Authenticity and blockchain

Beeple

https://www.beeple-crap.com/

Beeple is the online name under which Mike Winkleman operates. He is an artist that is proficient in a wide range of image making software and he has an aesthetic to his work that could be described as post pop expressionist surrealist collage. I. e. a playful relationship with invention, that is fuelled by collage techniques. I think his work is interesting and worth looking at, but no more so than quite a few other artists. However he has come to be seen as a symbol for the continuing hold of capitalist ideals and the power of the investment market. 

Today Christie’s auction house will become the first to offer a purely digital artwork for sale.  Beeple’s “EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS,” is being offered as a unique NFT (non-fungible token) consisting of 5,000 individual images created every day between 2007 and 2021 and posted on the artist’s Instagram feed. Those of you that follow this blog will have become aware over time that I have serious worries about the art market, and have long thought that it skews meaning and value in such a way that it makes it extremely difficult to understand how art can be used to benefit society, or to be a communal resource, if the best of it is priced far beyond the means of the average person. For a while I naively thought that online work might open out a new 'money free' arena from within which artists could operate, but I was not aware of 'blockchain'.  

Noah Davis, a specialist in Post-War & Contemporary Art at Christie’s in New York who is leading the sale, states that, "understanding NFTs is an exercise in abstraction, the actual NFT-based artwork is just a code. It doesn’t exist. It has no objecthood." So we are asked to see this as 'abstraction' and of course abstract art has remained a very good seller on the investment market, so why not attempt to link the abstract nature of code with that of abstract imagery, after all they are all symbolic languages. 

Christie’s will also accept payment for the artwork in cryptocurrency, a coin known as Ether. (The buyer’s premium, a set of fees tacked on to the principal, must still be paid for in dollars.)

This is how Noah Davis describes the situation:

"It’s important to define the artwork itself and the symbol that represents the artwork, separately. The actual NFT-based artwork is truly just a non-fungible token — it’s a long series of letters and numbers that is dropped into a digital wallet. But the symbol that represents the token is the monumental collage that Beeple put together, and one could argue that the token basically implies that this is contained within it. It’s the first 5,000 images from his ongoing project The Everydays, in which every day he makes a new image. More recently, they have been very politically or pop-culturally inclined. But the actual NFT-based artwork is just a code. It doesn’t exist. It has no objecthood. We are not selling a painting to hang on your wall." 

He goes on to state; "You could look at it on your phone, your computer, your tablet, or in virtual reality. Really, the only pre-requisite is a screen that has access to the image." Finally commenting, "There are people who are going to look at this as a volatile marketplace that represents an opportunity for speculation and potentially a windfall down the line. Even though this is probably going to command an extraordinary price, there are people out there who are looking at this as a potential investment opportunity. Then there are people who are looking at this as a radical declaration of philosophy or values or investments in the concept of a future where blockchain technology and NFTs and cryptocurrency become the norm for transacting in the financial marketplace."

So the market driven art world becomes ever more speculative, just like the futures markets that collapsed a few years ago we now enter a world of non-tangible investment, but for what purpose? While we all know that we are failing to look after the planet, we also distract ourselves from this very fact, still looking for investments that might mean that we can get 'loads a money' by being the first to invest in a fast rising stock. 

I have been asked by several students lately as to how to save work if it is to be seen as saleable on line, well now I have the answer, when you have made your digital artwork, publish it directly onto a blockchain in the form of a non-fungible token (NFT).  This makes the ownership, transfer and sale of your artwork possible in a cryptographically secure and verifiable manner.

Beeple set out to make an artwork that was about creativity itself. He was celebrating invention, demonstrating that he could renew himself through imaginative play everyday, and what a wonderful idea that was. But it has now been eaten and consumed by another idea, one that states that everything is subject to commodification and can be sold to the highest bidder. If only Beeple could have been content to gift his work to us as a celebration of our creative possibilities as humans. Not that I blame him, he has to make a living and this is an opportunity that few artists would turn their noses up at. I just feel deep down that it shows us that there is 'something nasty in the woodshed', a hidden something that keeps us from seeing clearly, that distracts us from the real business at hand. 

