Image and Reality

Raul Rezende ArantesPG01 | MA Visual EffectsRavensbourne 95829612

Personal illustration

Image and Reality!I always found it fascinating the influence that image has in our lives. As a small child, I remember spending endless hours drawing and looking through art books imagining the life behind the illustrated pages. I used to admire realistic painters and my dream was to be able to mimic what my eyes were able to see in form of a drawing or a painting.

Many years later and after two attempts in studying design in different universities, luckily or not, I ended up working for advertising agencies as art director. Right at the beginning, I felt I had to train my eyes and on my free time, I kept the ritual of looking through magazines and photography books for hours, staring the pages for several minutes, analysing details or detecting editing "mistakes". Because I knew about the artificial nature of those images intentionally used and constructed with the purpose of seduce people, I was interested on the editing and composition side of things.

Even though I had the experience of working constructing visual perceptions for certain communication or consumption purposes, I've never though I was an exception on my belief that there is a very introspective relationship between images and the human psychic. And I'm not only focusing on advertising, even though it is indeed a very interesting field of study.

On "Days of War, Nights of Love" from the american anarchist CrimethInc. collective, there is a chapter dedicated on image called "Seduced by the Image of Reality" which offers interesting glimpses on this relationship between people and image:

"Whatever each us may be looking for, we all tend to pursue our desires by pursuing images: symbols of the things we desire. We buy leather jackets when we want rebellion and danger. We purchase fast cars not for the sake of driving fast, but to recapture our lost youth. When we want world revolution, we buy political pamphlets and bumper stickers."

"Fascinated as we are by images, our values have come to revolve around a world we can never actually experience."

"We look for life in the image of life. The curious thing about a spectacle is how it immobilizes the spectators: just like the image, it centers their attention, their values, and ultimately their lives around something outside of themselves. It keeps them occupied without making them active, it keeps them feeling involved without giving them control."

Even though it looked extremely biased to me, it asked direct critical questions regarding the immersive aspect of visual image, as the representation of reality, considering reality as the state of things as they actually exist in the world, observably and comprehensibly. I assume we might think of alternative interpretations of reality such as physical existence or even other theories of reality but I am limiting myself at the world we see and experience as we know it. For me, the representation of this reality is still a representation and not the real world, regardless of the type of representation or depiction, whereas it's a photography, a drawing or a digital image, virtual reality and so on.

I was convinced that there was something else, some sort of intimate connection between the experience of seeing, image and the mind. The experience itself seemed more like a fascinating journey of self projection rather than just visual comprehension or translation of reality. My initial investigation was focused on this relationship between the role of image and moving image and reality. As a Visual Effects person and specially interested in films, I wanted to also look the influence of films and moving image in a society so dependent on image and appearance.

According to the Wikipedia, "an image is an artifact that depicts or records visual perception, that has a similar appearance to some subject - usually a physical object or a person, thus providing a depiction of it." An image can also be a mental representation or idea or a general impression of something. Its Latin origin, imago, relates to imitation (likeness, statue, representation) and imagination (imaginative, imaginary).

At first glance, these were indicatives that the reality was, perhaps, a personal construction of what we can see. Why do we worry about representing the real world? Which real world exactly are we representing? And more importantly, do we interfere on our conception of this reality when we try to represent it? Why do we get so intimately connected with something that it's not real?

Personal illustration - dinamically generated by codeSeeing!Ok, with so many questions on my mind, I thought I had to dedicate some time on the structure that enable us to capture visual information: our eyes. It seemed obvious that our eyes played the most important role on our ability to see things.

During my investigation, luckily enough, I remembered a story (or book) somebody told me long time ago about a blind man who recovers his sight. After some research, I had the opportunity to discover the work of British neuroscientist Oliver Sacks and his book “An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales” which consists of seven medical case histories of individuals with neurological conditions such as autism and Tourette syndrome. “To See and Not See” is the tale of a man, Virgil, who was blind from early childhood, but was able to recover some of his sight after surgery after nearly 50 years.

This one of an extremely small number of cases where an individual regained sight lost at such a young age, and as with many of the other cases, the patient found the experience to be deeply disturbing. Everyone, Virgil included, expected something much simpler. A man open his eyes, light enters, and falls on the retina: he sees.

Though, this was not what happened. When the bandages were removed... he heard a voice coming from in front of him and to one side: he turned to the source of the sound, and saw a blur. He realised that this must be a face.

"During these first weeks - after the surgery - I had no appreciation of depth or distance, street lights were luminous stains stuck to the window panes, and the corridors of the hospital were black holes. When I crossed the road the traffic terrified me, even when I was accompanied. I am very insecure while walking; indeed I am more afraid now than before the operation.”

