Dennis Hollingsworth

the movie called You

Back in the day between undergrad and grad school, while I was apprenticing with architecture firms I was painting at night and on weekends. I was reading E. H. Gombrich and Rudolf Arnheim, thinkers who made a huge impression on me and unfortunately haven't been incorporated into the dialog in the art world at large as much as I think they should be. Here's the tail end of an article in today's NYTimes which is a testament to Gombrich and Arnheim's enduring relevance in our art world and beyond:

The mechanisms that succeed in seizing our sightline fall into two basic classes: bottom up and top down. Bottom-up attentiveness originates with the stimulus, with something in our visual field that is the optical equivalent of a shout: a wildly waving hand, a bright red object against a green field. Bottom-up stimuli seem to head straight for the brainstem and are almost impossible to ignore, said Nancy Kanwisher, a vision researcher at M.I.T., and thus they are popular in Internet ads.

Top-down attentiveness, by comparison, is a volitional act, the decision by the viewer that an item, even in the absence of flapping parts or strobe lights, is nonetheless a sight to behold. When you are looking for a specific object ? say, your black suitcase on a moving baggage carousel occupied largely by black suitcases ? you apply a top-down approach, the bouncing searchlights configured to specific parameters, like a smallish, scuffed black suitcase with one broken wheel. Volitional attentiveness is much trickier to study than is a simple response to a stimulus, yet scientists have made progress through improved brain-scanning technology and the ability to measure the firing patterns of specific neurons or the synchronized firing of clusters of brain cells.

I would identify the top down aspect with what we call the art world dialogue, and the bottom up with the visual studies pioneered by the likes of Gombrich and Arnheim.

Recent studies with both macaques and humans indicate that attentiveness crackles through the brain along vast, multifocal, transcortical loops, leaping to life in regions at the back of the brain, in the primary visual cortex that engages with the world, proceeding forward into frontal lobes where higher cognitive analysis occurs, and then doubling back to the primary visual centers. En route, the initial signal is amplified, italicized and annotated, and so persuasively that the boosted signal seems to emanate from the object itself. The enhancer effect explains why, if you?ve ever looked at a crowd photo and had somebody point out the face of, say, a young Franklin Roosevelt or George Clooney in the throng, the celebrity?s image will leap out at you thereafter as though lighted from behind.

Whether lured into attentiveness by a bottom-up or top-down mechanism, scientists said, the results of change blindness studies and other experiments strongly suggest that the visual system can focus on only one or very few objects at a time, and that anything lying outside a given moment?s cone of interest gets short shrift. The brain, it seems, is a master at filling gaps and making do, of compiling a cohesive portrait of reality based on a flickering view.

To say that one or the other is superior would be missing the ultimate point, that we need both and we need both to interact dynamically. Fluidity might be the kind of thing we need in our dialog in the arts. Make a paradigm, break a paradigm, make another paradigm... fluidity. Keep it moving, people.

?Our spotlight of attention is grabbing objects at such a fast rate that introspectively it feels like you?re recognizing many things at once,? Dr. Wolfe said. ?But the reality is that you are only accurately representing the state of one or a few objects at any given moment.? As for the rest of our visual experience, he said, it has been aptly called ?a grand illusion.? Sit back, relax and enjoy the movie called You.

And to speak of the beyond, here's a political implication mapped by a psych/politico blogger by the name of Shrinkwrapped. Unfortunately the top down mechanisms dominating much of our fellow art worlders won't admit this connection easily.

Posted by Dennis at April 1, 2008 9:24 AM