Thursday, 9 January 2020

Quantum entanglement

Tyre tracks encounter each other and the road surface.

I have posted before on lines and their entanglement and how nets can be used to think about interconnections. I have also posted on quantum theory and how this can be used to help us think about the fact that everything is constructed of different patterns of vibration or interconnected energy fields. By linking quantum theory to object orientated ontology, it could be argued that we can move towards a more 'flattened' or non hierarchical way of thinking about reality. If so, any event could be a drawing, but conversely the idea of defining something using a particular word becomes redundant. This is very counter intuitive and it is in opposition to all those theories that put human rationality on top of a pyramid of importance. One conceptual model that can be derived from a coupling of OOO with quantum theory, is one that could be used to think of a world without 'conditionality', something that would be quite disturbing if you are a Buddhist. Buddhists have a word 'pratityasamutpada' which means 'dependent origination', which suggests that because existence is dependent on previous or connecting factors, it is conditional on those factors.

'He who sees the Principle of Conditionality sees the Truth. One who sees the Truth sees the Buddha'. See

The important issue here is that Buddhists and many other religions and philosophies look at the moment of now as being conditional on all the infinite number of things that have happened before. For instance I would not be here to write this if my mother had never met my father. But I would also not be writing this if mammalian evolution had not taken place in the way it did and a different set of creatures had filled that particular evolutionary niche left open after a meteor collision with the Earth served to extinguish most of the dinosaurs.

I have previous looked at the Northern European concept of the Wyrd, one that is centred on an image of a thread that is wound around and between an individual and all the events and things and people that that individual encounters during their life span, a thread that is 'cut' on death. This image also suggests the interconnectedness of everything. Conditionality suggests that there is an underlying cause and effect for everything and that therefore one thing follows another. However in a universe where stones are no more or less important than Greta Garbo or a dandelion or this computer on which I'm typing, or a dog or a cushion or an idea, such as Batman, each entity is simply a particular configuration that happens to be in that configuration at one particular moment and which at any other moment might be part of something else. The interactions these things may or may not have will depend on their relative space time positioning and whether or not they affect each other will depend on their individual time and spatial properties. But what if some things can happen in two places at once or if time as we think of it, i. e. a situation whereby one thing follows another, is not the way things work, time being simply how we as a species have built an idea to help us navigate and understand our local space time experience. Conditionality has recently become even more questionable because it would appear as if there is no such thing as a single point in time to hold on to.

More things interacting with stuff, visualised by other things interacting with stuff

If everything is more like a wave than a thing, then as waves occupy multiple places in space all at once, anything and everything can occupy multiple spaces at once. This is called "quantum superposition" and recently scientists have observed a molecule made up of 2,000 atoms occupy two places at the same time. We are now aware that bacteria are influenced by magnetic field changes at a quantum level and as our bodies are made up of approximately 50% bacteria, it is becoming apparent that we are, like everything else, interacting with quantum fields much more than we ever realised before.

Because entangled particles remain connected in such a way that actions performed on one affect the other, even when separated by great distances, we can perhaps intuit other ways beyond the human to think about conditionality or cause and effect. The phenomenon "spooky action at a distance" depends on elemental particles or fields existing in all possible states simultaneously. Our previous mental picture of these things suggested that there was a boundary between the ordinary and the quantum world, but what if there isn't? If a molecule of 2,000 atoms is subject to quantum superposition there is no reason to expect that there's a limit to the size of quantum effects. It has recently been theorised that bacteria can become entangled with light particles and it has been seen that some birds can navigate the Earth by responding to bacteria that are themselves entangled with the Earth's magnetic field. All sorts of areas of thinking are affected by quantum entanglement. For instance; if our memories are simply patterns of chemical and/or electromagnetic connections, these patterns may, like those of the bacteria in our stomachs, become entangled with other electromagnetic fields. Our perceptions consist of recorded changes in chemical and/or electromagnetic connections, so at some base level, a memory, an idea and a perception all exist in a similar electrochemical format. Percepts, perceptions, sensations and reality all entangled together at a quantum level in ways previously unimaginable.

A drawing made with graphite on paper, encounters computer software and because of the implications of the encounter, the idea is further adjusted to suggest imaginary encounters with a library of quantum effects

So where are we going with this? If I am a thing like any other thing consisting of a series of interacting fields that interact with other fields and I am interacting with stuff just like everything else is interacting with stuff, my drawings can be seen as the result of a certain type of material entanglement, and the materials I engage with, are at the same time engaging with me, neither being more or less important than the other. I am in effect the subject of my drawing materials' engagement, just as much as an idea I might have. It could be argued that I am an idea implied by the way certain materials are coming into new formations.