There was some very interesting parts, one for example explains how Virgil used to experience the world as a blind man. According to him the world is build from sequences of impressions (tactile, auditory, olfactory), as opposed to sighted people that have a simultaneous visual perception. Space is reduced to one’s body and the position is measured by time. For the blind, people are not there unless they speak. People are in motion, they are temporal, they come and go. They come out of nothing; they disappear.

The story helped me realise the importance of the brain in the process of seeing, or more precisely: the cognitive process of reading images, decoding the inputs and constructing a meaning. It was clear to me that the “natural” act of seeing was in fact the result of a long and complex process by which humans acquire the ability to visually read and comprehend; in a similar but not equal process to language acquisition. I say "natural" because I'm comparing it to the act of reading, even though both constituting completely different tasks, both involve cognitive process of interpretation and comparison. It also helped me to amplify my concept of "representation of reality" in regards to visual perception and space, as opposed to disabled people lacking visual perception.

Although this was a very important component for my investigation, the visual aspects of the cognition didn’t entirely answer my questions since I couldn’t determine the relationship established between the visual stimulus read by the brain and the consciousness. After all, why do we get so intimately and emotionally connected with a film, for example?

Film and Film Language

Being focused in Visual Effects I am naturally interested in Film and Film Language, particularly the importance of effects and post production in visual storytelling and its overall visual contribution both in terms of cinematography and art direction.

I thought it would very helpful to explore more on the field firstly mapping the history of film and film language. My aim was to detect, possibly, the reason why the experience of watching a film and the observation of visual illusion play so intimately on our feelings and emotions. What distinguishes the motion picture from other artistic media? Why and how it evolved from a sequence of still images to what we know now: from author and independent films to the big

studios that make billions of dollars every year. In the investigation I considered crucial to understand the conditions in which it has evolved in its own language.

The context of the development of film was very important. In respect to arts and artistic influences of the time, starting from around 1850 in Europe, I can identify trends leading to the modernism and different movements to a more radical questioning of the society of the time.

• 1850's: Mid to late nineteenth century, certain trends leading to Modernism, such as the Naturalist, Impressionist and Symbolist techniques associated with artists and writers in what was then emerging as an avant-garde.

• 1850 - 1900: Then in the 1890s modernism begins to emerge in many different contexts: in painting, post- impressionism extends the Impressionists while rejecting its limitations, emphasising geometric forms, unnatural or arbitrary colours.

A number of explicit movements emerged around the time with philosophies and manifestoes, characterised by various kinds of techniques and motivations such as Futurists (in Italy and Russia), Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Cubism and all kinds of abstract variations of all of the above. Important to notice that a strand of thinking began to assert that it seemed necessary to move way from the past and previous norms completely, in favor of embracing contemporary techniques.

The society itself was changing gradually, impacting and influencing art and culture. As main drives of change, we may point out:

– In physics, Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity– Innovations in industry, such as the development of the internal combustion engine– Increased role of the social sciences in public policy

From Wikipedia, Modernism:

"If the nature of reality itself was in question, and if previous restrictions which had been in place around human activity were dissolving, then art, too, would have to radically change."

"Thus, in the first twenty years of the 20th century many writers, thinkers, and artists broke with the traditional means of organizing literature, painting, and music; the results were abstract art, atonal music, and the stream of consciousness technique in the novel."

"These developments began to give a new meaning to what was termed "modernism": It embraced discontinuity, rejecting smooth change in everything from biology to fictional character development and filmmaking. It approved disruption, rejecting or moving beyond simple realism in literature and art."

If Modernism was emancipatory from the beginning, considering it was a response to restrictions in human activity and the questioning of reality itself, is film an alternative to reality? Or just a reconstruction of reality? In that extent, the idea of the Flâneur might offer an interesting point of view. Even though it was visited and revisited so many times, it is still a very useful metaphor for even our current time (as I will explore later on this document).

From Wikipedia, Flâneur:

"The flâneur was, first of all, a literary type from nineteenth-century France, essential to any picture of the streets of Paris. It carried a set of rich associations: the man of leisure, the idler, the urban explorer, the connoiseur of the street."

"To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world - impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define…" Charles Baudelaire

"Walter Benjamin described the flâneur as the essential figure of the modern urban spectator, an amateur detective and investigator of the city. More than this, a sign of the alienation of the city and of capitalism - a triumph of consumer capitalism."

As observation requires distance, which invariably tends to suggest detachment, it is inevitable to notice that there is a necessary level of individuality coming from the figure of the flâneur, as we can see here:

"The flâneur's tendency toward detached but aesthetically attuned observation has brought the term into the literature of photography, particularly street photography."

