p. 133-134
Matters are made worse by the fact that the eyes move almost continuously. Several times a second they jitter and bounce; they also make saccades and micro-saccades-that is, sharp, ballistic movements. As a result, the projection of an object you perceive to be still in facts jumps around on your eyeball, and when you track a moving object, its image stays still on your retina while that of the stationary background races across your eyes. Again, in order to explain how we manage to experience a stable visual world, we need to suppose, it seems, that the ability is achieved at some later stage in the processing of the original retinal information.

p. 142
The world is not a construction of the brain, nor is it a product of our own conscious efforts. It is there for us; we are here in it. The conscious mind is not inside us; it is, it would be better to say, a kind of active attunement to the world, an achieved integration. It is the world itself, all around, that fixes the nature of conscious experience.

p. 143-144
The retinal image is an image in a mathematical sense; it is a projection or a mapping. The retinal image is not an image in the sense of a picture – or, if it is, this is entirely accidental. How it looks, or how it reads, plays no role in its performance of its neurophysiological job description. Once we appreciate that the retinal image isn’t something that we see, we lose a grip even on what it means to say that it is upside-down. Upside-down, one must ask relative to what? Who’s to say what counts as upside-down in the head relative to the tasks faced by the nervous system?
[...]
Again, we don’t experience the retinal image; we don’t experience any image , in that sense. We experience the world.

—

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, Wiley-Academy 2005

p.21
The technologically expanded and strengthened eye today penetrates deep into matter and space, and enables man to cast a simultaneous look on the opposite sides of the globe. The experiences of space and time have become fused into each other by speed[...], and as a consequence we are witnessing a distinct reversal of the two dimensions -a temporalisation of space and a spatialisation of time. The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eye is causing us to live increasingly in a perpetual present, flattened by speed and simultaneity.

p. 35
Perhaps, freed of the implicit desire of the eye for control and power, it is precisely the unfocused vision of our time that is again capable of opening up new realms of vision and thought. The loss of focus brought about by the stream of images may emancipate the eye from its patriarchal domination and give rise to a participatory and empathetic gaze. The technological extensions of the senses have until now reinforced the primacy of vision, but the new technologies may also help ‘the body[...] to dethrone the disinterested gaze of the disincarnated Cartesian spectator’.

p. 40-41
Sensory experience become integrated through the body, or rather, in the very constitution of the body and the human mode of being.[...] Our bodies and movements are in constant interaction with the environment; the world and the self inform and redefine each other constantly. The percept of the body and the image of the world turn into one single continuous existential experience; there is no body separate from its domicile in space, and there is no space unrelated to the unconscious image of the perceiving self.
[...]
A walk through a forest is invigorating and healing due to the constant interaction of all sense modalities. [...] The eye collaborates with the body and other senses. One’s sense of reality is strengthened and articulated by this constant interaction.

p.65
The forest enfolds us in its multisensory embrace. The multiplicity of peripheral stimuli effectively pull us into the reality of its space.

—

Lawrence Weschler, True to Life. Twenty-five years of conversation with David Hockney, University of California Press 2008

p. 4
“I mean, for instance, wide-angle lenses!” Hockney exclaimed as we stood that afternoon on the deck overlooking his pool. “after a while I bought a better camera and I tried using a wide-angle lens because I wanted to record a whole room or an entire standing figure. But I hated the pictures I got. They seemed extremely untrue. They depicted something you never actually saw. It wasn’t just the lines bending in ways they never do when you look at the world. Rather it was the falsification – your eye doesn’t ever see that much in one glance. It’s not true to life.”

p. 6
Hockney led me back into a the studio and picked up a magazine, thumbing randomly to an ad, a photograph of a happy family picnicking on a hillside green. “See? You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter. I first noticed this with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively: you can’t. Life is precisely what they don’t have – or rather, time, lived time. All you can do with most ordinary photographs is stare at them – they stare back, blankly – and presently your concentration begins to fade. They stare you down. I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops – for a split second. But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world.

p. 10
“[...]Looking at you now, my eye doesn’t capture you in your entirety, but instead quickly, in nervous little glances. I look at your shoulder, and then to your ear, your eyes (maybe, for a moment, if I know you well enough and have come to trust you, but even then only for a moment), your cheek, your shirt button, your shoes, your hair, your eyes again, your nose and mouth. There are hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impression of you. And this is wonderful. If, instead, I caught all of you in one frozen look, the experience would be dead – it would be like…it would be like looking at an ordinary photograph.”

p. 66
“[...] For perspective to be fixed, time has stopped and hence space has become frozen, petrified. Perspective takes away the body of the viewer. You have a fixed point, you have no movement; in short, you are not there, really. That is the problem. Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such thing as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it has to be an account of the experience of that looking. In that sense it must deeply involve an observer whose body somehow has to be brought back in.”

