus are not

unique to photography.1

1 Empirical (professional/amateur), Rhetorical (landscape/object./portrait/nude), Aesthetic (realism/pictorialism)

However, what is uniquely different about a photograph is how it represents and

simultaneously is never separate from its subject. “The photograph always carries its referent

with itself.” (CL 05) The photographic object itself is therefore invisible; it is not what we see,

we see the referent. In his thinking, photography can be the object of three perspectives: (CL

09)

To do – the photographer, operator To undergo – person or thing photographed, the target, referent, Spectrum (“every

photograph is a return of the dead”) To look – the spectator, all who view the photograph

Bathes recognizes he cannot address the first feature. He is too impatient to be a photographer

and finds Polaroid photography somehow disappointing. But then he proceeds to address the

first feature anyway, and claims the intention of the operator is to “surprise.”

Relative to the second feature, a person knowing he is being photographed will adjust his

appearance for the camera, attempting to project his essence of individuality. (CL 11)

Most of the book is concerned with the portrait photograph described as a closed force field

when considered from divergent viewpoints: The photographic portrait represents the:

One I think I am One I want others to think I am One the photographer thinks I am One the photographer renders. (CL 13)

Throughout the book Barthes is fixated on death – the photograph is about death. At the

moment of camera exposure, the subject becomes an object (a micro-version of death). The

photographer poses and positions the subject in a scene, as this death is an embalming. (Cl 14)

Photography is closer to theater than to painting – because of its relationship to death. (Cl 31)

Essence of photography is its relation to love and death – and is individual to the specific

spectator. Once his mother died he no longer had any reason to live. (CL 72)

Some images will resonate while others are boring. (CL 17) Functioning as spectator, Barthes is

interested in photography only for “sentimental” reasons. But what makes a photograph

interesting, an attraction? It is an advenience or adventure that makes photography exist – the

photograph then “animates.” (CL 20)

Photographs can contain two discontinuous heterogeneous elements, studium and punctum,

and such a co-presence might establish an interest in a particular photograph. (CL 26-27)

Studium

An average effect, based on a shared interest, a common response of most observers grounded

in cultural conditioning. This is responding to the photograph on the level of personal likes and

dislikes. It is here that the viewer encounters the function of the photograph and the

photographer’s intentions: to inform, to represent, to surprise, to cause to signify, to provoke

desire. The photograph may surprise the spectator when intentions are ambiguous. “Culture is

a contract arrived at between creators and consumers.” (CL 28)

Punctum

The punctum is formed by incidental details which elicit emotional association unrelated to

photographic meaning resolved culturally. It is “An element which will break or punctuate the

studium, that accident which pricks me, a detail a partial object, power of expansion, often

metonymic.” 2

The stadium is ultimately always coded, the punctum is not. (CL 51) In order to see a

photograph well, to receive the punctum, it is best to look away or close your eyes. – “… allow

the detail to rise of its own accord into affective consciousness.”

(CL 45) As such, punctum is unplanned and only exists for one specific viewer.

Through the punctum “the photograph transcends itself; is this not the sole proof of its art? To

annihilate itself as medium, to be no longer a sign but the thing itself?” Intentional details

positioned by the photographer are not punctum, it is only experienced by the viewer. (CL 47)

3

2 Metonymic is a figure of speech in which a thing or concept is not called by its own name, but by the name of something intimately associated with that thing or concept.

Punctum is what the

spectator “adds to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.” (CL 55) Something is

always represented “…the photograph is pure contingency and can be nothing else.” Another

3 Affective consciousness relates to moods and attitudes characterized by emotion, and the tendency to assign valuation and react to feelings. This is a key component of an organism's stimuli interaction process.

punctum element is time, recognition of the photograph as referring to that which has been.