This might not be as weird as it appears. It has been pointed out that quantum mechanical effects are key to the ability of green plants, through photosynthesis, to almost instantaneously transfer solar energy from molecules in light harvesting complexes, to molecules in electrochemical reaction centres. As photosynthesis is vital to our existence on this earth, I would suggest that we are entangled with this energy transfer at every level. When we eat food and release the energy tied up in plant and animal cells, are we not re-entangling the quantum mechanical effect of photosynthesis into ourselves and as far as the sun is concerned being just another localised twist in the entanglement of its long time energy release.
As far as the sun is concerned we are in effect no different to the paper and the charcoal with which a drawing is made. You could well now argue that I was back using another version of 'conditionality', first of all the sun then the leaf etc.

However in order for me to make sense of my nowness I need an idea such as conditionality in order to make decisions that suggest that what I do now will effect what is going to happen in the future. Conditionality enables me to navigate 'local' conditions, therefore I/we need it as an idea to remain sane.

I have referred to Graham Harman's diagram before when reflecting on Object Orientated Ontology, but it is worthwhile revisiting it in order to look at how quantum entanglement can be seen as part of the way we could think about the state of things as they are.

Harman argues that in the day to day we deal not with real objects, but with their sensuous surrogates or manifestations. We fail to recognise the difference between real objects and sensuous objects because we live amongst a particularly localised set of entanglements where sensuous qualities have become associated with our particular sense organs' abilities, thereby rendering us blind to what is in reality hidden (to our sense organs that is) within objects.

I think of this in a slightly different way. If I encounter a mountain, I can never actually experience it, I can only have a series of small encounters with the bits of the mountain I come into contact with. However from my tiny bit of information I can deduce all sorts of things that allow me to survive. For instance I may experience a certain coldness because of the mountain's height and may therefore respond to this by putting on warm clothes. So yes I don't ever encounter the 'reality' of the whole mountain because it consists of what feels like an infinity of possibilities, but I do respond to aspects of it, such as whether or not snow covers it.

I try to open this issue out in another post on the limits of language and would argue that Harman is like so many other philosophers tied down with words and that his sensual object/real object distinction would disappear if he had no verbal or written language to refer back to. I would argue that we would simply interact with whatever is happening, the enactment on contact being some sort of exchange dependent on degree of touch and length of time tho two elements are entangled.

Gravitational fields, electromagnetic fields, weak, and strong nuclear fields all mediate the four known fundamental forces. These fields interact by exchanging particles, which is their mediation or effect.
This is how the four forces are described:

Strong interaction: the interaction responsible for holding quarks together to form hadrons, and holding neutrons and also protons together to form atomic nuclei. The exchange particle that mediates this force is the gluon.
Electromagnetic interaction: the familiar interaction that acts on electrically charged particles. The photon is the exchange particle for this force.
Weak interaction: a short-range interaction responsible for some forms of radioactivity, that acts on electrons, neutrinos, and quarks. It is mediated by the W and Z bosons.
Gravitational interaction: a long-range attractive interaction that acts on all particles. The postulated exchange particle has been named the graviton.

If one existed, a unified field theory would bring these four interactions together into a single framework. (Carlo Rovelli suggests that we now have an answer to this in terms of information theory, but even so, he would argue that as new information comes into a system, part of the previous information becomes irrelevant). We might not be aware of them at our day to day human scale but they are what previously scientists took to be the reality that underpinned our existence. Now however we are told by scientists that this is only about 5% of 'reality' and the other 95% consists of dark matter and dark energy, things we can at the moment only guess at as to what they actually are.

I am as an artist going to suggest that what is important here is the moment of 'exchange' between one thing and another. Whatever dark matter is it will have an infinity of possibilities, and it will be possible that some things will be able to respond to certain aspects of it, and how they respond will be the imaginative possibility of the situation.

So how does all this impact on drawing? There is a book on architectural possibilities, 'Siteless: 1001 Building Forms' by François Blanciak. If you haven't come across it before do look it up, because it is a wonderful example of how visual thinking can be far more powerful than traditional linear, written or verbal thinking. The book is a response to the imaginative possibility of a series of situations.

As you can see from the images above, what Blanciak does is to provide us with what have been called by Ian Bogost, 'visual ontographs'. These are speculative encounters between possibilities of forms. They remind me of an exercise we used to set students on the Leeds foundation course, which was to explore how many variations of interacting basic forms you could draw. Blanciak's forms, drawn freehand (to avoid software-specific shapes) from a constant and consistent viewing angle, are presented twelve to a page, with no scale, order, or end to the series. In many ways they reflect the flattening of hierarchy that I believe happens when a unified field theory is implied. No one thing is more important than another, but each encounter raises possibilities for future actions. (As new information comes into a system, part of the previous information becomes irrelevant). The fact that all of Blanciak's drawings are the same size reinforcing the fact that no one encounter is more important than another.

This is interesting because it also points to a specifically aesthetic phenomena. In this case objects are not reduced to their sensuous manifestations, but are all speculative. The imaginative begins to occupy the same status as the real, both being types of encounters between things rather than being things in themselves. As I pointed out earlier, stones are no more or less important than Greta Garbo or a dandelion or this computer on which I'm typing. But in this case it is about an encounter with the qualities of Greta Garbo, the 'Garboing' or the 'dandelioning', the action rather than the object. My role in this being that of a bricoleur, someone who is making the most of what is at hand.