p. 68-69
“[...] For instance, in the old Newtonian view of the world, in Newtonian physics, it’s as if the world exists outside of us. It’s over there, out there, it works mechanically, and it will do so with or without us. In short, we’re really not part of nature; it virtually comes to that. Whereas modern physics has increasingly thrown that model into question and shown it cannot be. Mr. Einstein makes things more human by making measurement at least relative to us, or anyway, to some observer; the supposedly neutral viewpoint is obliterated. There can be no measurement without a measurer. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is, of course, highly technical and specialized. It deals with a paradox in particle physics, showing how if you attempt to measure the velocity of a given particle you won’t be able to identify its exact location and vice versa. Previous to this, of course, science believed that given enough technical advancement, it would eventually be able to measure anything, but Heisenberg showed that this was not just a problem of not yet having the right measuring devices but that the problem was inherent in the nature of physical reality itself. The old conception of scientific inquiry had gone on as though we could measure the world as if we weren’t in it. Heisenberg showed that the observer, in effect, affects that which he is observing, so that some of those old borders and boundaries begin to blur, just as they do in cubism.
[...]
There’s that famous phrase of Gombrich’s about the triumph of Renaissance perspective – ‘We have conquered reality’ – which has always seemed to me such a Pyrrhic victory, again, as if reality were somehow separate from us and the world now hopelessly dull because everything was known and accounted for. These physicists, by contrast, were suggesting a much more dynamic situation, and I realized how deeply what they were saying had to do with how we depict the world, not what we depict but the way we depict it.”

—

CONTACT – ART AS THE OUTER LIMITS OF THE UNIVERSE

The movie ‘Contact’ (1997) explores different aspects of the traditional positions of science and faith; what is faith and how does faith differ from scientific deduction. It cleverly raises a few questions about the validity, or reality, of individual experience versus ‘objective’ experience. The most interesting point, however, is that it (unintentionally?) provides a definition of art, and a way to look at art as playing a fundamental part in the construction of reality.

In the beginning of the movie, young Ellie Arroway is sitting behind a shortwave-radio trying to make contact with other radio enthusiasts. After a brief conversation with a man from Pensacola, Florida (the farthest away from her home so far), she makes a drawing of how she believes it looks like there – a nice beach and some palm trees. According to her caring widower-father it’s ‘a beauty’. Shortly after, her father dies of a heart attack, leaving Ellie calling out for him on her shortwave radio.

Twenty years later, Ellie is a passionate astronomer searching for extraterrestrial life using large radio telescopes. Eventually, she receives a signal, which apparently comes from very far away. Through a series of events, the signal is decoded and a giant ‘machine’ is constructed using the instructions given in the signal. What this machine is supposed to do is unclear, but it is believed that it will create a wormhole allowing ‘the passenger’ to travel to ‘the other end of the universe’. Having been chosen to be the passenger, Ellie takes her place inside the machine and, from her perspective, travels through a series of tunnels of light and eventually awakens on a beach, which closely resembles the drawing of Florida that she made many years earlier. It is there that she meets an entity who looks like her father. Baffled by the scenery and seeing her dead ‘father’, she assumes that her mind ‘has been downloaded’ by the aliens in order to create a non-threatening setting. After a brief talk with the entity she suddenly ‘wakes up’ again in the machine – according to her experience (and the recording equipment she carried) 18 hours later, and according to the onlookers from the machine control centre an instant later.

The final stages of the movie deal with questions concerning the veracity of Ellie’s individual experience (“I cannot explain it, but it was real”) as opposed to the multiple concurring observations made from the control centre (“We didn’t see anything”). Eventually, Ellie gives into the accepted narrative, that “…some things just can’t be explained”. (From a feminist point of view, this is when the strong heroine breaks and becomes vulnerable, and is eventually swept off in a limousine by her male, Christian protector, who only then says, that he “…for one, believes her story.” She’s finally been reigned in.)
At the end of the movie, Ellie tells a group of school kids that nobody knows how big the universe is, but that “…it’s bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of.”

This final statement is a typical example of the hierarchical incongruity between our perception of the subjective experience and ‘objective’ reality. Ellie has just travelled to the far ends of the universe and found it to be a real version of a drawing she herself made, and her conclusion is that the universe is somehow “…bigger than anything anyone has ever dreamed of”!?! It seems to me that she sees exactly what she herself had dreamed, regarding the farthest place from her home, would be like and that, by implication, our dreams and visions define our universe. Even though she applies an explanation that makes sense from her technologically based worldview (“downloading my mind”), the fact remains that she walks in a world constructed by her own brain. Now, normally we dismiss that as a hallucination, but what we then overlook is that everything anyone ever experiences is a construction of the brain. It makes no sense to speak of one experience being a construction of the brain and the other not. It is how we choose to incorporate these experiences into our shared construction of reality that matters.

