Seeing

Learning to design is learning to see, an adventure that gets more and more captivating the further you go.

A love letter to our profession.

She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”

Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating.

She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

Ultimately I’m less interested in Bush Tower and Gilbert’s impression of Bush Tower than am in this sketch. [Gilbert] used a blunt line – probably just a soft pencil – and made little effort to capture detail of the building, but as soon as I saw the sketch I knew which building it was, as clearly as if he had taken a photograph. I’m impressed by this in part because I can’t do it. I can make an engineering diagram – a load-path sketch, for example – just fine and I can draft in CAD. My handwriting has deteriorated because I’ve almost entirely switched from writing to typing, but my sketch line-work is okay. But I can’t draw any better than the average random person on the street, so his ability to so readily capture the essence of a building floors me.

ONE: Picturing Ad Reinhardt

TWO: Morgan Meis on experiencing Robert Irwin’s acrylic columns

THREE: Three: Stereo Sue’s first letter to Oliver Sacks on Stereoscopic Vision

I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.

Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art.

“Oh, look at your fish!” he said, and left me again to my own devices. In a little more than an hour he returned, and heard my new catalogue.

“That is good, that is good!” he repeated; “but that is not all; go on”; and so for three long days he placed that fish before my eyes, forbidding me to look at anything else, or to use any artificial aid. “Look, look, look,” was his repeated injunction.

Speaking of strange aides to talent: most blind mathematicians work in geometry and topology. It is argued that the spatial intuition of sighted people is degraded by the triviality of retinal perception.

I was thinking about this not long ago while reading in Petapixel an essay by a photographer named Scott Reither, “Long Form Study: Why Photographers Should Repeatedly Revisit A Scene.” In it, he described photographing one particular stretch of beach, over and over, throughout his career.

Of course that landscape has changed over time, and of course he’s had moments when he felt he’d captured the same territory so many times there was nothing left to see.

But there was always something more to see — maybe because of a change in Reither’s life, rather than in the physical environment.

As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,

“Step 1: Wonder at something.
Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.”

Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.

Direct instructions at point of need may encourage writers and programmers to divert diversions. Or not, because signs are seen only a few times before becoming unseen.

At the end of the 18th century, Spain's official geographer, Tomás Lopez, was asked by the King to create an accurate map of the kingdom. In an attempt to delegate the herculean labour required, Tomás drew a series of circles, picked the town in the center of each circle, and asked the local priest to answer a questionnaire and draw up a map of their province. The goal was to amalgamate the responses into a single map. But none of these priests were trained in cartography, and many of them would have had limited access to maps at all. Nonetheless, 500 of them tried. In one map, the entire region is represented simply by a series of letters (“A” for church, “B” for hermitage, “C” for house, “D” for tree, and so on). Another represents the surrounding villages as if they are orbiting planets. In some, the handwriting forms the topographies. In others, descriptive columns of text take center stage, as if the language itself is a landmark. Each priest implicitly reveals how they see the world around them, and the relative importance of its constituent parts: nature or people, religion or trade, architecture or landscape, precision or vibes.

The great misinterpretation of twentieth-century art is the claim advanced that many people, especially critics, that cubism of necessity led to abstraction. But on the contrary, cubism was about the real world. It was an attempt to reclaim a territory for figuration, for depiction. Faced with the claim that photography had made figurative painting obsolete, the cubists performed an exquisite critique of photography; they showed that there were certain aspects of looking—basically the human reality of perception—that photography couldn't convey, and that you still needed the painter's hand and eye to convey them.

To see with fresh, uninstructed eyes and an open mind requires a deliberate, self-aware act by the observer. Abstract artworks represent themselves and should be first viewed for themselves. When looking at outdoor abstract pieces, concentrate initially on the unique optical experience produced by the artworks. See as the artist saw when making the piece.

A focus on optical experience does not deny stories, it postpones them. Viewing an artwork may evoke interesting narratives – or just tedious artchat recalling similar art or artists, concocting playful tales, realizing how scrap metal was repurposed into art, making judgments about the artist's intentions or character, or contemplating an artwork's provenance, price, politics. Let the artwork stand on its own. Walk around fast and slow, be still, look and see from up down sideways close afar above below, enjoy the multiplicity of silhouettes shadows dapples clouds airspaces sun earth glowing. Your only language is vision.