In my work for a recent 'Library Interventions' project I imagined that as I walked through the library I could be guided just as a bird could by some sort of quantum level interaction. All I had to do was leave myself open to its influence. A decision to stop and draw was an unquestioned instinctive one, one that could have been predicated by light bouncing off book titles and entering my field of vision and at some point getting entangled with some memory electrons. A type of speculative theory.

My encounter with the bookshelves was diagrammed via an old drawing process that I used to use, centred on measurement and an awareness of my location in relation to the shelves I was looking at. (I'm reminded of this by Mike Croft's previous guest blog post, whereby he takes on the implications of this sort of perceptual drawing and pushes it to a particular limit).

Initial observational drawing

The initial drawings were annotated with the names of specific texts that could be found along the central axis of vision. More drawings were then made from the ones made on location, this time allowing for 'speculative' encounters to be as important as encounters with sensuous objects. These speculative encounters were implied by book titles found. The drawings were then processed using computer software and a geometry of targeting applied to clarify the sighting process.

Aesthetic phenomena in this case allude to the domain of real objects beyond their qualitative manifestations in sensuous objects, this in effect freeing me from any form of being trapped in 'actualism' where objects are reduced to their sensuous manifestations. This is why making and drawing are much better ways of dealing with these issues, they leave the imagination to material inventions rather than ones predicated by words. My equivalent images to Blanciak's being ones where ceramic invention is linked to thoughts about library books as if they had organs for perceptual encounters, such as eyes, noses, ears, fingers and tongues. A book about Islamic pattern, may encounter one on cowboy boots, and as it does the imaginary taste of leather shapes a new formal logic. Initially images were simply about how things might emerge from rough lumps of clay, but as these images merged with possibilities coming from both drawings and clay shaping, new hybrids emerged.

Drawings and ceramic objects made from the drawings

Once I began making these ideas changed again, my encounters with clay revealing something that was pushing back very forcefully and making its own demands as to what it should or could be. The drawings were about what pen and ink can become, not what clay can do.

Objects made from an encounter with clay

From one position this object looks like a set of books, from another a pair of armoured knight's boots. This was an idea of the clay's rather than myself, I had set out to make a pair of cowboy boots thinking about books, but in the making process things changed. Clay, books, boots, ideas about the possibilities of what clay can look like, the word 'movement', the word 'time', all possible events within a wider range of events such as an exhibition, or a studio production, or an artist's work. As the clay began its own dialogue with my hands there was a point when I wasn't sure which of us was doing what. The same material dialogue, but perhaps to an even greater extent, then takes place during the glazing process. There is no way I can intervene in the kiln firing, I just have to trust that my intuition as to whether flow rate, eventual colour, surface texture etc. is right and that I have enough experience to predict the outcome. However the variables are so wide that there is always something that happens that I'm not expecting. As I have pointed out already, as new information comes into a system, part of the previous information becomes irrelevant. I. e. the traditional approach to art making or any form of planning or academic research, is to set out a question or set of issues to work with, that lead to a pre-determined set of procedures that you then can reflect upon as to whether or not the actions taken were successful or not. However working in this way things just happen.

This not being in control is very important as it reminds me that other things have agency in this series of conversations. My interest in object orientated ontology leading me to foreground these issues and to hope that as I try and reduce my human centred awareness and acknowledge alternative non human realities, I can persuade others to try some other alternative modes of thinking. Our present systems of thought seem to have brought us into difficult and dangerous waters, so as an educator and artist it would appear to me that one of my roles is to point to other possibilities and suggest frameworks for thinking that might help someone come to terms with a world that seems to be out of kilter with the way we inhabit it.

An illogical relationship

The fact that we don't know what 95% of the reality that we exist within consists of, suggests that our very limited perception of reality may well be very like the experience of a line in Abbot's 'Flatland'. A line could not conceive of a three dimensional solid, therefore if a line was picked up and moved through a space beyond the 2 dimensional world it existed in, it would in effect disappear and only reappear again if it was placed back into its own flat world. The three dimensional world would also allow for a view of where a line was to be seen as a series of positions that were possible points for reinserting that line back into its own space, therefore it could be reinserted at a point of previous existence, i. e. breaking the causality chain of time. For the line conditionality would therefore be questioned.

A film has now been made of Flatland, and it is worth watching if you have never encountered Abbot's work before. The movement between 2 and 3D thinking is something fundamental to imaginative thinking and the position of drawing as a major game player in this process is vital.

The artwork that relates to these ideas was exhibited in the Leeds Arts University gallery as part of the Library Interventions series of artist's responses to the university's library.