It is now many years since Suzi Gablik wrote her powerful book 'Has Modernism Failed?' She stated that we needed a renewed moral, social and spiritual dimension to art, and argued for a commitment to socially relevant and spiritually informed art practices. Artists are still working to integrate and entangle the concerns of the environment with and into and alongside their various art practices, but as they do I hope this latest investment news doesn't dishearten them, or make them think that nothing changes. Beeple's patched up giant emoticon, sticks its tongue out in defiance, it rises up out of its construction site like Pieter Bruegel’s ‘Tower of Babel’, another monument to the hubris of humankind. 

Pieter Bruegel ‘Tower of Babel’

Tower of Babel’ and Beeple details

Perhaps we will never learn and we are hard wired to take the money and run, but at some point there may be nowhere to run to. 

It would seem that blockchain can prove that there is only one of something and it is that rare one off nature that gives the work its authenticity; even if when made the work was available in infinite variations to all who happened to click on Beeple's site. But Beeple's work is native to a computer screen, look at how easily you can see his image of the patched up giant emoticon, and compare the experience of looking at Bruegal on screen. The Bruegal image is much harder to read, it was designed to be seen as a painting, not as a digital image, so in many ways by showing Bruegal on screen I devalue it, but Beeple belongs on screen, his images' authenticity lies in their native digital construction, which is a process not an object and this is perhaps what annoys me most. Beeple's process is one of engagement with creation, but the selling of the final result as a commodity reduces the process to a thing, a thing that only has one use and that is as an investment opportunity for those already rich enough anyway. 

As an image maker myself, I do though respect Beeple's inventiveness and the fact that his images are out in the world, does mean that others can make use of them. Whoever buys the 'original' can't take the images back out of people's minds. So maybe the most important issue here is that once an image is seen it will be consumed in another way, like food, it will be digested and ingested by all that encounter it, and as such its potential for use increases exponentially as each new viewer looks at it. 

See also:

Collage: Part one

Collage part two

Collage part three
College: part four

Computer generated art and coding

The smiley face

Fat

The argument for NFTs

Virtual space and drawing metaphors

Tiébélé in Burkina Faso

Occasionally in travel articles you see something that really makes you think. In this case it was a series of photographs taken by a photographer and diarist, Rita Willaert and Olga Stavrakis. I would normally dismiss these travel documentary images as yet another example of post colonial travel syndrome, people vicariously gazing into other peoples lives and in recording them making a good living from poor people living on the edge. It could well be that Willaert and Stavrakis are indeed voyeurs and that by poking their noses into a place where they don't belong they may have disturbed the equilibrium of a society that has managed to get on fine without Western interference. But even so, the images I saw really effected me and made me aware of how far we have come in our English towns from a close contact with the ground from which we have emerged. 

Tiébélé lies nestled at the base of a hill, and is an African village which was first settled in the 15th Century.  Belonging to the Kassena people, their chief, and royal court, this is the home of one of oldest ethnic groups in Burkina Faso. Digging a little further into their history I found that the Kassena peoples belong to a larger subset of peoples, the Gurunsi, that inhabit an area encompassing southern Burkina Faso and northern Ghana. The Gurunsi share common histories, languages, and political structures, but French and British colonial systems differed in their administrative practices, which means that a once united people are now separate. The lines drawn on maps by French and British administrators in the 19th century, still divide populations that had deep cultural connections and of course an affinity with and awareness of the land and its possibilities. It was at the Berlin Conference of 1884, that the European nations agreed upon their respective territorial claims and a border was agreed by mutual agreement between Britain and France on 14 June 1898 and a more precise border was then drawn up by an exchange of notes in 1904, and officially approved in 1906, a border that was later demarcated on the ground via a series of pillars.