(CL 96)

History is the time before ones birth, representing prior non-existence. Discovering this in

photography by moving back through time, Barthes most responded to a single photograph,

Winter Garden, which for him provoked not just an identity but the essence of his mother. (CL

71)

The photograph is reality in a past state, where “The power of authentication exceeds the

power of representation.” (CL 89) The photographic referent is necessarily a real thing which

has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph. (CL 76) “In

photography the presence of a thing is never metaphoric” (CL 78), thus “the essence of a

photograph is a past reality “that-has-been.” (CL 76)

Photographic meaning is a product of society and its history. (CL 34) Society mistrusts pure

meaning, but advertising photography has clear meaning. No meaning at all is safe, so

photography is subversive when it is pensive, when it thinks. (CL 38)

“Usually the amateur is defined as an immature state of the artist: someone who cannot - or

will not - achieve the mastery of a profession. But in the field of photographic practice, it is the

amateur, on the contrary, who is the assumption of the professional; for it is he who stands

closer to the noeme of photography.” The noeme of photography is the always historical

photographic experience, supporting the capacity a photograph to reference something ‘that

has been’. (CL 99) A photograph is a temporal hallucination, false on the level of perception but

true on the level of time: “it is not there” - “but it has indeed been.”

___________________________________________________________________________

Benjamin, Walter, and J A. Underwood. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Penguin great ideas. London: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Descriptive Annotation

Written in 1935, this essay postulates that art is malleable, responding to evolving conditions of

production, distribution, and reception. Although artworks have always been subject to

replication, by 1900 reproduction technology became so efficient that the reiteration process

profoundly modified the meaning and impact of the art so proliferated. An implied value

judgment is rendered, that specifies a negative consequence of this modern transformation. In

mass reproductions, the “here and now” of the original work of art is absent - its “unique

existence in a particular place.” Uniqueness underlies “authenticity,” which evades

reproducibility. As mechanically reproduced art is distributed widely, the experience of

contemplation is lost. This missing element is given the name “Aura.” Aura has its origin in

ritual, cult, and tradition, and perceptual orientation changes over time and has social

influences. Reproducibility revolutionized “the whole social function of art.” Aura’s decay

socially adjusted the behavior of the mass population to both get closer to things, and to

overcome object uniqueness. As cult value declines, exhibition value increases. This generates a

new function for art, with traditional “artistic function” becoming incidental while exhibition

value becomes superior and pregnant with political significance.

Modern art forms exist primarily in replica, so that an original artwork is indistinguishable from

its copies. This renders authenticity arbitrary and illegitimate. Mass distributed artistic

reproductions are incorporated into the personal contexts of their observers, transforming the

entire environment of art. A unique object is too limited to be addressed by a mass, which is

defined by the shared experiences of its members.

The film actor differs from the stage actor. Just as the motion picture process does not record

the performance as a whole, the actor cannot adjust to a specific audience. The audience

empathizes with the constructed and edited film creation rather than the actor: this is not

compatible with cult value. In addition, film has no aura because a film performance isn’t “here

& now.” In this regard, film art has escaped the realm of “beautiful semblance.”4

On a film set the equipment is prevailing. The “illusory nature of film” is twice removed; it

comes from the editing function. “The presentation of reality in film” is significant because it

paradoxically provides “the equipment-free aspect of reality . . . precisely on the basis of the

most intensive interpenetration of reality with equipment.”

4 On the Sublime, Friedrich Schiller

When the masses confront contemporary painting, they have hostile reaction because of their

distance to the medium. Only a few select individuals are positioned as legitimate critics. With

film the mass reaction is progressive. This is because film combines pleasure with “an attitude

of expert appraisal.” With cinema, “the critical and uncritical attitudes of the public coincide.”

Film permits “simultaneous collective reception” and progressive reactions. In a film the

meaning of each single picture appears to be prescribed by the sequence of all preceding ones.

Film produces a divergent participation, a kind of “reception in distraction.” Distraction and

concentration are directly opposite. Traditional art requires concentration in which the viewer

is absorbed by the art. With film, ‘the distracted masses absorb the work of art into

themselves.” Reception in distraction is a sign of profound changes in perception. "It

encourages an evaluating attitude" and positions art to mobilize the masses.

traditional art art mechanically reproduced

painting - drawing photography - film

aura aura lost

original derivative

unique common

distance closeness

ritualistic political

contemplation distraction

cult value exhibition value

hostile reaction progressive reaction

art absorbs viewer viewer absorbs art ___________________________________________________________________________

Crary, Jonathan. Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1999. Print.