Even though might be too simplistic comparison, this necessity might be captured by Ingman Bergman’s perception on film:

“When we experience a film, we consciously prime ourselves for illusion. Putting aside will and intellect, we make way for it in our imagination. The sequence of pictures plays directly on our feelings. Music works in the same fashion; I would say that there is no art form that has so much in common with film as music. Both affect our emotions directly, not via the intellect. And film is mainly rhythm; it is inhalation and exhalation in continuous sequence. Ever since childhood, music has been my great source of recreation and stimulation, and I often experience a film or play musically.”

Liquid times

Last year, I visited the British Museum with my fellow colleagues. The visit had a number of purposes relevant to our research process and offered an interesting way to think about cultural aspects about society and to observe the heritage of past and present. Not just that, it helped me to realise and think about the state of what is perceived as our so-called technologic society and its meanings in terms of identifying what really our society and times are made of.

This visit basically contributed to develop a workflow regarding ways to investigate, question and observe. Following it and "reverse engineering" my questions based on what I experience from the world I inhabit led me to think that if modernism was triggered during intense scientific and economic developments, social changes and apparently flourished mainly in consumer and capitalist societies, how this could help determine the nature of our times? If we had the transition from estates to classes and the emancipation to an idea of individual (as we've seen on the figure of the flâneur), what to expect from now?

I’m sure that the concept of postmodernity is always a controversial and arguable one as well as our postmodern condition as society given the number of schools of though and different interpretations and conventions used to describe the economic and cultural aspects of our current society. I don’t want to enter the philosophical or ideological discussion about meanings and I don’t want commit the crime to end up in conjectures about the subject, though, it seems inevitable and I reckon my personal investigation has to start from some point.

And although concepts like hypermodernity can be applied to describe economic and cultural state or condition of society after modernity, I’m not totally convinced in our technological ability in controlling every aspect of human nature, not even mentioning the natural environment and our limitations in controlling it (even considering global warming as a anthropogenic phenomenon, I doubt that it could be seen as technological development).

Zygmunt Bauman seems to have an interesting approach in regards to the state of the current society. His term "liquid modernity" is based on the idea of "fluidity" as a valid metaphor for the actual stage of the modern era, as a continuation or development of modernity; instead of creating a new recognisable era, such as postmodernity. According to Bauman, modernity was a process of liquefaction from start, process that continues taking place in our present time.

What time is this about? Complex, global capitalist economies and a shift from state support and welfare to the privatisation of services. A process fueled by the information revolution, the capacity to move capital and information around the world instantaneously. On his book, he explains his views on individuality, time and space, work and community.

I’m going to concentrate in one aspect, individualisation. According to him:

“To put it in a nutshell, 'individualization' consists of transforming human 'identity' from a 'given' into a 'task' and charging the actors with the responsibility for performing that task and for the consequences (also the side-effects) of their performance. In other words, it consists in the establishment of a de jure autonomy (whether or not the de facto autonomy has been established as well).” - Liquid Modernity

“The individual submits to society and this submission is the condition of his liberation. For man freedom consists in deliverance from blind, unthinking physical forces; he achieves this by opposing against them the great and intelligent force of society, under whose protection he shelters. By putting himself under the wing of society, he makes himself also, to a certain extent, dependent upon it. But this is a liberating dependence; there is no contradiction in this.”

Is there any connection to the level of individuality associated to the flâneur? And, being free from “unthinking physical forces” - the heavy, bulky, immobile and rooted Fordism - the deliverance from blind; is this new liquid individual more empowered and empathetic?

Another interesting aspect of our society which is undoubtedly an essential contributor to the liquefaction of it is the information revolution, specially digital information. It shouldn’t be a surprise to say that everything that can be digital will be. According to Kryder's Law, hard disk capacity doubles every 18 months which seems like an indication.

Information Transmission (from the beginning)

VisualComplexity @ OFFF 2008 - A visual exploration on mapping complex networks

Cave Paitings - 32,000 YearsTransmiting prehistoric information

Sumerian Cuneiforms - 5,000 YearsOldest registry of a written language - Earliest Civilization

Ptolemy's World Map - 2,000 YearsRevolutionized European geographical thinking - first use of longitudinal and latitudinal lines

Gutenberg's Movable Type - 500+ YearsKey factor in European Renaissance - made new ideas available to a much larger audience

Traumatic Brain Injuries - Exel: Drexel University(http://exelmagazine.org/article/traumatic-brain-injuries/)

Immersion and the brain

I am flying. No plane, no wings, just me soaring over rooftops with a mild flip in my belly as I dip closer to the grid of city streets. I lean to the right to curve past a sky- scraper, then speed up and tilt left to skirt by a tree. There has been an earthquake and I am looking for a lost child who is diabetic and needs insulin.