Map of Ghana and Burkina Faso

Look at the line that divides the two territories, it looks as if for most of it's length someone simply placed a ruler on a map and drew a straight line. The contrast between the sharp gridded lines of longitude and latitude that divide up the map, and the organic lines of the Kassena peoples' adobe buildings couldn't be more stark, and they point to a fundamental difference in cultures. The Western nations had 'abstracted' themselves away from the world, mathematics and scientific thinking had allowed them to maintain a distance from reality and to believe that they could control things from a distance. The Kassena peoples were living in and as a part of their environment, therefore their constructions followed the contours of the land rather than cut into or through it.

These houses emerge from the ground organically, and are made of local clay, the walls are decorated with various colours of clay slip. The Tiébélé royal residence is made up of a series of small houses that are hand-painted in different geometric patterns and symbols using clay paints. These patterns are one of the visual indicators that differentiate the royal homes from that of the “ordinary people.” While most of the structures are homes, some of the most elaborately decorated are mausoleums, where the dead are laid to rest. The dead living amongst the village people even after death and recognised as an integral part of life. 

An altar for animist worship  

The fact that the village still has a working animist altar for ceremonies involving milk, feathers and animal blood, suggests that the people that live there still have a close spiritual relationship with their local environment. The recent stains of milk running down the sides of the altar, indicating that cows are still an important part of the local economy. Somehow these people have been able to continue living within a culture that still maintains aspects of pre-colonial traditions. The most visually striking being the powerful decorative surfaces that cover the village buildings. Their resilience is amazing and I would hope that rather than encourage some sort of tourism, that the message goes out about growing architecture out of the landscape rather than flattening it. The integration of people, architecture, and typologies of landscape with sensitive ecological effect is vital to all our futures and our ability to survive. 

3D printed buildings made from mud: Mario Cucinella Architects (MC A) and WASP

The Green School in Bali

Earthship

What this post is also about is a reminder of the power of drawing. Lines drawn on a map of Africa divide a continent between Britain and France. When it was first realised that lines could be used to define a boundary, no one would have predicted that eventually this concept could be used to define the borders of artificially constructed countries. But it is also drawing that empowered the people of Tiébélé in the decoration of their buildings and artefacts. These buildings covered in zigzags and squares, communicate both the sheer joy of making lines and shapes over surfaces, as well as an awareness that these lines mark out differences between the homes of the living and the dead. But drawing can also be a tool that allows us to visualise new futures, the organic structural forms now possible for architects and engineers to use because of the power of computing, are only made visible to us through technical drawings. Drawing allows us to have powerful visions, sometimes so powerful that it would seem that humans have lost contact with the effects of that vision. 

Technical drawing of the atom bomb

Drawings of the Nazca people

Nazca lines were made over 2,000 years ago and are most likely connected to water worship. The Peruvian archeologist John Isla points to the Nazca people’s intricate irrigation systems as evidence that these desert-dwellers had developed an intimate and worshipful relationship with water; their sophisticated aqueducts and spiral shaped wells still operating today. Nazca society developed around 200 B.C. alongside a river basin that allowed them to grow cotton, beans and corn. The Nazca River, which often flows underground, springs up at the foot of the remains of an important temple and shells from the coast of northern Peru are found at the sites of ceremonial altars in the mountains. I once read that the indigenous peoples of America visualised thought as 'crystallised air', their relationship with their environment being such that they were inseparable from it. We forget that we 'swim' in air as fish swim in water and that without it we would die; the drawn lines of the Nazca are it would seem a way to 'talk' with the sky. In the 1940s in the USA the Office of Scientific Research and Development, forged an unprecedented alliance between government, academia and industry, to shape a different idea that also emerged in a desert environment, an idea that reminded Robert Oppenheimer at the time of a piece of Hindu scripture; “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.

 See also:

Drawing Maps.   Mapping as thinking.   Drawing and politics.   The broken line

Signs of life in flowing line drawings.

