Perception

The use of color to display data is a solved problem, right? Just pick a palette from a drop-down menu (probably either a grayscale ramp or a rainbow), set start and end points, press “apply,” and you’re done. Although we all know it’s not that simple, that’s often how colors are chosen in the real world. As a result, many visualizations fail to represent the underlying data as well as they could.

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.

The mere exposure to masterworks does not suffice. Too many persons visit museums and collect picture books without gaining access to art. The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened.

...The delicate balance of all a person's powers which alone permits him to live fully and to work well-is upset not only when the intellect interferes with intuition, but equally when sensation dislodges reasoning. Groping in vagueness is no more productive than blind adherence to rules. Unchecked self-analysis can be harmful, but so can the artificial primitivism of the person who refuses to understand how and why he works. Modern man can, and therefore must, live with unprecedented self-awareness. Perhaps the task of living has become more difficult-but there is no way around it.

It is the purpose of this book to discuss some of the virtues of vision and thereby to help refresh and direct them.

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

A comprehensive guide for exploring and learning about the theory, science, and perception of color and contrast.

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.

Lawrence Weschler:

The red, for example, wasn't simply red – or rather it was: the surface was covered over in a completely even gloss of lipstick red paint – but (had it been doing that before?) the panel was reflecting ambient conditions like crazy, so much so that in fact almost none of the surface, strictly speaking, was red. Pool-like, it was reflecting the yellow ceiling panel beyond, whose own color was in turn being affected by the blue floor piece beyond that. There were purple effects and green, a sort of even bruise-brown hovering over the entire array when one now viewed the gallery from the side.

Mr. Serra’s most celebrated works had some of the scale of ancient temples or sacred sites and the inscrutability of landmarks like Stonehenge. But if these massive forms had a mystical effect, it came not from religious belief but from the distortions of space created by their leaning, curving or circling walls and the frankness of their materials.

This was something new in sculpture; a flowing, circling geometry that had to be moved through and around to be fully experienced. Mr. Serra said his work required a lot of “walking and looking,” or “peripatetic perception.” It was, he said, “viewer centered”: Its meanings were to be arrived at by individual exploration and reflection.

It’s unpleasant for us to notice the universe is basically just white spheres, rotating. Did you think your sun a beautiful orange? No, it is the white of all colors, so therefore has no colors at all, a sphere voided.

...The end result is that, according to science, there are no qualitative properties anywhere in the universe—no blues and no reds, no pleasures nor pains, no vices nor virtues, nothing at all… except those that exist inside our skull.

How to describe a scintillating scotoma? It’s one of the most common symptoms of a migraine, but unless you’ve had one, it sounds unreal. A scintillating scotoma is like a barbed ripple in the pool of sight. It’s a skeletal Magic Eye raised up from the flatness of the world. It’s a glare on the tarmac as you drive West at sunset on a rain-slick freeway—only when you turn your head, it’s still there, so you have to pull over, close your eyes, and wait out the slow-motion firework working its way across your brain.

...It’s true that migraines offer a rare vantage on the brain and its mysteries. As the scotoma’s shining edges recede across your field of vision, they trace a corresponding wave of electrical activity, a “spreading depression” crossing the cortex at 3 millimeters per minute. You can watch it happen in real time, as you might watch a cloud track across the sky on a windy day. You might even have time draw a picture of the scotoma as it passes overhead—a landscape en pleine tête.

The brain doesn’t just store a blurry picture of the light in peripheral vision, it summarizes it with statistical measurements. At this statistical encoding can mix things together, losing information about which letter is which when there are multiple letter.

I hypothesize that for the illusions on this page, the fact that things look different when viewed directly, versus in peripheral vision, suggests that peripheral visual encodings cause the illusions.

It’s not easy to understand or visualize peripheral visual encodings. It seems that the brain is converting light measurements into a high-dimensional feature space of summary statistics, and these do not have easy visual interpretations.

Vision scientists visualize these encodings with spatial metamers: pictures that have visually equivalent statistics to a given image, for a given fixation. That is, you pick an eye gaze location in a picture, and a metamer can be generated that jumbles up the image in a way that is not noticable when fixating on that location. These metamers illustrate that peripheral vision isn’t just blurry vision.