Capra, F. (1997) The Tao of Physics London: HarperCollins (I first read this book back in the 1970s and it influenced my work then, I have since revisited Capra's writings and find him still relevant)

Rovelli, C (2017) Reality is not what it seems London: Penguin

Sunday, 5 January 2020

Mike Croft: Observation of Perception, Part 2

Observation of Perception, Part 2

When writing this I’m thinking of drawing as a form of visual thinking. By such thinking, I mean considerations of mind, body and cognition variously channelled through the filter of vision. (Philosophically, this could take one in the direction of Embodiment theory.) What makes drawing as visual thinking particular in the context of art and design is intentionality, and it is the latter of which I try to be specific and that registers in and as the result. This said, a lot happens in drawing concerning the relatively autonomous behaviour of the medium that defies one’s intentions, and intentions are not necessarily always recognisable. However, on this occasion I’m trying to show through and as the drawing, ways in which one might observe perception. For this reason I’ve been recording the drawing process and my spoken thoughts while drawing as videos, specifically through an action camera attached to the front of clear plastic goggles worn over my glasses, Figure 1.

Figure 1: To show goggles, inside and outside, and action camera

both separate from and attached to the goggles.

This does also make the methodology more sharable, and anyone interested in it might take up the process and adapt it as needed.
The action cam, however, appears as a thin blurred black rectangle imploded in front of and perpendicular to my vision, Figure 2.

Figure 2: Screenshots from Observation of Perception: Showing Part 1 of a 2-Part Drawing, video clip 26:52 min, 2019.

This is therefore both a tool to record the drawing process and one of two objects or motifs to observe. While the action-cam itself picks up sound, I record my speech, what I term a voice-over, into a separate audio device. The second tool, also an object or motif, is the goggles. Both of these may be said to operate as tools because, being very close to my face, they’re almost an extension of my eyes. In this sense I’m observing perception, in other words looking at looking. This point is debatably another example of the medium’s defiance, but what I want is a situation where, as nearly as possible, there is nothing in front of my vision.
The tools, neither of which you the viewer can see in the videos except in the terms that the drawing presents them, are each responsible for a pair of faculties of visual perception. One of the tools is the action cam, with its wide-angle lens, which records visual content both central and peripheral to my vision, without of course distinguishing between either. I provide such distinction through my speech. The other tool is the goggles that register eye and head movement in coordination with the head. (The camera won’t record eye movements made independently of head movements, of which there are two possibilities; eye movements while the head is still, and less often eye movements in different directions to movement of the head.) Both sets of faculties I register as drawn marks and shapes, which provide the accumulative visual/material interest that gradually makes the drawing, Figure 3.

Figure 3: The two stages of the drawing recorded as the video Observation of Perception: Showing Part 1 of a 2-Part Drawing and Observation… Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing. Dermatograph pencils, black ink, attached filing cards on white laminated cardboard,

109 x 79cm. 2019.

In the first blog entry (link), through reference to the Russian psychologist Alfred L. Yarbus’s non-digital eye-scanning device circa 1960s’, and the Italian Renaissance theorist Leon-Battista Alberti’s net or gridded frame to enable the plotting of observed coordinates, I try to explain that to my mind the mediation between perception and observation falls somewhere between the observer and that which is observed. The eye-scanning device is useful in this respect because it shows how one’s eyes scan across space, and Alberti’s frame because it can represent a material mid-way for consideration of life questions; questions of being. By substituting minimal objects, better conceived as tools of perception, for more tangible three-dimensional objects at obviously more distant positions in front of one, then what gets presented on and in the drawing is the mid-way, the mediator of sources of reference that are before it, as nearly as possible extensions of perception itself.
In circumstances where I’m drawing only, without using the action-cam, I have only my glasses to which to refer. If, as in the following example, I still record my speech, it seems appropriate to write at least some of the observations onto and progressively into the drawing, Figure 4.

Figure 4: Drawing of reading glasses drawing viewed from inside the frames while being worn. Dermatograph pencils, coloured inks on white laminated cardboard,

109 x 79cm. 2019.

This might also be a key point in general about the experience of drawing: it’s an activity that starts on a surface and gradually, through its development, opens up the surface as space. My own drawing method however, which is mainly concerned with conveying information about its self-same process, does tend to prioritise the surface.
Explained another way, I’m setting up an inversion of the circumstances whereby the observed object that’s usually positioned somewhere in the space beyond oneself and the drawing is immediately in front of one, in this case the glasses. There is no source of reference that’s logically in front the drawing, and in fact the drawing, that should be the mediator between perception and what’s observed, is further beyond the object in the positions drawer/agent – glasses – drawing, as suggested in Figure 5.

Figure 5: Drawing of reading glasses viewed from inside the frames while being worn + the actual glasses now suspended in front of the drawing to fit their drawn size

according to distance when seen from behind.

What’s now interesting about the circumstances so installed is that the actual space between the object, the glasses, and their mediator between perception and observation, the drawing, can be the space of a narrative, a story of whatever else could be taking place in and as a different criterion of perception, Figure 6.

Figure 6: Showing the photo of Figure 5, above, and a view of the actual space existing between glasses and drawing.