  Walking and drawing

The Blue Danube 

The Triangle

The Delta Glyph

The triangle, in the Greek alphabet is called the delta glyph. It has often been regarded as being symbolic of a doorway, but before the Greeks used it in their alphabet, it had been drawn on cave walls across many cultures and times. It is an entoptic shape, something generated by the brain and as such it belongs to human beings just as much as their arms and legs and stomachs. 

Amesbury Archer arrowhead from Stonehenge

Many of the early triangle representations do look very like arrowheads, so it is hard to decide whether they are drawings of things that would have been around all the time, or whether that is simply a coincidence. However, these basic early forms do occur right across the world.

The distribution of early symbols

The tri-angle is of course a representation of three lines coming together. It can be used to draw an arrowhead and the arrowhead in its turn has sometimes disengaged itself from the shaft of the arrow to become a stand alone directional symbol. 

Contemporary directional arrowheads

The triangle combined with three arrowheads is of course now used as a recycling symbol, which is a sort of multiplication of triangular effect. 

Recycling symbol

The triangle has been used by many cultures and faiths as well as different societies to symbolise a wide variety of ideas and concepts.

Triangles can be used to direct energy and power in the direction which they point. If however it is an equilateral triangle, a decision as to which line forms a base, will often depend on context. 

In alchemy, the triangle represents the three realms of human existence; the body, the mind and the spirit/soul. The triangle providing four symbolic representations of the basic alchemical elements. 

Fire – 🜂

Water – 🜄

Air – 🜁

Earth – 🜃

It can be rewarding to play around with numbers

In caves the world over the basic abstract forms that we have been looking at reoccur again and again. I have referred to them before as entoptic forms, but there are other explanations. 

The prehistorian Henri Breuil, decided that the abstract symbols were representations of traps and weapons, linking the shapes to the animals depicted next to them. The French archaeologist André Leroi-Gourhan read the lines and hook shapes he found as male symbols, and ovals and triangles as female symbols. 

Representation of the vulva?

However reading inverted triangles as representations of the vulva, could be the result of gender bias in interpretation. “It’s interesting that it was predominantly male archaeologists doing this work early on, and there were a whole lot of vulvas being identified everywhere. This could have been a product of the times, but then again, many cultures do place importance on fertility,” stated a more contemporary researcher, Genevieve von Petzinger. The general consensus in the books on symbolism is when pointing up, triangles represent stability and power, when pointing down they become unstable. The up-pointing triangle is often seen as a masculine shape, but when inverted it represents the feminine. Perhaps this juxtaposition needs amended though, it tends to suggest an association of masculine strength and female instability. It would have been more interesting if it was power v balance. The balancing of all that mass on a fine point being far more difficult than resting on a fat base. In spirituality, triangles represent the union of body, mind, and spirit, and in the Christian religion, God the father, God the son and God the Holy Ghost. Once again we have a great many uses for a simple shape. 

It was the South African archaeologist David Lewis-Williams who proposed a neuropsychological interpretation for these symbols. It was argued that they were triggered in the darkness of caves during hallucinogenic experiences that were part of shamanic rituals. These  symbols being literal representations of hallucinations which were themselves visions of entoptic forms. As someone that gets severe migraines, I see linear and triangular forms drift across my field of vision when my migraines are at their worst, and the drawings I have made of them are not unlike those found on cave walls. Triangles can also be thought of as 'geons', simple 2D or 3D forms, (a cone is the 3D form of a triangle) that can be used to build up more complex forms. 

Number 1 could easily be a boy's head with a dunces cap on and number 2 could be an ice cream in a cone. 

With the advent of computer graphics geons are becoming more important. In computer aided design 3D shape representation is often made by approximating the shapes of object parts by a set of prescribed volumetric models called parametric geons. Something that is actually not that new, as I remember having students draw as many variations as possible of combinations of cubes, cylinders, cones and spheres, as a 3D design exercise when working on foundation back in the 1970s. In fact it takes me back to the time I was working as a draftsman at Round Oak Steel Works. Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) is a language of symbols and standards designed and used by engineers and manufacturers to describe a product and facilitate communication between groups of people and machines working together to produce something. GD&T statements are essential to this, and they make sure that in making drawings for manufacture that all dimensions must have a tolerance. Every feature on every manufactured part is subject to variation, therefore, the limits of allowable variation must be specified. However what geons reminded me of was that there are 14 GD&T symbols and they are very like the basic forms we have been looking at. The symbol for angularity is basically another arrowhead.

