Emerging Perspectives
University of San Jorge (Venue in the city centre) Calle San Voto, 6-8 50003 Zaragoza, Spain
From Viewpoint-centric Vision to Pictorial Vision: Brain Mechanisms, Evolution, and Relevance to Observational Depiction View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Leon Lou
The appearance of an object from a viewpoint is important for visually guided actions. Since the vision for action need not be conscious, it leaves unsettled the questions of why and how humans are evidently capable of consciously seeing 2d images of 3d objects. Seeing images may seem useful only for artists doing observational drawing and painting. But whatever observational artists can see must be anchored in the visual cognitive competencies shared by all adult human beings. In this presentation, I propose a framework for understanding image vision from the distal world in neural network terms. I focus on the empirical research on size perception first, highlighting the effect of instruction on object and angular size perception. I then propose an extension to Grossberg’s (2021) brain resonance theory of consciousness to explain perceived angular size by suggesting a role played by the prefrontal cortex in sustaining mental images. Evidence supporting the ontogenetic and phylogenetic recency of angular size perception over constant object size will be presented. The conclusions reached about the size perception are then generalized to shape and color perceptions. In the last part of the study, I raise questions on what entails for observational artists to try to see the world from their viewpoints and what respective roles the viewpoint-centric and object-centric vision play in observational depiction. I argue that viewpoint-centric vision in observational depiction is essentially about seeing pictorial relationships that most non-artists have difficulty seeing.
I Was a Teenage Photographer: The Vernacular Polaroid Image "Feed" in Pearl Jam's "No Code"
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Sell
As we approached the dawn of the digital age, we still consumed images through news and print media, television, movies, and music. Pearl Jam’s 1996 album No Code used a mosaic of 144 Polaroid images within its packaging, and became a physical staple in my cd player and the subject of fascination of my teenaged artist mind. The square format of the Polaroids, arranged in a seemingly interminable collage, presupposed the Instagram feed, but in physical form. In the days before we could curate our visual personality online, we had album artwork like No Code’s to help build that personality for us. The transformative power of the images contained within the album was their physical presence — the record featured Polaroids within its cover and in facsimile images within the package. The images were meant to be looked at. My paper examines the photographic theory underlying the ubiquitization of the Polaroid image, its role in vernacular photography, and how the artistic integrity of the Polaroid images on the album influenced me as an artist, impacting my photography as the objectives of the photo world shifted from physical to digital in the late 1990s. In addition, my paper utilizes biographical elements to contrast and narrate the building of personality within the analog age versus the digital.