Artists often use the medium of drawing to rehearse and research narratives, or use drawing as the sole medium for this purpose – to name but one example, the contemporary artist William Kentridge.
This leads me towards another kind of theory, which is the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981). I’d thought of mentioning Lacan in the first blog entry in the context of the glance, but since I reference the glance specifically in the video, Observation of Perception: Showing Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing (see Figure 3, above), and hadn’t completed that at the time of writing the first entry, it now seems a better moment for further explanation. Lacan’s theorisation of the glance occurs in his paper, ‘Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty’ (1945). This paper is particularly interesting from the point of view of inter-subjective use of time. While the scenario that provides the context for Lacan’s discussion concerns three human individuals, I’m adapting this to the kind of dialogue that can occur between a drawer/agent and a drawing.
Lacan explains that within the time frame of trying to make a decision or reach a conclusion about something, an initial hypothesis concerning that something is first put to the test of doubt. The period of doubt, which in decision-making need be no more than an instant, but an instant that can be of variable length, is in effect the glance. According to Lacan (2006: 168): ‘The time for comprehending can be reduced to the instant of the glance, but this glance can include in its instant all the time needed for comprehending’. What I like so much about this quote is the suggestion that the glance concerns uncertainty. The engagement with drawing, or more precisely the dis-engagement with other modes of thought during and as drawing, can be an extended time frame of the glance; the holding of decision-making in abeyance as uncertainty. In the following drawing of the action cam and goggles – from which I also made a video – I later superimposed the glasses, seen as before from the narrow space between my face and the glasses lodged on my nose, Figure 7.

Figure 7: Single-layer state of a drawing of an action-cam worn over goggles and the goggles viewed from the inside while being worn, and a second-layer state of the drawing showing the same drawing with orange glasses superimposed, viewed from inside the frames. Dermatograph pencils, black ink and coloured inks, attached filing cards on white laminated cardboard, 109 x 79cm. 2019.

What’s interesting here is that there’s conceptually a space between the two layers of mark making and cursory imagery that I leave alone. The several apparent positions of the glasses do seem to be increasingly in front of the placements of the narrow band of the action cam, but I mean a conceptual space that’s to do with my lack of conscious concern to integrate the two sets of imagery. However, the two sets waver in a kind of relationship that’s, in a sense, up to them.
While the word uncertainty often has a negative connotation, drawing and other forms of creative practice stand a good chance of manifesting uncertainty positively, no matter what one’s disposition. Debatably, if art works, it’s imbued with affirmation, even if its content and the invested feelings are opposite. Insofar as an uncertain disposition would be to hang back, and a decisive one would be to push onwards – hesitancy versus boldness – I personally like the idea of time conducting a kind of backwards rotation as part of its movement forward, where it picks up the past and draws it through. This also seems like drawing; where each decision is consequential on the next, and the next one is in acknowledgement of some previous decision. There are moments in the video-recordings of the drawing as shown in two states in Figure 3, above, however, where such consequential decisions break down, and in the video particularly of the second state I appear to be searching around for something to do next. While this often happens in drawing, I’d much prefer a drawing to roll on as a continuum of action, Figure 8.

Figure 8: Screenshots 40:42min and 41:27min, with 1st voice-over, and interventions of a 2nd voice-over between the timespan of the two screenshots, of the 44:35min video Observation of Perception: Showing Part 2 of a 2-Part Drawing, 2019.

What’s interesting with the strategy of intervening in the first voice-over that’s spoken spontaneously while drawing, is that the intervention is squeezed into available moments of silence where I’m drawing only, which seems like a textual equivalent of re-working and revising the drawing. I show this also, in Figure 8, to indicate how the drawing and the voice-over are mutually both cooperative and distractive.
A second point of Lacanian theory conveniently links the first blog entry’s reference to Alberti’s frame with the idea of a potential narrative space. Lacan adapted the idea of a mid-way in the optical pyramid to his own idea, in the psychical context, of an opaque screen, more like a ‘stain’ or ‘decoy’, that muddies vision, altering and affecting what we assume to be the objectivity of vision. (This is my simple interpretation of very complex theory. For more thorough explanation you might refer for instance to Harari, 2004: 119-40) Suffice it to say that the metaphor of muddied vision may relate to the more subjective aspect of perception: the fact that one often imposes personal interpretation on otherwise objective and sharable visual-material content.
I’m intending to offer this question to a small group of fine art students as a contribution to their seminar class on Embodiment. After a drawing exercise that follows closely in the method of the above-described work, I’ll ask them to define the space that their glasses frame, or the frame of sunglasses, in terms of a narrative of their own choosing. Whether physically in whatever medium in the space as shown in Figure 6, right-hand photo, above, or as further development of the drawing, the only stipulation will be that the drawing should be seen to physically morph into the story. A colleague wrote me a comment on the proposed idea: ‘I see action through big drawing (space), glasses in some way combining a self to a field, which could be expanded space of imagination and place of vision. Physically and symbolically this is interesting, with the use of interpretative words and objects and also the context of subject and thing. I think the content analyses time, space, place, and will involve the students naturally in self related content.’
The idea of framing in one way or another is always important in the more instructive level of creative teaching, and in the above-described project I’ve been doing this for myself. The intention of the drawings is to explore a hypothesis that one can observe perception and visualise it as an observation. As in some instances of drawing – though not all – one hopes that the result conveys a degree of clarity of intentions. However, in the process, things may happen that cause one to become involved in other areas of research. I’ve given some indication of my own interests, and of how things can occur by chance in the course of drawing. If research is an additional direction, then through one’s practice a third and more integral possibility can emerge that alters one’s perspective, but in a sense, because it’s within the work instead of clearly declaring itself, it waits to be discovered. This other integral possibility may shift and challenge one’s determination to achieve clarity.