If you ever come across a feature control frame you will now know what it refers to. This is yet another example of those codes that have by necessity become fixed, such as the highway code. The white lines, yellow lines, dashed lines and arrows that are part of our highways' visual texture, are as fixed in their interpretation as the letter A (another arrowhead) in English standing for the sound 'ei'. 

The letters IPA set out in the International Phonetic Alphabet

The reason I know that the letter 'A' is pronounced 'ei' is because of another set of standards set out as a code. The International Phonetic Alphabet or IPA which of course has yet another set of guidelines, its own highway code.

Guide to the International Phonetic Alphabet

Typical map legend 

We see these code translations on inserts in every map we open, in some cases our arrow/triangle will now become a campsite, in others a survey marker. 

But it is also at the root of all our troubles, the triangular form that is in the centre of the larynx or the voice box is what makes us human, without it we would be something completely different.

Canova's tomb

The larynx image instigates an idea that the spoken word is perhaps the beginning of the end for human kind. When I hear contemporary political debate it feels as if oratory has lost all reason and that language is dying. During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, it became fashionable to view art galleries at night by torchlight. This meant that sculpture became subservient to the shadow, and Canova was an artist who was seduced by those shadows, smoothing out his marble surfaces until all life had been polished away. The language of sculpture at that time was dying too. 

There are times when I yearn for a set of standards whereby there could be no more than one interpretation for something I have drawn. So as my mind wanders off in another direction perhaps I'll leave you with a few images with titles (code translations) just as a test to see whether as images they are in any way anchored in their interpretation by text juxtapositions.

Fear of failure

Deep sleep

Incontinence 

See also:

The circle

Angles

Points, dots and spots

The zig zag

Dotted lines

Entoptic forms and how they can be mixed in with representational drawing 

Flowing line drawings

X

The square

The spiral

The hashtag

Maps

Andy Goldsworthy: Drawing with the world

Ceca Georgieva

It snowed over the weekend and of course everyone went out to play and the park was littered with attempts at snowmen, rolling snow balls and all sorts of attempted snow and ice structures from igloos to slides. Someone had even begun 'planting' twigs in rows, mimicking the spring growth to come, the snow triggering peoples creativity and need to have inventive fun, especially in a time of lockdown. As I walked back home I was reminded of Andy Goldsworthy, an artist that has taken that spirit of play and elevated it into an art, someone that began their career very locally and who was actually rejected from the foundation course at Leeds and so had to go to Bradford; I'm so glad his early experience of rejection didn't put him off, I hope it just strengthened his resolve. I see his work as drawing rather than sculpture, but at the end of the day the difference doesn't really matter. For me, he sees lines and shapes in nature and emphasises these by making them a photographic reality. The image above is actually by the Bulgarian artist Ceca Georgieva, who also uses the things she finds in nature as her drawing materials, in fact I initially made a mistake and thought the work was by Goldsworthy, an issue that is actually very serious, as I do understand the pain of having your own work labelled as someone else's, so I must apologise. In Georgieva's work, if you stand in a certain position, you can see two trees that have grown away from each other, so that they can give room for sunlight to illuminate their leaves evenly. This creates two diverging lines, that in turn creates a space between them and she fills that space with snowballs and photographs the result. The process is very straightforward, but at the same time conceptually beautiful. 

