design and neuroscience - mimesis

DESIGN AND NEUROSCIENCE#3 - MIMESIS

Impressionists did not draw the border of things, claiming that lines don’t exist in nature and eyes only see stains.

True that lines don’t exist, but the brain sees them, actually the brain seems to be built exactly to recognise the border of things.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, La Grenouillere (1869)

RYAN AND SCHWARTZ EXPERIMENTThey asked to recognise these 4 images.

The comics drawing (4) was recognised in the shortest time,followed by the line drawing (3).

Linear drawings are easier to recognise than a picture since they suppress all the tonal information and give to the retina an image pre digested.

Comics in addition have a high level of conventionality which makes the recognition immediate.

1 2 3 4

“We can only see what we learned to see, an innocent eye doesn’t see anything.

[..] Reading an image, like the receptionof any other message, is dependent on prior

knowledge of possibilities; we can only recognize what we know.”

Ernst Gombrich

REALISM VS CONVENTION

Native Africans, when asked what the man was doing, would say he was about to spear the elephant, ignoring the depth cues.

Hudson also observed that pre-school western children also tended to make similar judgments.

HUDSON EXPERIMENT:

Not to forget that in most of the cultures, also in the European Middle Age and in children drawings,

“bigger” means more important, not “closer”.

Duccio di Buoninsegna, Maestà with Twenty Angels and Nineteen Saints, (1311)

Some people claimed that it was the clear continuity of the natural visible, others that it was absolutely conventional.

Both the aspects are true, the perspective of a rinascimental painting follows a precise cultural code, on the other hand has been tested that between two cubes drawn on a prospective plan a monkey

would try to grab the closest one.

EUCLIDEAN PERSPECTIVE

The European painting prefers the three-quarter view.Hands and feet - especially - are always drawn in a way that all the 5 fingers and toes are visible.

Analysing frames frome a footage only few will be showing all the fingers and body parts in general.

I.E.The cognitive type of the cat includes the outline, but also the characterial characteristics, the agility,

the movement, the smell, the moral qualities that we attribute and so on.For crossed similarities that we can track down the cat elegance just from the outline or maybe we can see

in an unrecognisable doodle the sudden movement of a cat.

COGNITIVE TYPESUmberto Eco talked about cognitive types, a representation

of both visual traits and non-visual ones.

Which figure seems more the cognitive type of the elephant?

Photography

Pictogram

Engraving

Stylisation

Xilography

Toy

Charles Peirce (1839-1914) proposed to call icons those signs (signifiers) that resemble or imitate the signified (recognizably looking, sounding,

feeling, tasting or smelling like it)But who can establish what a motivated link is, and so similar looking to the signified?

We do not have all the same idea of similarity. For an “x” person we build a different model: in my type the fundamental

trait is the red hair, in yours the curve of the jaw, etc.It often happens that looking at the pictures of known people we indentify grades of similarity,

till the point to say “here he doesn’t like him”.

Marilyn Monroe, refused many pictures from a sitting with Bert Stern, since she was not looking Marilyn enough.

Indeed in many pictures the lady don’t look even close to the Monroe.Stars are photogenic because we know only the selected shots, following an idea chosen by the media.

To choose a pictures among many is to turn it into a sign. The picture is raw so far there is no selection of the shots taken.

The optic iconism dot per dot is not warrant of similaritysince the on-off cells have to agree with other cells.

In her last apparition (The Misfits by John Huston), Marilyn with some wrinkles looked barely like the cognitive type that Hollywood had chosen for her.

Pictures have two codes: 1- choice of the shot

2- light

With the flash of a passport photo we all look like criminals.

A similarity is not enough to do communication.We can recognise the similarity of an image with a thing,

but that doesn’t say what the image “means”. Someone outside of the western society would recognise the cup as one of those seen in the kitchen,

but they would not get that it is a sign for the cafeteria.

In 1935 Otto Neurath proposed the Isotype system stands for International System of Typographical Picture Education

The idea behind it was that of an utopian, ancient, universal language, but those symbols are a system often darker than the official writings and, like for the writing, they have to be learned anyway.

Conventionality level is maximum in comics, they are more a kind of writing than a kind of painting.

In fact, most of the people who don’t read comincs appear to have difficulties to understand them, since they’re not “inside the code”.

A=

Carl Barks Model Sheet That’s not a depository of images, rather a dictionary: they are the sign of a writing and, like in every writing,

the differential value is what counts, that the “very sad” face is well distincted from the “desperate” one.

Emojis are intuitive and don’t need explanation...Are we sure?

NUMBER OF PEOPLE THAT GAVE EACH

RANKING

NEGATIVE NEUTRAL POSITIVE

People’s Emoticon/Sentiment Rankings for

BORDERS AREN’T IN THE NATUREthe brain can see the borders even when there aren’t

The triangle shape seems brighter than the background (though luminance is in reality homogeneous) and seems

to be closer to the viewer than the inducers.We see the triangle just because it’s more likely that there will be a white triangle rather than 3 aligned pac-mans.

KANIZSA’S TRIANGLE

An illusory contour is perceived via radial line segments.

EHRENSTEIN ILLUSION

THE NIDO COLLECTION LOGO

Illusions in line with the Gestlat Psychology.We see things all together, rather than as a sum of parts, the illusionistic contours would be the natural tendency

of the mind to fill the shapes closing them.

Has been found that some brain cells activates to see ghost contours.There are many scenarios where we still don’t know anything. The world seems to be made up by the brain which

apparently is predisposed to see things that there aren’t.

This makes us think how difficult it is to work on artificial intelligence,

how to build machines which cannot see?But to see what? and how?

COMING NEXT#4 - STARTING TO SEE