Descriptive Annotation

The basic premise of this thought provoking book is the assumption that “the ways in which we

intently listen to, look at, or concentrate on anything have a deeply historical character.” In any

activity, we are “in a dimension of contemporary experience that requires that we effectively

cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment.” 5

The book is not concerned with whether or not there is some empirically identifiable mental or

neurological capacity for attention. Rather the focus is on documenting its presumptive

existence and importance during the historical period under review. (SoP 23)

Crary

debatably contends that this biological necessity is both negative and caused by “western

modernity.” He further claims that our lives are a patchwork of disconnected states that are not

“natural.” At the end of the twentieth century, humankind is adrift in a vast social crisis of

“subjective dis-integration.” He argues, “Modern distraction can only be understood through its

reciprocal relation to the rise of attentive norms and practices.”

Attentive norms reside at a paradoxical intersection. One vector is the attentiveness influenced

and controlled by society as a disciplinary organization of labor, education, and mass

consumption. The other vector is an ideal of sustained attentiveness as a constitutive element

of a creative and free subjectivity.

5 Although I enjoyed the portion book I read (Introduction and Chapter One), and benefited

much from the study, my scientific training indicates this human capacity for sensation filtration

is a fundamental requirement for survival. If we could not control sensations by selective

awareness, we would be completely overwhelmed by the continuous and massive input

stream.

Primarily concerned with the historical conception of attention, the book is an attempt to

outline how the ideas about attention changed over time. From 1870 to the very early 1900s,

significant cultural alteration invoked a modernization of subjectivity.

The first chapter establishes why attention became a decisively new kind of conceptual model

and why it became inseparable from philosophical, psychological, and aesthetic investigations

of perception. In addition, these re-conceptualizations of perception became a central element

in the reshaping of mass culture. Attention emerged as a model of how a subject maintains a

coherent and practical sense of the world, a model that is not primarily optical or even

necessarily coincidental with reality.

Perception can be both absorption and a deferral, a kind of suspension. In such a state,

attention might become so rapt that it transforms ordinary conditions. This position is a

cancellation or an interruption, a disturbance, or a negation of perception itself - a “hovering

out of time.”

Repeatedly reference is made to the “Problem of attention.” In a broad sense, a problem exists

when an individual becomes aware of a significant difference between what actually is and

what is desired. Perhaps more to the spirit of the text, this problem refers to a situation,

condition, or issue that is yet unresolved.

New models of subjective vision emerged in the nineteenth century and broke from a classic

“regime of visuality.” Although the author does not define the classic regime, my research

indicates he refers to vision as a social fact founded on the geometric certainties of optics. The

visual thus represented an external fact rather than an internal interpretation. But the outlined

developments in the history of perception grounded an understanding of vision in the “density

and materiality of the body.” Vision thus became dependent on the physiological observer and

therefore is fundamentally faulty. (SoP 12)

This logically leads to new assumptions, that the senses have no objectivity or certainty. Once

the empirical truth of vision was determined to lie in the body, sensation could be controlled by

external techniques of manipulation and stimulation. The disintegration of an indisputable

distinction between interior and exterior was a condition for the emergence of a “spectacular

modernizing culture.” Coupled with this was a dramatic expansion of aesthetic experience.