References

Harari, R. (2004) Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction. New York, NY: Other Press
Lacan, J. (2006) Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. (First published 2002) New York, NY; London: W. W. Norton & Company

Thanks to Mike for a fascinating insight into the work he is doing.

It might be interesting for you to contextualise Mike's post by reading my own thoughts on that 'uncertain certainty' an attitude that lies at the core of most ventures into trying to record perceptual activity. His glasses are another drawing device or apparatus and therefore it might also be useful for you to think about how these devices have become integral parts of other drawing processes.

Mike has sent a sharable file for those interested in more detail. He has extracted a 'voice' from one of his videos and given an account of how his spoken interjections are woven into the narrative of drawing making.

Wednesday, 1 January 2020

Mike Croft: The Observation of Perception

Guest drawing blogger: Mike Croft

For the starting post of the new year I'd like to introduce Mike Croft who is the first of my guest drawing bloggers. I first met Mike in the early 1980s when he was making a series of large drawings of cathedrals. These were impressive studies of the types of complex spaces that you find in buildings that have been built on organic principles rather than to an architect’s plan. We were both working on the Foundation Course at what was then the Jacob Kramer College and because of the importance of drawing in the curriculum at that time, we found ourselves constructing situations whereby certain different aspects of observational drawing practices could be explored. Mike left to move to London and then on to S.E. Asia, teaching on various design-based programmes in universities. His most significant pedagogic experience being developing an exploration of the perception of movement with the first year students of a new design programme in South Korea. Movement and the question of time, of which movement is of course an expression, have been abiding interests within Mike’s work for several years and being able to explore this with a group of students who already had strong drawing skills was a cathartic experience.

Mike has this to say about the changes he has experienced when teaching and making drawings. “Thinking back to the days of Jacob Kramer College, the emphasis seemed much more on the image, and a degree of investment of rigour in drawing to ensure that the image was well founded. What may have changed, and has certainly been my more recent experience of teaching through drawing, is an emphasis on drawing as a research tool that students use while not necessarily being interested in drawing as its own medium, or a medium of fine art”. I would suggest that the change is more one of philosophical positioning here at Leeds. Drawing as process is of course important, but perhaps we are now looking more at drawing as a thinking tool rather than observational record.

Mike points to his work as having “a certain cursory character compared with what you might imagine as being a ‘well founded’ image” and points to Henri Bergson’s distinction in ‘Matter and Memory’ ([1912] 2004), between what he calls the ‘present image’, as opposed to the ‘represented image’. ‘Representation is always there, but always virtual – being neutralized, at the very moment when it might become actual, by the obligation to continue itself and to lose itself in something else’ (2004: 28). Mike loves this quote, pointing out, “concerning conscious perception, because through it one can acknowledge and build into an image one’s own sense and feelings of movement, and the drift and development of thought and action while drawing. The ‘present image’ may be considered the image in its sense of passing through, and conveys in essence a degree of insubstantiality but in the affirmative sense. Of course, in the sense of difference between say, the sketch and the finished work, this is nothing particularly new”. He points to the recent drawing blog post on ‘clouds’ stating, “what more beautiful instances of ephemeral insubstantiality than clouds!”

When I look at Mike’s drawing research, I’m always impressed with his focus and clarity; recent drawing experiments whereby he explores how to respond to changing perceptions in relation to movement, as always reflect his desire to be accurate, minimalist and systematic in response to the overwhelming amount of experience that sense data provides us with.

Mike’s blog posts are designed to help you as drawers think more carefully about movement. (He has crafted two, but because there is a lot of information to digest, they will be separated by a few days) As he points out, “working with and through movement in drawing may possibly be a way of attending more to how we see, perception itself, rather than perception’s resulting observations, while attending no less to whatever is the motif, the object of observation”.

When drawing, going back to hard earned thoughtful and measured looking is always worthwhile and Mike helps us approach the process with fresh insight.

Bergson, H. (2004) Matter and Memory (first published 1912) New York, NY: Dover

Link to TRACY where Mike has made some of his earlier research publicly available.

