CHArt TWENTY-FOURTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Seeing…Vision and Perception in a Digital Culture |
Ada Henskens, Tasmania, Australia
Perception and Representation: the Visual Cortex and Landscape Art
My illustrated paper will be based on research for a Ph.D. in Visual Art that investigated the process of creating concepts of reality. Fuelled by personal experience of hearing loss and the impact of this on cognition, it was entitled Perception and Representation: the visual cortex and landscape art. The project revisited representation of landscape as a concept of reality in order to arrive at a manner suited to the culture and beliefs of the 21st Century. My paper will commence with traditional portrayal of the world in Fine Art, how this arose from a mindset and culture of an earlier stage of industrialised society, and how this is inappropriate to the present time. Classical landscape reflects, for example, Newtonian mechanics (relating chiefly to slow-moving planetary bodies), and popular belief of the eye as camera wherein a coloured, perspectival image of a pre-existing reality is imposed on the retina. This will be contrasted to a world culture dominated by flux, change and fragmentation. The latter concept will be supported by contemporary published books, abstracts, and conversations with professionals in neurophysiology, quantum physics, digital technology and the arts, on contemporary advances in these fields and mass-communication networks. Imagery used will reflect this flux, speed and fragmentation by sources taken from the natural world.
Vision is our main mode of perception; we now know that we move through the world, scanning as we go, building a composite image from selected fragments. The brain is hard-wired to look for continuities, and by making rapid comparisons from its store of known factors, arrives at a consensus of what is being viewed. Aspects of quantum physics , (the science of very small, fast-moving objects), will be quoted in the combination of traditional and contemporary media to convey the visual bombardment enabled by fibre-optic networks and mass electronic technology, and allied to such current market-place technology as lasers in supermarkets, medicine, holographic advertising and video production. Artworks will quote actions of cells within the visual cortex, activated by light reflected off surfaces, to recognise edge of form, movement of object, separation of form from background, tonal factors, and the dual visual system that has evolved principally in primates. They will convey selective scanning, speed and translation, continually in motion, in the manner of the life of sub-atomic particles, and of this world society saturated with information, interacting physically as never before, but with those fractures in personal and social relationships that conversely exist in a much more public domain.