Andy Goldsworthy

In the image above Goldsworthy reverses the trick, this time it's found sticks that fabricate a drawing of wonky geometric forms. There is a playful illusion of three dimensional solidity, an illusion that causes this artwork to hover between being a series of objects and a line drawing. I heard him speak once and it was probably his sense of playfulness that came over most powerfully. Give him some time outside and he will find visual potential in something, all he has to do is move things around a little and he will reveal all sorts of possibilities. In one photograph in particular where he simply throws a few sticks up into the air, you also realise how important the camera is to his work, without it all those decisive moments would go undocumented. So why not just go out and play and take your camera with you just in case. 

Hazel stick throw: Goldsworthy

See also:

Some Goldsworthy drawing

More drawing using three dimensional materials

More traditional approaches to landscape

About Ceca Georgieva

Marion Milner: Art therapy and perceptual research

Tired

Footpain 

I’m engaged with research at the moment that explores certain aspects of perception, in particular in my case the area of perception that is called ‘interoception’; our awareness of things such as heart rate, a need to urinate, feeling sleepy, having a pain, or emotional states such as feeling the weight of the world on one’s shoulders. These are all ‘real’ things that we feel or perceive but which because we can’t see them, we have no clarity as to how to depict them when we are communicating with other people. If you have been following this blog you might have noticed that quite a few recent posts have touched upon issues related to this research, but in reality it is an interest that goes back many years to a time when I was teaching observational drawing, and it is an interest that has since been re-kindled by Mike Croft who was my guest blogger just over a year ago, and who posted a very interesting account of where his own research was taking him at the time. Since then our interests have begun to dovetail, my own fascination with how we communicate the un-communicable, has taken me into an area that explores how drawing or image making can operate in the overlaps between perceptual investigation, phenomenology, dream materials and other non-verbal representations of our inner somatic world. This has led part of my investigation to explore the relationship between psychic experience and its visualisation which was a preoccupation of Marion Milner and other members of the Independent Group of the British School of Psychoanalysis, all of whom were concerned with two central questions: ‘what is the relationship of pictorial expression to a growing awareness of a psychic life’, and ‘what aspects of self experience can be actualised by the making of images in a way that is not possible through verbalisation alone?’ Milner had a long time relationship with a client called Susan, who during this extended period of psychoanalysis began to draw images that reflected her deep unconscious perception of her self-perceived fight with sanity and madness. Milner then reflected on these experiences in a wonderfully rich book, ‘The Hands of the Living God’, a text that contained approximately 150 drawings made by Susan and which when I first saw them, alongside Milner’s interpretations, made me realise how communication is totally reliant on context. 

Drawings by 'Susan'

Susan's drawings also reminded me of how much the world of the professional artist can overlap with the world of psychoanalysis, and the fact that similar forms crop up over and over again across world cultures and over vast periods of time, therefore, I would argue, that there is something deeply meaningful about the way that we return to these forms when we need to express our feelings. However the world of therapy is very different from the world of art and Lygia Clark found the cross over fraught with misunderstandings. Clark's work seems to slide between art and therapy, but she I'm sure would argue what she was doing was therapy and not art. 

Lygia Clark: Stone and Air: 1966

Louise Bourgeois

Shangaan pottery (South Africa)

Pre-historic cave images

Visual experiences that arrive out of inner vision or entoptic forms were often characterised by abstract geometric patterns, which have been classified into four categories of form constants: (1) gratings, lattices, fretworks, filigrees, honeycombs, and checkerboards. (2) cobwebs. (3) tunnels and funnels, alleys, cones and vessels. (4) spirals. It is believed that these patterns form irrespective of an individual's previous visual experiences. They are internally directed perceptual experiences, directly formed out of the biological structure of our visual system. They reflect the subjective experience of looking into yourself, and the patterns seen it could be argued, expose the underlying operation of our brains.