Link to an earlier post on eye tracking technology

The Observation of Perception: Mike Croft

What I’d like to say relates to drawing that concerns observation of the external world, but through the filter of perception. Of course, that there is a relation of the latter to the former is obvious, yet we may tend not to notice, let alone see, perception’s role in the process. Also, conventionally, we mostly select objects for drawing that are still or slow moving enough to enable what we assume will be some degree of representation of them. Notice that I’ve used ‘some sort of’, ‘may tend not to’, ‘mostly select’, and ‘some degree of’, which suggests that nothing I’ve so far said can be really concrete; it’s all open to interpretation. However, insofar as what I’ve said is relatively true, the facility of observation, in this case primarily visual, is automatically challenged and even sometimes contradicted by aspects of our innate biological and physiological facility of perception.

Perception may be said to work both for and against objectification of the object of vision, mostly in ways that are either automatic to, or beneath our awareness. How I happen to think this is due to at least two pivotal realisations – points of learning – neither of which happened in art school drawing classes. This is not to say that the classes did not provide the potential for such realisations, just that they were not theoretically articulated at that time. The situation may be somewhat different now. The first realisation was back in the 1970s’ when I was first a student. I happened upon a large-format book on psychology, in which was a photo of a girl’s face and next to it a semi-abstract rendition of it that transformed the face into a continuous kind of line map comprised of tiny flicks and dashes. (The phenomenon of drift and flickyou might, yourself, wish to look up on the Internet in relation to visual perception.) The rendering of the face turned out to be a printout from a non-digital eye-scanning portal, a device invented by the Russian psychologist Alfred L. Yarbus (1914 - 1986) in the 1960s’. The device would record eye movements of a person attached to the device while looking at an image, usually a photograph, for a short period of time. The limitation of this is that the observed material does seem to be photographic, and therefore flattened, but I was quickly extending the visual characteristics of Yarbus’s findings to objects in three-dimensional space.

There are now digital equivalents of eye-scanning portals, but they work very differently. The useful point about Yarbus’s device that relates it to drawing is that it recorded in line, by means of a stylus, which looks similar to and is practically adaptable to drawing. It is however a mechanism, and like any medium imposes its own behaviour to some extent on the user’s intentions. What I learned from it, which caused it to be a pivotal influence, is that in perception we do not incessantly inscribe contours around objects, either on a page or in space, however eloquently we might use the phenomenon of contour in aesthetically inspired drawing. The oval of a human face, for example, does not register in perception except in a fragmentary sense, or even when we are giving it special attention. What is more likely to happen is that we register points and intersections of things in a hierarchy of importance according to whatever are our intentions of looking, Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Photograph and resulting eye-scanning reading from an eye-scanning portal by

A. L. Yarbus, and a contrasting portrait drawing by the author.

In the above trio of photos, I’m comparing the Yarbus photo and printout that I originally noticed with a portrait drawing of mine that is made according to certain drawing conventions, especially that of the closed contour. It’s not necessarily a bad drawing, but to make a bald statement that is therefore open to challenge, it’s not how we look from either the point of view of the observer or the observed! If you compare the Yarbus printout with drawings by the British artist Frank Auerbach, for example, you may feel that Auerbach has arrived at similar knowledge to that provided by the Yarbus, although through the progress of his own experience. At the time of this discovery, especially the examples from Yarbus that concerned the various scanning of an image of figures in a room, this knowledge helped me to understand the kind of scanning across space that is a characteristic of drawings by an artist such as Giacometti, Figure 2.

Figure 2: A Yarbus eye-scanning experiment where the participant was asked to scan the photo, above left, for a range of specified reasons.

The eye-scanning’s element of science may help underline the fact that drawing can and often does have an investigative basis. In those early student days, the eye-scanning images enabled me to loosen up line and conceive the depiction of objects more in terms of marks and dashes and, most importantly, sense that space could be traversed through the drift of one’s vision during perception, with or without mapping objects in its course. Currently, I find that the more popular literature of quantum theory on the question of space provides some basis for untethering such marks and dashes almost entirely from the object, so that they start to say something, albeit as a very crude analogy, about the structure of space itself. In this respect, you may be interested in investigating such contemporary research in quantum physics as loop theory(Rovelli, 2017, for a clearly explained introduction).

So, to conclude this first point of discovery, the Yarbus findings challenged and in some respects even negated some of the conventions that I was being taught in the context of structuring visual observational experience.

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The second realisation concerns a very recently read comment on the Italian Renaissance theorist Leon Battista Alberti (1404 – 1472) concerning the optical pyramid, which is an attempt to conceptualise how the eye reads three-dimensional objects in space.

Alberti invented a device known as a netor veilto enable the precise depiction of objects through the extraction from them of a structure of coordinates plotted onto a semi-transparent net stretched taut on a plane in front of them. A derivation of this as a gridded frame is shown clearly in use, in a woodcut by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer (1471 – 1528). The artist can be seen plotting such coordinates from the frame relating to a human figure lying in front of him (Gombrich, 1977: 259), Figure 3.

Figure 3: Woodcut by Durer, showing a painter using the device of a gridded frame to aid observation.