This is not a dream. I am awake, wearing my normal clothes – no cape or leotard – standing squarely on both feet in a room of the virtual reality laboratory at Stanford University ."

This is the begging of a recent article published on the Financial Times about recent studies regarding the effects of being constantly connected to popular websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and so on and to the increase in time spent in front of screens, expressed as "screen time". In the same article, Jaron Lanier, a prominent Silicon Valley technologist and author of “You Are Not A Gadget”, says that “we have been designing a paradise for people with Asperger’s syndrome.” Controversial.

No need to mention the fact that slowly, my investigation started pointing to broader areas such as consciousness and the brain as the possible answers to my question regarding the construction of visual perceptions and the introspective relationship between image (including mental image) and the human psychic: the necessary projection of the self that make things stick together being played by the brain.

The so called "digital life" is the summary of constant changes brought by the digitalisation of information and the increase of storage and computation capacity, which contributed to a large increase in data availability and the interconnection of computers and information. Well, let me clarify; by “digital life” I mean the collection of services a person interacts everyday (including his or her phone, notebook, desktop computer at home and/or at work with social media sites, games, programs interactive videos and digital content as a whole and so on).

One may agree or may not with this picture, but we certainly can agree that we have enough evidence that people are spending enormous time in front of screens consuming information in digital form, managing and curating digital data and connecting their minds to the vast ocean of the digital information by utilising a growing variety of electronic devices, from desktop computers and video game consoles, to televisions, smart televisions, tablets and smartphones.

Here, I’m particularly interested in the state of consciousness or types of immersion necessary to experience these extensions and instances of (digital) life - in front of screens. First, I can’t avoid to point out the parallel between our fluid times and the level of information fragmentation existent today. For example: if several years ago we started selling digital music tracks individually instead of an album (as an entity), what about watching a film in a fragmented ways: a bit on your television during the evening, the other bit on your mobile during your commute to work and finally the final bit at work during your lunch. How does it impact storytelling? And how storytelling can benefit from the number of ways of experiencing and interacting with a content. And also, what are the effects of this constant fragmentation of information and the multitasking on people?

Screens

People Staring at Computers (2011) by Kyle McDonald.

In this respect Nicholas Carr offers some interesting views on the effect of the Internet on our brains suggesting that it has detrimental effects on cognition, affecting out capacity of concentration and contemplation. The cause and effect here is not surprising as I believe we, as species, have been rewiring and reengineering our brains constantly. The question here is the level of detachment from what we know as the real world. In our current time, one might say that when we stare at computers we might connect to the “world out there”.

“People Staring at Computers is an art project and the name of a tumblr blog by Kyle McDonald. The project involved studying faces of people looking at computers. The photos were gathered by going to Apple retail stores and secretly installing an application on Macs that would snap a photo

using the Mac's built-in webcam iSight every minute and uploading photos if a face of an unsuspecting customer was detected.”

The project itself is the metaphoric view of the state of the society we live in: the liquid flâneur doesn’t need to physically move. Its city is so packed with people that detachment and distance is not a viable option. The liquid flâneur creates the virtual space of observation.

A quick look at the evolution of the computer screen is very useful to our investigation as well. I started thinking about that during my commute to the university: taking the advantage of the recent installed free wifi on tube stations, I use my tablet to access Facebook, read my emails and distract my mind from the boring commute to the university. Most people seem to enjoy their newspapers or books, switching from time to time to a quick check to their mobile phones. Other people prefer books or to play games. After monitoring my network of friends and their activities, I switch to an electronic book or article previously saved to the device. After some minutes reading or procrastinating just scrolling up and down the screen with my finger, I get completely immersed.

Without me realising, the train gets busier and the light emitting screen looks tempting for most people’s eyes around me. When I get to notice that it’s usually too late and I immediately try to protect my private virtual space tilting the device slightly or switching it off. Once I do that the gorgeous glossy screen, which was the focus of my attention and the source of my emotional immersion, becomes a black dark mirror ceasing the experience and revealing a reflection of my face and part of the surroundings.

Glossy screens first started appearing in 2006 and became the standard in the following year. Same finish became very popular in tablets and smartphones. Polished metal and glossy screens made products visually more attractive and commercially more desirable. This was the direction most hardware companies decide to take as a successful formula: products that looked always like new and minimalistic clean, another mental image that suggests durability and quality in a liquid age of rapid change.