Attempts to rationalize the irrational must fail so questions asked are more important than the

empirical conclusions. Some such questions include:

How does attention screen out some sensations and not others? How many simultaneous sensations can be attended for how long? How fast can one switch attention for one sensation to another? Is attention an automatic or voluntary act? (SoP 24-29)

Because attentiveness is the site of observation, classification and measurement, it is also the

locus around which knowledge is accumulated. Artists like Seurat and Cezanne contented that

any sensation is always a compounding of memory, desire, will, anticipation, and immediate

experience. (SoP 27) Crary argues that “attention and distraction cannot be though outside of a

continuum in which the two ceaselessly flow into one another, as part of a social field in which

the same imperatives and forces incite one and the other.” (SoP 51)

Three attention models become germane:

A reflex process, mechanical adaptation to environmental stimuli Various automatic or unconscious processes of forces Decisive voluntary activity of the subject to impose itself on the perceived world

The consciousness is inseparable from physiological temporality and process. Mental states

marginalized in older perception theories (sleep, trance, fainting, daydream, dissociation), are

important as components of newer theories. (SoP 57) The modern subject ceases to be

synonymous with a consciousness. (SoP 58)

Throughout the twentieth century, shifting power structures and changing subjectification

models have demanded reciprocal modifications in understanding attentive behavior. (SoP 72)

Concepts of perception and attention swim in a sprawling diversity of rationalization attempts.

To conclude, what follows are significant selected samples of philosophical thought:

Immanuel Kant The dilemma of modernity is defined by a human capacity for synthesis within the fragmentation of a cognitive field. Perceptual modalities are in a state of perpetual transformation. The modernizing cultural environment is increasing saturated with sensory input.

Arthur Schopenhauer Perception involves a wholeness of the world, a variable relation of forces. Therefore, the question is what processes and structures allow for the complex coherence of conscious thought.

Henri-Louis Bergson Perception involves a synthesis binding immediate sensory perceptions with the creative forces of memory.

G. Stanley Hall The perceptual synthesis progression is a condition of knowledge.

James Cappie Attention is an imprecise way a subject selectively isolates certain components of a sensory field at the expense of others to maintain an orderly and productive world.

Étienne Bonnot de Condillac Attention is based on the force of the focused sensation.

Alfred Fouilee “Concentration of the will and attention on anything will lead to exhaustion of attention and to a paralyses of the will.” In perception a given force can assume more than one form and attention and distraction are inherently inseparable. Modernity is a process of fragmentation and destruction in which premodern forms of wholeness and integrity were irretrievably degraded through technological, urban, and economic reorganizations.

Walter Benjamin Within perception, distraction and concentration form polar opposites. Architecture and film are paradigms of the modern representing a “reception in a state of distraction.”

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche Attention can be absorption, a forgetting precondition for life-affirming action. This forgetting could attain an instant of eternity within the flux of human time. Orderliness of consciousness is no longer is guaranteed, and “a window opens onto the cognitive chaos of modernity against which attention will be conjured up to do battle.”

Wilhelm Dilthey Subjective experience is “a continuous stream.” In this flow, we manifest only a single relative representation at a time. As it disappears then another relative representation begins to

appear. Thus, the selective and delimited nature of attention relates to the narrowness of consciousness. “Consciousness is an immense terrain that is illuminated only in very small areas by the beam of attention.”

William James Stream of thought is an internal equilibrium of perception always in a state of change, the changes affecting every part. Attention figuratively freezes the stream temporarily. “Each of us literally chooses, by his ways of attending to things, what sort of a universe he shall appear to himself to inhabit.” We inhabit a common perceptual world due to overlapping common choices made by an evolving community of free individuals. The emergence of increasing powerful technologies and institutions externally determine the objects of attention for populations.

Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz “The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things.” ___________________________________________________________________________

Frieling, Rudolf, and Dieter Daniels. Media Art Net 1. Wien: Springer, 2003. Print.

Artwork Analysis

ASCII Art Ensemble Walter van der Cruijsen, Luka Frelih, Vuk Cosic

History of Moving Images http://www.ljudmila.org/~vuk/ascii/film/

Introduction An interest in symbols as images and images as symbols informed my selection of “A History of

Moving Images” as the artwork to analyze from the expansive book and on-line project, Media

Art Net 1. As a survey of media art, this selection was made difficult by virtue of the massive

quantity of interesting works presented, and I plan to spend much more time with this valuable

resource.