The point in relation to what I want to say about this concerns the fact that the gridded frame is positioned midway between the figure being drawn and the drawing plane. According to Dahl (2003: 5), Alberti gave ‘ontological status’ to a non-visible essence somewhere in the middle of the optical pyramid, a kind of plane of being, where Alberti suggests that there’s something more than visual going on in the experience of looking. Coincidentally, and in a sense incongruously, considering that it is such a material device, the net, veil or grid is positioned in just such a middle space between the artist/observer and the human figure or object/s observed. If perception is both the facility that enables observation and something other than observation, then Alberti was suggesting that there could be a sense or realisation of beingcoming through one’s striving to render the appearance of objects in space accurately.

The Alberti device has since been developed as a more synthetic means that incorporates the slight curvature of the eyes’ lens through the skill that many of us will have learned of holding a pencil or straight-edge at right angles to our outstretched arm, variously perpendicular or horizontal to vision. When used correctly, this system of establishing proportional relationships between objects in three-dimensional space can be very accurate. It’s the scope for the convention’s inaccuracyhowever, while nonetheless striving for accuracy, or through noticing anomalies in the system, that interests me, Figure 4.

Figure 5: The author plotting positions of objects from four slightly differing viewpoints, and the resulting drawing, Dermatograph pencil on white laminated cardboard, 119 x 84cm, 2018.

The above process of mine concerns making a measured drawing from four very slightly differing colour-coded positions of a single open eye, using a thread held taut between a vanishing point on the drawing set-up and the eye. The resulting reading of the drawing is one aggregate configuration comprised of several mismatched layers. How this relates to Alberti’s idea of the in-between is that – perhaps – the ontological value comes through in the very impossibility of absolute correctness, in which the drawing as a presentationis to be found in a sense of its oscillating somewhere between its referenced objects and its agent, the drawer. It’s paradoxical that the Alberti device is so material, when what it and its derivations presents is an embodiment of less tangible aspects of life.

Drawing can in this respect be a relationship almost in the manner of a hologram result of an otherwise two-way process of looking and the return to one of what’s being viewed. Since the basis of the hologram is in a certain projected interferenceof the object, this idea of interference is the key – the interference of aspects of perception on observation. To give you an example – although this doesn’t necessarily reflect my current approach to drawing – I relatively recently drew a single figure slowly rotating in a chair through 360°, and shifted the drawing of the figure across to the right at the moment the actual figure crossed a midway diameter demarcated on the floor. While the drawing reads as two separate seated figures, the schematic marks between them are an attempt to conceptualise both moving the figure and keeping it linked to itself. If I speak of an energisedspace between the two apparent figures, this is not so much observed as conceptualised through gestural marks as restless eye movement back and forth, in regard of space itself rather than surrounding infrastructure that one might otherwise reference. Such visualisation of space at least suggeststhat what’s going on is a change in looking at the figure conceived as its back view, to one conceived as its front view at a certain moment when a shift in consciousness of the situation takes place, which is debatably more a question of perception than observation, Figure 5.

Figure 5: Two drawn versions of a single rotating figure, pencil on paper, 84 x 59cm, by the author, 2013.

The idea of an intangible and non-visible in-between plane as a source of interference has been adapted by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan (1901 - 1981) where, in the context of discussion of internal psyche, the mid-way of the optical pyramid is a metaphorical ‘stain’ or ‘decoy’ that muddies any assumed clarity of observation (Harari, 2004: 121-31) – but this would have to involve a more extended discussion. In terms of my own albeit limited adaptation, imagine that, when drawing, the drawn object falls somewhere between oneself and whatever is the actual object, and in the process it’s observed basis is as much confounded as enabled by one’s perception. This is the idea that I’d like to introduce in the second blog entry, particularly through links to a couple of video clips that show such a drawing in process and simultaneously explain it through speech.

There will undoubtedly be plenty of existing artistic work and research on this subject of discussion, but a third and overriding key point is that one tends to engage in and with drawing from wherever one is with one’s own interests at the present time, Drawing as a medium in any case often exerts a degree of autonomy that sets it apart from whatever are one’s expressed intentions.

References

Dahl, T. (2003) The Transformation of Space and the Construction of Engineering Knowledge and Practice—From Renaissance Perspective Thinking to Gaspard Monge’s Descriptive Geometry. Hård, M. et al (ed) Transforming Spaces. The Topological Turn in Technology Studies.(http://www.ifs.tu-darmstadt.de/gradkoll/Publikationen/transformingspaces.html

Gombrich, E. (1977) Art and Illusion. (First published 1960) United Kingdom: Phaidon

Harari, R. (2004) Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: An Introduction. New York, NY: Other

Rovelli, C. (2017) Reality Is Not What It Seems. (First published in English 2016) United Kingdom: Penguin

Yarbus, A, L.

https://www.google.co.th/search?q=Alfred+Yarbus&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjmq76RiK_mAhUWIbcAHeoEDp0Q_AUoAXoECBAQAw&biw=1195&bih=667#imgrc=FA3zrg52HHr0rM

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