Geons

I have gradually over the years begun to explore the area, initially as a response to those ‘entoptic’ images and more recently, especially because of the importance of 3D computer graphics, I have begun thinking about sets of form ‘primitives’ called geons. Geons have four basic properties: View-invariance: so one can be distinguished from others from almost any viewpoint. Image stability or resistance to visual noise: i.e. still recognisable when viewed behind a bush. Invariable resistance to recognition failure due to changes in illumination direction, surface markings and texture. High distinctiveness: such as being straight or curved, having parallel or non parallel sides, positive or negative curvature. These qualitative differences can be readily distinguished thus rendering the geons and the objects composed from them, readily distinguishable as well. However, there are several limitations to the development of a visual language based on these spatially determined three dimensional differences, the most important it would seem to me, to be that they don't account for the constant dissolving of images back into the world of events. The process of reducing all images to basic geons, suggests that we can pick objects out of the world for contemplation; and that we can atomise our experiences in such a way that a type of Cartesian duality allows an observer to separate out from the subject of observation. I have been at pains to question this possibility in several ways over the past year or so, and I’m indebted to Jorge Louis Borges, who in his short story ‘Tlön, uqbar, orbis tertius’ had this to say; ‘It is no exaggeration to state that the classic culture of Tlön comprises only one discipline: psychology. All others are subordinated to it. I have said that the men of this planet conceive the universe as a series of mental processes which do not develop in space but successively in time.’ Borges put his finger on something that I had not really understood well enough before and this was the relative importance of time and space. I had been for many years prioritising an investigation of space in my drawings and have gradually come round to the idea that time is much more important. The two of course are conjoined in ‘space-time’ but perhaps because of the importance of perspective as a visual system, I had been led to see position as being more important than duration, but I now suspect the opposite is the truth. Cubism was always more about time than space, it was about the difference between the compressed simultaneity of a painting or drawing, made in response to the extended time through which an experience happens. It is this particular conclusion that is the main driving force behind the development of the first body of images that have emerged from this research into inner body feeling. Because the initial experiences, or perceptions are not located in a traditional perspectival space, a form that can see itself from the inside as well as an outside is needed, one more reminiscent of those creatures that inhabited Abbott’s ‘Flatland’ and as I bring Abbott into the discussion perhaps I also then need to acknowledge the importance of W. B. Yates’ poetic observation, that poetry is made out of a ‘mouthful of air’ (1899) something that is also happening as I write these sentences. 

Shoulder: inner itch

Irritable bowel 

The need to scratch an ankle

References 

Abbott, E. A. (1992) Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions New York: Dover Publications 

Biederman, I., (1987) Recognition-by-components: a theory of human image understanding. Psychological review, 94(2), p.115. 

Borges, J.L. and Ducornet, R., (1983) Tlön, uqbar, orbis tertius. Erin: Porcupine's Quill. 

Dill, M. and Edelman, S., (2001) Imperfect invariance to object translation in the discrimination of complex shapes. Perception, 30(6), pp.707-724. 

Edelman, S., (1999) Representation and recognition in vision. London: MIT press. 

Froese, T., Woodward, A. and Ikegami, T., (2013) Turing instabilities in biology, culture, and consciousness? On the enactive origins of symbolic material culture. Adaptive Behavior, 21(3), pp.199-214. https://froese.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/froese-et-al-13-turing-instabilities-in-biology-culture-and-consciousness-on-the-enactive-origins-of-symbolic-material-culture.pdf Accessed 5. 2. 21 

Halton-Hernandez, E., (2019) Spirals, Whorls, and Faulty Containers: The Psychoanalysis of Form in the Art of Marion Milner’s' The Hands of the Living God' and the Sculpture of Louise Bourgeois. Free Associations, (75), pp.49-64. 

Milner, M. (2010) The Hands of the Living God London: Routledge 

Yeats, W. B. (1899) The Wind Among the Reeds. New York: J. Lane, The Bodley Head Bartleby.com, 1999. www.bartleby.com/146. Accessed 6. 2. 21

See also:

Posts on various entoptic forms

The spiral

The zig-zag

The hashtag

Dots and spots

The dashed or dotted line

The cross

Lines

Posts directly related to the current research on perception

Mike Croft on the observation of perception

Drawing textures

Drawing texture Part two

Drawing and perception: the curved surface

Surface and inner body perception in an age of CGI

Qualia

Drawing it all together