In a short time, matt screens became a little duller, even though offering a truer representation of the actual real world colour, and are arguably easier to look at for extended periods, since our eyes don't try to see through the image to the reflection underneath. Though, glossy screens became more interesting, with deeper blacks and much richer colours, more immersive and saturated. Interesting enough, it appears that the only moment we interact with the world out there is via the screen and the only moment we get to see what surround us is by watching the reflection projected on the glossy screen.

Illustration produced by databending.Glitch art is the “aestheticisation” of digital or analog errors, by either

corrupting digital code/data or by physically manipulating electronic devices.”

The disparities between many realities

In his book “The Master and his Emissary”, Iain McGilchrist says that the mind and brain must be seen in the broadest context of our existence in order to understand the human culture in which they arise, help to shape and, in return, are moulded by. Focusing on the hemispheric functioning of the brain, his theory is that Western culture was shaped by the conflict and the relationship between the right and left side of the brain. Important to mention though, that both sides are actively involved in any task performed by the brain and the most fundamental difference between each hemisphere lies in the type of attention they give to the world.

According to his book, the left hemisphere, responsible for a sort of self-reflexive virtual world view, has increasingly, in our modern times, interfering on the right hemisphere, which could enable us to rebalance our views of reality. Resulting in a world that is “increasingly mechanistic, fragmented, decontextualised world, marked by unwarranted optimism mixed with paranoia and a feeling of emptiness, has come about, reflecting, I believe, the unopposed action of a dysfunctional left hemisphere.”

One feature that makes our brain so different from other species is the extraordinary expansion of the frontal lobes. In the humans, frontal lobes occupy as much as 35% of the brain, comparing to 17% in apes and 7% in a dog. The constitution of this part of the brain also is extremely important and unique in humans. According to the author, “the defining features of the human condition can all be traced to our ability to stand back from the world, from ourselves and from the immediacy of experience. This enables us to plan, to think flexibly and inventively, and, in brief, to take control of the world around us rather than simply respond to it passively. This distance, this ability to rise above the world in which we live, has been made possible by the evolution of the frontal lobes.”

My conclusion is that this distance is a necessary element that would, at least, partly explain the reason behind my investigation. Later in the book, he says: “there is an optimal degree of separation between ourselves and the world we perceive. This necessary distance is not the same as detachment. Distance can yeld detachment, as when we coldly calculate how to outwit our opponent, by imagining what he believes will be our next move. It enables us to exploit and use. But what is less ofter remarked is that, in total constrast, it also has the opposite effect. By standing back from the animal immediacy of our experience we are able to be more empahic with others, who we come to see, for the first time, as being like ourselves.”

“The result is that the frontal lobes not only teach us to betray, but to trust. Through them we learn to take another's perspective and to control our own immediate needs and desires.”

In other part he calls the mind the brain’s experience of itself, making the brain both responsible for the constitution of the world and the fundamental agent in consciousness. My conclusion is that we experience a fragmented and specialised world creating different instances of the reality that

surround us. Each instance inevitably affects each other as well as the mediator, the brain and consciousness.

Bibliography

Bauman, Zygmunt (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge.

Sacks, Oliver (1995) An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales. Alfred A. Knopf.

CrimethInc. (2002) Days of War, Nights of Love: Crimethink for Beginners. CrimethInc.

McGilchrist, Iain (2009) The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. Yale University Press.

Dembosky, April (2013). Cerebral circuitry - FT.comhttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c19b2e1e-5595-11e2-bbd1-00144feab49a.html#axzz2HNWfBnlQ

Kasparov, Garry and Thiel, Peter (2012). Our dangerous illusion of tech progress - FT.comhttp://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8adeca00-2996-11e2-a5ca-00144feabdc0.html#axzz2Bzqt7wQN

Lima, Manuel (2008) VisualComplexity @ OFFF 2008 - A visual exploration on mapping complex networks. http://www.slideshare.net/manulima/visualcomplexity-offf-2008

Carr, Nicholas (2010) Eric Schmidt’s second thoughts. (Rough Type blog)http://www.roughtype.com/?p=1333

Modernism and Filmhttp://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/modernism&film.htm

Walter Benjamin (1982-1940) One Way Street (1925-26)http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elljwp/walterbenjamin.htm

Modernism/modernityhttp://www.press.jhu.edu/journals/modernism_modernity/

Modern history - Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Era

History of Film - Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_film

Industrial Revolution - Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution

Flâneur - Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fl%C3%A2neur

Charles Baudelaire - Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire

Glitch art - Wikipediahttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glitch_art