BLOG/WRITING

Visual Intelligence

I'm giving this thoroughly enjoyable and fascinating book by Donald D. Hoffman a second reading at the time of writing this. Hoffman has put together a compendium of the algorithmic rules that determine how we humans, and probably animals, extricate information and construct form from the chaotic 2D splatter of colour and value on the back of our retinas. Hoffman lays out how rules apply and how other rules might over-ride other rules under specific circumstances. Some rules seem well understood both conceptually and in terms of brain and eye physiology but for others current research can only speculate why they work. Any visualist who has taken the time to put in the thousands of hours required to draw well could find this book fascinating through the recognition that most of the brain's visual construction rules are the very same rules visual artists apply when constructing and arranging coherent form in the pictorial space of a two dimensional surface. Drawing might be a sort of reverse engineering of our innate read-only visual intelligence into a writable system, through practice and skill, that can be applied with stylus or brush onto a sheet of paper or a canvas. This is why the book will probably appeal to artists, or at least those artists who have taken the time to draw...to describe form...exceptionally well. It probably won't appeal to conceptual artists, or those artists who prefer words or ideas to images. It also probably won't, or shouldn't, appeal to those learning to draw, that is students, because, I suspect, being too self aware of processes while learning skill could undermine necessary unconscious 'flow' and hobble you. But, once you have a chunk of a lifetime spent drawing behind you this book becomes magic because it so comprehensively lays out much of what you already know.

This is a pipe! As a visual artist, on the one hand, i've always been annoyed at the somewhat 'anti-art' notion that this 2D representation is 'not a pipe', and also Magritte's title for the painting 'The Treachery of Images'. It's a representation of a pipe, so it is a pipe we are perceiving. Surely Magritte might be being nuanced and even ironic in his title, because, if we see a pipe, then it is for us in an ever so astonishing, quite delusional way, a pipe? Just writing or saying 'This Is Not A Pipe', like some kind of hex, doesn't make it not a pipe. Surely it is at least both a pipe and not a pipe? The treachery could as easily be of words, and as a visual artist god only knows I find words as treacherous as images. Here is the 'other hand'; if this painting of a pipe were not a pipe, then looking at an actual pipe before our eyes is also not a pipe because it's actually a delusional perceptual construction from a two dimensional splatter of light in the back of our eyes. It's delusional pipes all the way down. There is magic and mystery (and creative intelligence Hoffman shows) in seeing, especially in the realm between two and three dimensionality. British artist Michael Craig-Martin recently said in a Guardian item “A painting of a shoe looks nothing like a shoe, being entirely flat and made of bits of colour put together. The miracle is that we look at it and can see a shoe as clearly as if there was a shoe in the room with us." This is a shoe, if it fits, wear it, although ultimately Hoffman's fascinating research is probably suggesting, somewhat alarmingly, that if it's not a pipe or a shoe you are seeing then nothing is actually what it appears to be, but rather a fabrication created to make ends meet as best as possible negotiating in a complex world. Seeing isn't necessarily believing, and this is something that learning how to draw well makes eminently apparent.

Reading the Hoffman book working artists who draw and paint will recognize the uncommon 'accidents of viewpoint' like co-linear and co-planar alignments that you try to avoid in composition or the straightforward drawing of objects on a table. Should you happen to encounter accidents of viewpoint in your field of vision when drawing and put them in your image they would introduce confusion into the 'reading' of your image by a viewer. So you move things around, or move your point of view, left or right, even a little bit. These occasional accidents of viewpoint when encountered in the real world confuse the brain; one of my favorite examples of this, one that I often gave to drawing students, was a story printmaker David Blackwood once told me. From a small outport in Newfoundland residents had been telling tales of seeing a headless woman in a pale diaphanous robe or nightie in the moonlight in the surrounding barrens. It might be some believed what they saw or that some were having fun, but in the tales the instinct was generally to run away as fast as possible. Blackwood himself claimed to have encountered the apparition walking home late at night and managed to suppress the instinct to run but rather risk a firm gaze. Within moments the apparition became aware of his presence and the white horse turned sideways and gazed back. He was looking at the arse end of a pale horse. I always like to recount that story when making the point that vision is generally trustworthy but not always and that seeing should not, in fact, be believing. I think visualists who draw are uniquely placed to recognize this reality.