So some friends and I were talking about colors one day and how we all see colors a bit differently and how that's neat.

But is there a color that is interpreted differently THE MOST? Is there a most controversial color? Well, (if I contrive an ongoing survey and collect data about it), the answer is yes, of course!

The perception of colour is a gift just as definitely granted to one person, and denied to another, as an ear for music; and the very first requisite for true judgment of Saint Mark’s, is the perfection of that colour-faculty which few people ever set themselves seriously to find out whether they possess or not. […]

The fact is, that, of all God’s gifts to the sight of man, colour is the holiest, the most divine, the most solemn. We speak rashly of gay color and sad color, for color cannot at once be good and gay. All good color is in some degree pensive, the loveliest is melancholy, and the purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most.

A 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium and examines many aspects of visual communication.

Topics include:

• Definitions, history, and potential.
• Visual Iconography and its Effects.
• Closure, reader participation between the panels.
• Word-picture dynamics.
• Time and motion.
• The psychology of line styles and color.
• Comics and the artistic process.

One of the great failures of modern computing is how it has largely ignored the presence of the human body beyond the slightest acknowledgement that humans have a pair of eyeballs and a few fingertips.

...Consider, for instance, our hands. Human hands are capable of so much more than typing and swiping. Human finger sensitivity is astonishingly precise, capable of detecting wrinkles on a smooth surface with a wavelengths as small as 10nm, features so small they are invisible to the eye. Hands can both manipulate and communicate, have effect on the world and perceive its most minuscule features.

Enthusiasm around large language models (LLMs) and text-to-image systems, however, has made it easy to forget about the impressive facility of our hands and the astonishing capabilities of our vision systems, leading instead to proclamations about the pending death of the graphical user interface as an input system. Instead of veering towards a future where computers make greater use of our bodies’ expressiveness, LLMs compel us to diverge further from such a course. Why manipulate anything on a computer with gesture or point and click when you can type or speak?

This piece is a contemplative exploration of color and perception, inviting you to immerse yourself in the subtle art of visual interaction between colors. Over time, the generated shapes gradually coalesce into a monolithic form. Once complete, the composition gives way to a new visual experience, offering a continuous journey through evolving palettes.

Exponential increases in physical stimuli produce linear perceptual increases.

In this episode of Syntax, Wes and Scott talk about the process they are using for extending the Syntax website with themes, including a dark mode and secret custom themes. They also talk about issues encountered with theming and CSS, including flashes of un-themed content.

You will perhaps know that humans are far better at judging relative length than relative area, so a stacked bar chart is to be preferred to a pie chart. You will perhaps have graph color opinions. These preferences follow from a desire to create our visualizations in ways that work with known attributes of human perception and cognition.

...The most delightful kind of off-the-wall idea is both ludicrous and solidly correct.

If science fiction weren’t created by cowards, every time you see a bank of High Tech Screens monitoring some system, there would be a bunch of cartoon faces with expressions subtly animating...

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.

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'.

A related problem is that Barthes's thought is inseparable from the elegance and cunning with which it is formulated. Style, as Martin Amis rightly insists, "is not something grapples on to regular prose; it is intrinsic to perception." In The Pleasure of the Text—a useful guide, naturally, to his own work—Barthes had asked, "What if knowledge itself were delicious?" The corollary is: What if that knowledge were robbed of all that made it so tasty? ...To copy out and formalize Barthes's argument is not simply to diminish it, but to rob it of so many subtleties as to misrepresent it entirely (all in the name of representing it more clearly and rigorously).

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.

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.

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.

Remember Galton’s experiments on visual imagination? Some people just don’t have it. And they never figured it out. They assumed no one had it, and when people talked about being able to picture objects in their minds, they were speaking metaphorically.

And the people who did have good visual imaginations didn’t catch them. The people without imaginations mastered this “metaphorical way of talking” so well that they passed for normal. No one figured it out until Galton sat everyone down together and said “Hey, can we be really really clear about exactly how literal we’re being here?” and everyone realized they were describing different experiences.

...This makes me wonder what universal human experiences I and my friends are missing out on without realizing it.