Theresa: What's behind this door?
Bernard: What door?

By making it possible for the photographer to observe his work and his subject simultaneously, and by removing most of the manipulative barriers between the photographer and the photograph, it is hoped that many of the satisfactions of working in the early arts can be brought to a new group of photographers. The process must be concealed from—non-existent for—the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in taking and not in making photographs. In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture, and our task is to make that possible.

For if you will looke upon the Cabinet of your Eyes, you shall find that it is but a small thing, and that it hath nothing in it worth seeing; and therefore it is no great matter whether you looke at it or no. But if you will looke upon the Cabinet of your Soul, you shall find that it is a great thing, and that it hath much in it worth seeing; and therefore it is a great matter whether you looke at it or no.

The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress.

The newborn baby and the [blind man suddenly gifted with sight] do not have to learn to see. Sight is given to them. But they do have to learn to perceive. Perception is learnt and learnt slowly. Skill is required for perception as for speech. We are largely unaware of the skill we exercise. None of the things we have to learn to perceive are self-evident, or, apparently, instinctively evident. No doubt, however, we have an instinctive aptitude for this learning, and once we have learnt we cannot easily see as though we had not.

As Ruskin says, one has to strive, if one is to see with the 'Innocent Eye'.

Join me. Grab whatever you’ve got. Open the bag. Pinch it on its crinkly edges and pull apart the seams. Now we’re in business: We have broken the seal. The inside of the bag is silver and shining, a marvel of engineering — strong and flexible and reflective, like an astronaut suit. Lean in, inhale that unmistakable bouquet: toasted corn, dopamine, America, grief! We are the first humans to see these chips since they left the factory who knows when. They have been waiting for us, embalmed in preservatives, like a pharaoh in his dark tomb.

The perception of solid form is entirely a matter of experience. We see nothing but flat colors; and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey indicates the dark side of a solid substance... The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of color, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.

Here's a trick question: How do we get people to understand programming?

Khan Academy recently launched an online environment for learning to program. It offers a set of tutorials based on the JavaScript and Processing languages, and features a "live coding" environment, where the program's output updates as the programmer types.

Because my work was cited as an inspiration for the Khan system, I felt I should respond with two thoughts about learning:

• Programming is a way of thinking, not a rote skill. Learning about "for" loops is not learning to program, any more than learning about pencils is learning to draw.
• People understand what they can see. If a programmer cannot see what a program is doing, she can't understand it.

Thus, the goals of a programming system should be:

• to support and encourage powerful ways of thinking
• to enable programmers to see and understand the execution of their programs

A live-coding Processing environment addresses neither of these goals. JavaScript and Processing are poorly-designed languages that support weak ways of thinking, and ignore decades of learning about learning. And live coding, as a standalone feature, misses the point.

Alan Perlis wrote, "To understand a program, you must become both the machine and the program." This view is a mistake, and it is this widespread and virulent mistake that keeps programming a difficult and obscure art. A person is not a machine, and should not be forced to think like one.

How do we get people to understand programming?

We change programming. We turn it into something that's understandable by people.

I remember my mother sitting me down at the age of about five with pencil and paper to draw an acacia tree in the yard while she busied herself with her own sketchbook.

After a while she came over to see my efforts. “Splendid! But haven’t you noticed how the trunk narrows as it rises? And see how the branches flatten out sideways, not like that oleander over there, where they all go up at a steep angle. Now don’t rub that one out, just do another drawing to compare with the first one.”

The results of intuition can be studied by the intellect, but the intellect cannot give birth to intuition.

Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.

Experiences with great artworks deepen us in ways that are hard to describe. To have visited Chartres Cathedral or finished “The Brothers Karamazov” is not about acquiring new facts but to feel somehow elevated, enlarged, altered. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” the protagonist notices that as he ages, he’s able to perceive life on a deeper level: “I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish.”