Description of the Work Founded in 1998 “The ASCII Art Ensemble” is a European assemblage of three artists interested

in translating moving images into animated ASCII characters. The process is grounded in early

text-only based computer systems, in which images could only be presented by selection and

placement of the available symbol set, character by character. In such arrangements, a stylized

image is encoded based on the tonal density and shape of each character relative to the

information contained in the original image. “A History of Moving Image” is a web project

providing a series of short converted video image clips appropriated from specific iconic

cultural connections, including the original Star Trek television series from the sixties.

Early Historical Context The first written and therefore accumulated communication was in the form of pictures, which

represented ideas and objects. Over time, these hieroglyphics evolved into symbols

representing sounds of spoken communication. But the letterform as purely visual remained

important as an aesthetic archetype. Illuminated manuscripts incorporated decorative

penmanship into textual manuscripts. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918), a

French poet and artist known for juxtaposing the old and the new, used shaped

text in his handwritten visual word poems.6

6 Apollinaire, Guillaume, and Anne H. Greet. Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Print.

Since 1867, people have used the

typewriter not only for making text based documents, but also for creating

works of art. Typewriter art began to flourish from the late 1950s with the

concrete poetry movement. Concrete poetry is an art form where the message is created by

the combination of words and typography.7

ASCII Art

Along comes computers and ASCII, an acronym for the American Standard Code for Information

Interchange. ASCII art developed to a sophisticated level on computer bulletin board systems of

the late 1970s and early 1980s. The limitations

of early personal computers necessitated the

use of text characters to represent images.

This lead to ASCII's widespread adaption by

underground online art groups of the period, a

movement collectively known as ArtScene. 8

During the 1990’s, as graphical browsing and

variable-width fonts became dominant, ASCII

art dramatically declined. Microsoft declared

ASCII art "dead" in June of 1998, the exact

same time as the founding of “The ASCII Art Ensemble.”

Interpretation

“For all my life I have been attracted to unorthodox creation and usage of writing...to explore the spaces beyond text in lines or between two pages in the same leaf or between the letter and the paper that holds it (this) is much more meaningful...”

- Vuk Cosic

There are multitudes of conceptual layers to “A History of Moving Images” that resonate

profoundly. Following are those most significant.

7 Riddell, Alan. Typewriter Art. London: London Magazine Editions, 1975. Print. 8 http://artscene.textfiles.com/

Symbols <---> Images

This work explores the transcoding between one mode of language to another. By interrupting

and deconstructing expected visual codes and conventions, new relationships are created.

Symbols by principle are specific marks that represent something else by association. As a

different paradigm, images represent by resemblance. Here we have both modalities

juxtaposed in synergistic ways building a new complex whole out of the individual parts.

Information transformation

An attractive aspect of this work is its retro-futuristic aesthetic encoding, using an already

historical and obsolete method of a thoroughly modern digital communication protocol.

Associations between meaning and language are explored, providing an appreciation of

characters as significant shapes related to a superimposed image structure, rather than just for

their conventional symbolic role of representation.

Representation and Meaning

The digital image as an artistic representation has become ubiquitous and transparent, but in

the form of Ascii art is explicitly reveled. Communication becomes increasingly complex. Each

individual symbol may contain meaning, certain symbol combinations have more meaning, and

the whole is rendered into a pictorial representation with its own connotation. All these layers

can be manipulated separately, and assemble into recognizable moving constructs, flickering

over time forming a narrative. The code and image are simultaneously apparent.

Time History Culture

From the ancient expressions of hieroglyphics to a dematerialized digital glow on a computer

monitor, pictographic symbols resonate. The history of civilization is the history of written and

thus stored symbolic communication. Star Trek appropriation, being a shared and culturally

influential science fiction allusion is apropos. These Ascii Art messages continue to adjust and

modernized while marching along with evolving technological innovation, thus questioning

fundamental culture assumptions.

Internalization

As the relationships between writing, poetry, symbols, representation of meaning, and image

making are of enormous importance to me, I intend to incorporate Ascii and text art into my

personal creative repertoire. Below is example of an initial trial. Taking these concepts and

build on the possibilities in new and divergent ways, my desire is to aesthetically layer meaning

in an allusion to a historic future, or a future history.

Railway Station

Railway Station Detail