Observation of Perception, Part 2
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.
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