the architexture of vision
exercises in cross-eyed cinema
Plateau J (1849) was one of many to have observed the MAE experience. It has been said that he first witnessed this phenomena while staring at a waterfall – later he created experiments and other laboratory tests which amplified this aspect of perceptual disorientation, or perceptual fatigue (Plateau’s spiral). Interestingly enough, he was blind when he discovered this property.
light device for looking at the back of your retina
sprouting prosopagnosia (m. wintner).
this is a short video project Mose Winters made for our class, Technological Possibilties for Alternative Cinemas.
in it he explores notions of perceptual fatigue, and in particular face blind-ness, or prosopagnosia.
excavation by Mike Harris
Assignment 1
(in crayon)
-Personally, the concept of “discrete sensations” (while connoting a certain smuttiness) does not really make sense to me… the notion of discretion seems to involve something that’s hidden, and a sense (both hearing and sight) seems to be more of a reaction to a tactile stimulus. Taking this into consideration, it only makes the materiality of photons and soundwaves all the more concrete.
-I don’t think it’s useful to say vision and sound are the same thing… if anything, it’s similar to comparing Mandarin with American Sign Language; both are languages, but both use very different ideas and modes of communication to express differently.
-Sensory reaction are based on the receiving agents of our body responding to stimuli such as photons hitting our eyes or soundwaves entering our eyes. This certainly places a certain level of physicality onto these concepts, emphasizing the idea of “touching” space rather than compositing it via sight and sound.
* * *
Assignment 2
(not in crayon)
-Mirror neurons and the “monkey see, monkey do” effect seems to be a staple of conventional cinema… watching a character experience an event elicits an emotional reaction from the audience, the simulacrum of the experience. However, in this post-post-whatever era, these kinds of mental synapses are infinitely more fragile, and it seems that it becomes harder and harder to put the pieces of this mirror back together.
-Outside the theater, the existence of mirror neuron’s creates an interesting dilemma when it comes to considering actual experience. True, we must model our behavior and existences on those around us (parents, peers, authority figures), however, there is not a single experience in our lives that we are not the absolute center of. If we see a man get robbed, we may empathize or sympathize with him, but we will never know the experience as he knows it. For us, the experience will forever be “watching a man getting robbed.” This is an interesting Catch-22, and it is difficult to adequately fully, without going into long-winded analyses of the origins of culture, language, etc. However, it seems to me that we model ourselves on a very subjective model of what a “person” is, and how they/we choose to experience the world. In this light, we are all parodying a model which we have no real conception of in the first place.
echolalia
sound mirroring
facial physics, blinking patterns, environmental affect
Participants of TECHNOLOGICAL POSSIBILITIES FOR ALTERNATIVE CINEMAS watching 2 screens, one with (in appropriate order): a flicker film by Omar Zubair and Curtis Tamm, Paul Sharits T,O,U,C,H,I,N,G, Bruce Conner‘s BREAKAWAY, Shinya Tsukamoto‘s Tetsuo: The Iron Man….
and the other displayed a live feed of their face watching the clips.
exploring sound with R. Acalin
“The Architecture of Water” (installation funded by the Helen Meyerowitz Deafness and Art Memorial Grant, 2010. By Ryane Acalin and Curtis Tamm).
sound/touch alchemy.
autism ; youtube sample w/ user descriptions
jlmlorimer — March 18, 2007 — She amazes me with how smart and artistic she can be. Many of her pictures are full of feeling and communication that she can’t always show us.
kevinfruet — April 02, 2008 — ”Autism signs and symptoms can sound abstract on the page, but this video illustrates things like lining up toys, stacking blocks, rocking head back and forth, and other repetitive behaviors as it catches a little boy named Kevin in the act. Watch it to compare Kevin’s behavior to your own child’s … or just to fall in love with this curly-headed cutie.”
Red Flags that Parents Should Note:
* does not respond to his/her name.
* cannot explain what he/she wants.
* language skills are slow to develop or speech is delayed.
* doesn’t follow directions.
* at times, seems to be deaf.
* doesn’t point or wave “bye-bye.”
* used to say a few words or babble, but now doesn’t.
* throws intense or violent tantrums.
* has odd movement patterns.
* is overly active, uncooperative, or resistant.
* doesn’t know how to play with toys.
* doesn’t smile when smiled at.
* has poor eye contact.
* gets “stuck” doing the same things over and over and can’t move on to other things.
* seems to prefer to play alone.
* gets things for him/herself only.
* is very independent for his/her age.
* does things “early” compared to other children.
* seems to be in his/her “own world.”
* seems to tune people out.
* is not interested in other children.
* walks on his/her toes.
* shows unusual attachments to toys, objects, or schedules
(i.e., always holding a string or having to put socks on before pants).
* spends a lot of time lining things up or putting things in a certain order.
Source: Filipek et al. (1999). Screening and diagnosis of autistic spectrum disorders. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 29(6): 439-484.
momtwo836 — June 15, 2009 — My Lucas has come such a long way,,he interacts so much more than he used to although his room still is his favorite place to be.He was diagnosed with autism when he was 21 months old but I saw signs when he was just a newborn and he had a twin sister to compare to so it was much easier for me.
vaniachicago — December 18, 2008 — Looking for more info on Autism at this level. My child on a regular day. Hates to have clothes on. Loves to look at himself in any reflection.
vaniachicago — January 12, 2009 — Jaylen just finish watching Madascar and he is copying Alex the lion move on the stone. It was really cute. He can stay in front of a mirror for hours. His Tantrums have been better. He is sleeping more at night time also even though he still gets up sometimes at least he isnt screaming or crying. He is learning sign lanuage and he does ask me when he wants things. He does sign for more and he says eat. I finally heard him say mom. I massage him and it has help him calmed down alot. He is still into his movies but it does help. Thanks for watching.
aware4autism — May 04, 2007 — Here is Jade at 24 months. She would flap just one hand, often absentmindedly. She also used to grind her teeth for hours. Notice the facial tic as she walks away.