In this article, we summarize our views on the problem of consciousness and outline the current version of a novel hypothesis for how conscious minds can be generated in mammalian organisms. We propose that a mind can be considered conscious when three processes are in place: the first is a continuous generation of interoceptive feelings, which results in experiencing of the organism's internal operations; the second is the equally continuous production of images, generated according to the organism's sensory perspective relative to its surround; the third combines feeling/experience and perspective resulting in a process of subjectivity relative to the image contents. We also propose a biological basis for these three components: the peripheral and central physiology of interoception and exteroception help explain the implementation of the first two components, whereas the third depends on central nervous system integration, at multiple levels, from spinal cord, brainstem, and diencephalic nuclei, to selected regions of the mesial cerebral cortices.

If modern painting is "art as art," this means, to paraphrase Reinhardt, that is represents nothing and exists only in and for itself. If this has created an "art language, with an art communication," this is because this kind of art has implied all along a form of intimate contact with its viewer, in which the viewing of "art as art" becomes "sensation as sensation" or "perception as perception." This distinguishes "modern painting" from representational painting, which exhibits duality, that is, it uses imagery to refer to "past experiences and feeling," and to "color and reconstruct in the mind" associations that are meaningful, but that take the viewer far away from the specifics of the encounter with the painting before them.

Everything that we can see, everything that we can understand, is related to structure, and, as the gestalt psychologists have so beautifully shown, perception itself is in patterns, not fragments. All awareness or mental activity seems to involve the comparison of a sense or thought pattern with a preexisting one, a pattern formed in the brain’s physical structure by biological inheritance and the imprint of experience. Could it be that aesthetic enjoyment is the formation of a kind of moiré pattern between a newly sensed experience and the old; between the different parts of a sensed pattern transposed in space and in orientation and with variations in scale and time by the marvelous properties of the brain?

It is what is left over when what is expected has been canceled out.

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

The personal experience of most of us will testify to this persistence of an illusory image long after its inadequacy is conceptually realized. We stare into the jungle and see only the sunlight on the green leaves, but a warning noise tells us that an animal is hidden there. The observer then learns to interpret the scene by singling out "give-away" clues and by reweighting previous signals. The camouflaged animal may now be picked up by the reflection of its eyes. Finally by repeated experience the entire pattern of perception is changed, and the observer need no longer consciously search for give-aways, or add new data to an old framework. They have achieved an image which will operate successfully in the new situation, seeming natural and right. Quite suddenly the hidden animal appears among the leaves, "as plain as day."

For what Bob was trying to capture in these efforts was the incidental, the transitory, the peripheral—that aspect of our experience that is both there and not there, the object and not the object of our sensations, perceived but seldom attended to.

The structure of matter devolved ultimately into the intimate coexistence of something like corpuscles of nothing and atoms of something, segregating through the accidents of history to yield regions differing in density intimately interwoven on different scales. The experience of the world as well as human perception and analysis of any part of it is a matter of the angular scale of resolution and of the time necessary for making comparison between the different parts.

Without such variations and without time to compare remembrances of them, nothing can be experiences.

If one says “Red” (the name of a color)
and there are 50 people listening,
it can be expected that there will be 50 reds in their minds.
And one can be sure that all these reds will be very different.

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."

"Paintings are like what you can barely make out through a keyhole compared with the richness of perception that's just waiting there in the world to be experienced all the time. It's strange. With food, for instance, people seem able to understand what's involved: you savor the taste rather than just feed the body. But people have a hard time understanding that it should be the same way with visual experience."

In-person, live observation of color is a practice for which I feel there is no adequate substitute. Photographs are often imprecise in reproducing color.

The sensitivity
and consequently the registration of the retina of an eye is different
from the sensitivity and registration of a photographic film.

Normally, black-and-white photography registers all lights lighter
and all darks darker than the more adjustable eye perceives them.
The eye also distinguishes better the so-called middle grays,
which in photography are often flattened if not lost.

This shows what a higher key in light can lose in photography.

The greatest advantage the eye has over photography
is its scotopic seeing in addition to its photopic seeing.
The former means, briefly, the retinal adjustment to lower light conditions.