We are used to thinking of the universe as a pretty solid construction where everything is ordered according to certain deducible laws; given enough time, we will find out all there is to know about the workings of the universe, and consequently our position in it. This is a remainder of Cartesian dualistic thought that, although discredited by science, still seems to determine the everyday worldview of our (Western) culture. It proclaims the division between mind and matter, and thereby reinforces the notion of ‘mind over matter’, which in turn is used to justify the proclaimed superiority of Western culture (as the ‘head’ of the world). However, the same science that was fathered by this dualistic worldview has long since found that the universe is not as ordered as it once was thought. It makes no sense to speak of mind and matter as separate phenomena. Our experience of the world is determined by sensory experience and expectations of this experience, which in turn are determined by the structure of our brain and nervous system. The world we experience (and it makes no sense to speak of any other) is a construction of our brain and extended nervous system, which are extensions of cellular structures working to feed themselves. In order for the brain to maintain an ever-growing metabolism, at some point self-consciousness gradually evolved. This caused a growing division between an ‘inner’ and an ‘outer’ world. Some sensory experiences were interpreted to deal with an ‘outside’ world, some with an ‘inside’ world (to the brain there is no difference). Thus, the experience of ‘me’, of a personality linked to ‘my body’, was gradually born. In order for several ‘me’s’ to share and experience the same reality, we need to be able to speak of the same reality and, consequently, the more complex a society becomes the more the need for ‘objectivity’ (a shared communicable reality) arises. Over time, ‘I’ becomes so ingrained in thought, language, and culture that the division between ‘me inside’ and ‘the world outside’ becomes near impossible to bridge. Eventually this leads to the idea of a world disconnected from our experience of it. Descartes distils this idea in his meditations and proclaims that we cannot trust our senses to show us the ‘real’ world and subsequently he places consciousness (‘I’) ‘above’ a mechanical world. However, as Ellie learns on the other side of the universe, the world is an expression of the brain, our consciousness is a consequence of dealing with the world – the brain is simultaneously the creator of and actor in the world.

In the movie, Ellie finds herself at a point, or in a place, outside of the shared reality. She ‘travels’ in a machine, which tests the outer limits of Einstein’s theories, our shared understanding of the universe. It is simple to speak of infinite mass, the speed of light and creating a singularity in mathematics, but imagine a machine that actually does it. What would it look like if you were transported to a place where time, matter, and energy approach infinity? How would the brain help the consciousness make sense of it? In Ellie’s case, it produces a world, based on a familiar image, related to suitable concepts. Had she never made that drawing, never envisioned what ‘the place farthest away from home’ might look like, she would probably have experienced something entirely different – perhaps, scenery from a science fiction movie, an Escher-inspired world, or nothing at all. However, the conceptual link (or neurological link) between the image and the concept makes it the ‘logical’ choice for her brain. It constructs a world, which allows her to deal with the new reality in which she finds herself, without breaking down the conceptual framework of her everyday reality. This way, her ‘self’ can incorporate the new reality alongside the shared reality.

Nobody follows Ellie through the machine, but imagine her experience had been taken seriously (and while doing so, reflect upon why it was not), the next passenger would then expect to arrive at a beach with palm trees. Perhaps he or she would start to explore the beach further, walking beyond the trees. Upon his or her return, he or she would confirm that he or she had travelled to the ‘same’ beach and thereby begin to establish the shared experience of ‘the beach in space’ as a real place you can travel to. In time, more people would go there and a consensus would arise on how to define ‘the beach’. After a while, it might not look anything like the original beach anymore, perhaps someone would cut down the trees or build a house, start measuring distances, defining ‘natural laws’ etc., but the foundation of the beach would always be Ellie’s first experience, based on her drawing.

Much like the Australian Aboriginals who tell of how their forefathers in the Dreamtime sang songs which solidified and became the world, Ellie’s drawing, or rather the neurological processes (her ‘pre-conscious’ ) which ‘inspired’ the drawing, becomes the new world. Although we do not have access to a machine like Ellie’s, the processes described here can be used to describe the origin of the foundations of our world as well. From the caves of Lascaux to the perspectival visions of the Renaissance or the definition of Cyberspace by William Gibson, the foundation of our shared reality is an artistic vision, an artist’s rendering of pre-conscious neurological processes. The scientific goal is the exploration of this rendition – how does it work, how can it best be described, what does it do, and how can we best use it?

Art plays a much more fundamental part in the construction of reality than we usually accredit it with. Art is not something that develops in a society as a means of ‘exploring emotions’, analyzing current political trends, or keeping the masses content. Without art, there is no society. It is neither passive nor descriptive, it is active in its creation, and it is literally creative. Not as an exercise in metaphor or symbolism, but the concrete experience we know as reality. Art enables the construction of a shared reality, which can be used as foundation for the world and eventually, civilization. It is not at odds with science, it is the precursor to science and the scientific worldview – as Ellie stammers when she travels through the wormhole, ‘No, no words can describe this…they should have sent a poet’.

What she does not realize is that they did.

—-

1. I use the term pre-conscious not in the Freudian sense, but as a term for the neurological fact that e.g. decisions are shown to be already decided upon in the brain before the decision becomes conscious. We may think ‘we’ decide but our consciousness merely acts out decisions taken at a ‘deeper’ level of the brain, the ‘pre-conscious’.