...How does it work? How does culture do its thing? The shortest answer is that culture teaches us how to see. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way,” the Victorian art critic John Ruskin wrote. “Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”

Ruskin intuited something that neuroscience has since confirmed: Perception is not a simple and straightforward act. You don’t open your eyes and ears and record the data that floods in, the way in those old cameras light was recorded on film. Instead, perception is a creative act. You take what you’ve experienced during the whole course of your life, the models you’ve stored up in your head, and you apply them to help you interpret all the ambiguous data your senses pick up, to help you discern what really matters in a situation, what you desire, what you find admirable and what you find contemptible.

Learning to design is, first of all, learning to see. Designers see more, and more precisely. This is a blessing and a curse—once we have learned to see design, both good and bad, we cannot un-see. The downside is that the more you learn to see, the more you lose your “common” eye, the eye you design for. This can be frustrating for us designers when we work for a customer with a bad eye and strong opinions. But this is no justification for designer arrogance or eye-rolling. Part of our job is to make the invisible visible, to clearly express what we see, feel and do. You can’t expect to sell what you can’t explain.

This is why excellent designers do not just develop a sharper eye. They try to keep their ability to see things as a customer would. You need a design eye to design, and a non-designer eye to feel what you designed.

The cause of the experience of beauty is a series of events, not a state of affairs existing continuously. That perhaps is why the cause of the experience is something we find impossible to point out. It will not stand still to be pointed at. We can point out only what we perceive. We can never point out or describe what we see.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

I recently started a field notebook assignment for my upper-level Ecology class at the University of Montana. I asked my students to pick one “thing” and observe it carefully over the entire semester.

In addition to their field notebooks, the students also had to suggest at least ten research questions inspired by their observations.

And when I see you
I really see you upside down
But my brain knows better
It picks you up and turns you around
Turns you around, turns you around

If you feel discouraged
When there's a lack of color here
Please don't worry lover
It's really bursting at the seams
From absorbing everything, the spectrum's A to Z

I've looked and I've looked
And I've kept careful track.
But all that I've noticed, Except my own feet
Was a horse and a wagon on Mulberry Street.
That's nothing to tell of,
That won't do, of course....
Just a broken-down wagon
That's drawn by a horse.
That can't be my story. That's only a start.
I'll say that a ZEBRA was pulling that cart!
And that is a story that no one can beat,
When I say that I saw it on Mulberry Street.

The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.

Drawing requires that you pay attention to every detail—even the seemingly unimportant ones. In creating an image (no matter how skillfully), the lines and tones on the paper provide ongoing feedback as to what you have observed closely and what you have not.

This is not a catalogue because there is no list of works. The exhibition will comprise three spaces in which three artists will have made their art. At the moment of writing we are not sure exactly what they will do—and we cannot know how what they do will appear to us. Therefore we cannot attempt to help you perceive it. So this is also not truly an introduction to the art. It is not intended to be read until you have seen the exhibition.

"One and one don't make two, but maybe five or eight or ten, depending on the number of interactions you can get going in a situation."

Can repair sites and repair actors claim special insight or knowledge, by virtue of their positioning vis-à-vis the worlds of technology they engage? Can the fixer know and see different things—indeed, different worlds—than the better-known figures of "designer" or "user"?

Intuition means to see immediately, directly.

Considered as a form of activity, the seeing eye and the seen object are one, not two. One is embedded in the other. People who know with the intellect before seeing with the eyes cannot be said to be truly seeing.

With intuition, time is not a factor. It takes place immediately, so there is no hesitation. It is instantaneous. Since there is no hesitation, intuition doesn’t harbour doubt. It is accompanied by conviction. Seeing and believing are close brothers.

What I suggest has usually happened [during the act of creation] is this: the artist has glimpsed something: he has seen, perhaps fleetingly and indistinctly, some particular relation or quality of visible features which had previously been disregarded, and which impressed itself on him by its beauty. By means of making a work of art he then seeks as it were to fix isolate and concentrate what he has seen.

No one has ever succeeded in demonstrating in principle how this is done, but done it is; and when we see it done we find it hard to understand why it should have been so intensely difficult to do.

Our epoch is fixing its own style day by day. It is there under our eyes—Eyes which do not see.

Eboshi: What exactly are you here for?

Ashitaka: To see with eyes unclouded by hate.

I have almost never judged a work of art by first looking at its signature. This way of assessment holds no interest for me. If what I see is good, it is good with or without a seal.

Whether it is a painting or a pot, you must first look at the thing itself.