2 cups of epsom salt in Jade’s bath has eliminated all of the above.
mirror neurons; the extension of human limitations, and of body, into space
Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel, ch. 6
“A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron “mirrors” the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in primates, and are believed to occur in humans and other species including birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex and the inferior parietal cortex.”
“Some scientists consider mirror neurons one of the most important recent discoveries in neuroscience. Among them is V.S. Ramachandran, who believes they might be very important in imitation and language acquisition.However, despite the excitement generated by these findings, to date no widely accepted neural or computational models have been put forward to describe how mirror neuron activity supports cognitive functions such as imitation.”
The function of the mirror system is a subject of much speculation. Many researchers in cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology consider that this system provides the physiological mechanism for the perception action coupling (see the common coding theory). These mirror neurons may be important for understanding the actions of other people, and for learning new skills by imitation. Some researchers also speculate that mirror systems may simulate observed actions, and thus contribute totheory of mind skills, while others relate mirror neurons to language abilities.It has also been proposed that problems with the mirror system may underlie cognitive disorders, particularly autism. However the connection between mirror neuron dysfunction and autism is tentative and it remains to be seen how mirror neurons may be related to many of the important characteristics of autism.“
(this is footage taken from a study on space our class technological possibilities for alternative cinemas performed,
involving watching a series of one minute clips in an odd location — in this case, the painting storage and locker facility at UC Berkeley —
while simultaneously watching a live feed of yourself watching the clips on another monitor.
Charles Bonnet Syndrome : Oliver Sacks and Werner Herzog
Visual illusion is neural truth.
A Swiss philosopher named Charles Bonnet first described this condition in 1760 when he noticed that his grandfather, who was almost blind, saw patterns, figures, birds and buildings which were not there. Although the condition was described almost 250 years ago, it is still largely unknown by ordinary doctors and nurses. This is partly because of a lack of knowledge about the syndrome and partly because people experiencing it don’t talk about their problems from fear of being thought of as mentally ill.
Oliver Sacks is a neurologist, and…
“..is perhaps best known for his collections of case histories from the far borderlands of neurological experience, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and An Anthropologist on Mars, in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from Tourette’s syndrome to autism, parkinsonism, musical hallucination, epilepsy, phantom limb syndrome, schizophrenia, retardation, and Alzheimer’s disease.
He has investigated the world of Deaf people and sign language in Seeing Voices, and a rare community of colorblind people in The Island of the Colorblind. He has written about his experiences as a doctor in Migraine and as a patient in A Leg to Stand On. His autobiographical Uncle Tungsten: Memories of a Chemical Boyhood was published in 2001, and his most recent book is Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.”
He also wrote The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat (1985) and Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (2007). Awakenings (1973).
Land of Silence and Darkness (Werner Herzog, 1971)
In telling the story of Fini Straubinger a deaf-blind German woman, Herzog investigates the nature of human thought and communication. Positing the senses as forces, refraining from morally assessing perception as an individuals ability to function, Herzog creates an expedition into the extremities of perception.
O.B.Es
“An out-of-body experience (OBE), is an experience that typically involves a sensation of floating outside of one’s body and, in some cases, perceiving one’s physical body from a place outside one’s body (autoscopy). The term out-of-the-body experience was introduced in 1943 by G.N.M Tyrrell in his book Apparitions, and adopted by, for example, Celia Green and Robert Monroe as a bias-free alternative to belief-centric labels such as “astral projection” or “spirit walking”. Though the term usefully distances researchers from scientifically problematic concepts such as the soul, scientists still know little about the phenomenon. One in ten people has an out-of-body experience at some time in their lives.OBEs are often part of the near-death experience. Those who have experienced OBEs sometimes claim to have observed details which were unknown to them beforehand.”
A common sensation being explored and created with simple video feedback displays.
Wiki page for “prototype theory”, continuing thoughts on affordances (as perpetuated by t.korte)
Prototype theory is a mode of graded categorization in cognitive science, where some members of a category are more central than others. For example, when asked to give an example of the concept furniture, chair is more frequently cited than, say, stool. Prototype theory also plays a central role in linguistics, as part of the mapping from phonological structure to semantics.
As formulated in the 1970s by Eleanor Rosch (from UCB) and others, prototype theory was a radical departure from traditional necessary and sufficient conditions as in Aristotelian logic, which led to set-theoretic approaches of extensional or intensional semantics. Thus instead of a definition based model – e.g. a bird may be defined as elements with the features [+feathers], [+beak] and [+ability to fly], prototype theory would consider a category like bird as consisting of different elements which have unequal status – e.g. a robin is more prototypical of a bird than, say a penguin. This leads to a graded notion of categories, which is a central notion in many models ofcognitive science and cognitive semantics, e.g. in the work of George Lakoff (Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, 1987) or Ronald Langacker (Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1/2 1987/1991).
The term prototype has been defined in Eleanor Rosch‘s study “Natural Categories” (1973) and was first defined as a stimulus, which takes a salient position in the formation of a category as it is the first stimulus to be associated with that category. Later, she redefined it as the most central member of a category.
which would you call bouba, and which kiki?