When accidents of viewpoint are applied to carefully designed illusions they deliberately 'confuse' the visual mind, or, at the very least, lead it to construct alternate images or alternate readings of form. In the well known Necker Cube, for example, your brain flips the aspect of the cube back and forth, showing how the mind can 'construct' what you see in two separate ways. The book is full of such illusions illustrating how the rules apply and how they might be broken. The overarching rule seems to be the 'rule of general views' which is a kind of wager that rules out the prospect of the uncommon accidental view through probability. In a way all the rules are wagers on probabilities based on accumulated information and experience that the brain makes to interpret the retina; it is far less likely that things appear one way than another so the brain goes with the much more likely scenario. It's when an unlikely 'accident of viewpoint' occurs the brain occasionally loses the wager and sees something quite different from actuality, like a headless female apparition in the moonlight or a cleverly designed illusion.

This book is doubly interesting for me because not only did I work long and hard to learn to try to draw well, but I also worked as a background painter for animation. Backgrounds, in animation (or live action) have to do several things; establish mood and location without distracting from the interacting characters. This means they almost always need to be a completely comprehensible pictorial space for the brain. If, for example a theatre-goer experienced some kind of confusion about what they were seeing in the background it would capture their attention away from the narrative and characters. Everything in the background should generally make complete visual sense. Furthermore, most scenes in a film, animated or live action, are around one or two seconds long. So you also have a severe time constraint on being able to make sense of what you are seeing behind the characters. Awareness of 'the rules' of visual intelligence are therefore constantly referenced, knowingly or not, as you make sure that your background painting is easy to 'read' on the retina by ensuring there is no ambiguity for a brain wagering on probabilities about what it is seeing. This lack of ambiguity in ideal background paintings is somewhat different than what might occur in an illustration (or a painting) where a viewer might have more time to lavish attention; in fact, some ambiguity and effort might actually make the image more interesting as in, 'hey wait a minute, what is going on here'.

Visual intelligence helped me place another visual interest I've had and casually read about that at some point will require a post of it's own in future. I've always been a little perverse. As a visual artist I worked ever so hard to make form extremely comprehensible to the eye and the mind, accept on occasions in my own work where I might have wanted to use ambiguity to create interest. So I always wondered about how artists might reverse the rules of visual intelligence to obscure or even annihilate perceived form. If you are fascinated at constructing form it follows that you might be just as fascinated by processes that involve de-constructiong it. This is of course the realm of visual 'stealth'. Yehudi Lights on aircraft mimicking 'lights' on deep sea fish. Dazzle camouflage on ships at sea to confuse submariners. Camouflage on uniforms and aircraft...an animals. It's counter shading on military aircraft and animals. And of course it makes a lot of sense that much of the early work on obscuring form was done by artists, including the first person to describe and analyse counter-shading, American artist Abbot H. Thayer.

Because of or in spite of my fervent enthusiasm for this book, as a visual artist I was struck by a glaring and annoying omission. Hoffman lists the 'tourists' who will appreciate and enjoy his book on visual intelligence as people in marketing, advertising, graphic design, readers of popular science, undergraduates with undeclared majors, developers of virtual worlds, lawyers concerned with eyewitness testimony, and philosophers. But not artists. WTF Donald! Art and artists, often working hundreds of years ago, are referenced on a number of occasions in the book for showing an awareness and understanding of how to apply the rules of visual intelligence to describing form. What kind of accident of viewpoint, blind spot, or illusion prevented you from including us among sorts of people who might appreciate your writing and research?