Opsis

Thoughts, process, and inspiration for BFA thesis by Jordan Rundle for Cornish College of the Arts.

[jordanrundle]

Documentation video for my BFA degree project <i>Opsis</i> up until May 25, 2013 at Cornish College of the Arts.

[jrundlebfa]

Oh hey this actually happened!

[jrundlebfa]

On into February...

Been a bit... plenty of new stuff swarming about. But since you're not here to read my babbling, some images:

A quick comp of some logotype; I think I'm going to stick with this title for the show. In Greek, "opsis" relates variously to seeing and perceiving in general and to the visual elements of theater, and can be thought of as meaning "spectacle." From this the English word "optic" is predictably derived. For the actual logo, I plan to have similar holographic material laser cut and adhered directly to the wall.

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I don't like to boast, but I do enjoy tooting my own horn: a gif I created as part of my project was included in a year-end roundup of art gifs by Christian Petersen for Société Perrier. I've been a bit in awe of the number 1 spot holder Laura Brothers's work for a while, she is doing the whole internet art thing better than anyone else I've seen, and it's an emerging genre which I have a pretty serious interest in. Also, Joe Waine is a friend of mine and Cornish alum. It's an honor, but I bring it up here because it's things like these that build confidence in my direction—I just want to make stuff that people will really enjoy on any level!

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Continuing with my stereogram project... Now that I have gotten a handle on pattern making for the SIRDS program, I've moved on to the beginning phases of creating my actual models for the depth map information. Once again, I'm using the trusty Blender program to do so.

The graphics I'm creating are based conceptually upon different visual ideas, especially those involving binocular fusion and "depth" as a literal and figurative driver. Also interested in hidden information and illusion. 

This one is a nod to impossible objects and M.C. Escher. It is a play on the iconic blivet illusion...

The thing is meant to be a joke of sorts on several levels... in the original illusion, it is the very fact that the image is represented in lines that lends it its irreconcilable effect. Attempting to create a 3D model out of it is inherently futile and serves best as a commentary on the brain's power to fill in information to understand an object in three dimensions, which is a parallel quality of both stereograms and impossible object images.

This one is heavier on the concept side of things. It's another little visual joke pertaining to stereopsis, or the "third eye" through which we perceive the two disparate signals coming from our left and right eyes. Also, the third eye is a deeply spiritual idea, and while I don't have much knowledge in that realm, it's a duality which is funny to me. I think I shall call it "Third Eye Blind."

In creating the actual models, I have to do a lot of tweaking to get the depth map to look right, and the models themselves can look really wacky from any angle except that of the camera's view.

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Since apparently everything is funny to me, I'll include these pictures:

This an artistic visualization of one way to think about the "homunculus" in context of sensory perception. The features are scaled up/down based on the mind's awareness/prioritization of local sensory input. Very grotesque.

...and this is a Cartesian Theater, an antiquated and fundamentally flawed model for cyclopean cognition and another homunculus. Hang in there, lil guy!

[7north]

Our own Natalia Ilyin in Communication Arts!

With a shout out to Cornish students…

Check it out!

http://www.commarts.com/columns/typeblots.html

[jordanrundle]

Stereogramming

[jrundlebfa]

Currently developing graphics/concepts for a significant piece in my show. I'm hand-binding a coffee table-sized book of artsy single image stereograms (popularized by the Magic Eye book series) of my own creation. I've long been infatuated with stereography, and in fact the creation of stereo images was one of my earliest ideas in thinking about my degree project. Stereograms appeal to me in context of my larger narrative because they convey the brain's processes of interpreting depth via binocular vision and its powers of identification—anyone capable of revealing the hidden graphic in such an image knows that its appearance is very much unlike anything seen in real space, and yet via the illusion of depth and separation, is usually easy to describe as a familiar object: a horse, an apple, a heart.

I'm currently strengthening my knowledge of stereography through reading Bela Julesz's Foundations of Cyclopean Perception, a seminal book which focuses heavily on the subject of binocular vision. The book has also bled into my project on an aesthetic level, with its stark black-and-white SIRDS (Single Image Random Dot Stereograms) and beautiful construction.

Below is an early stereogram comp: the depth map (the greyscale 3D object which the algorithm uses to render the final image) isn't mine, and at this point I'm only attempting to get a handle on my pattern making. It's a relatively successful attempt, but there are a number of aspects of the process I plan to refine.

[jrundlebfa]

Miniproject 4: Saccade

click here, tumbletards

This project attempts to inject a little interactive fun into my experiments. I suppose it's framed as a puzzle game, though there's nothing difficult about it and it is very short. Mostly, I just wanted to create a bunch of revolving objects using my aesthetic, because I think they look cool. But the project goes deeper: I'm trying to demonstrate the vast powers of the mind to identify objects even at a highly abstracted level (look closely at any object and you will see that they resemble random dot patterns; some, like the rose, barely connect to make a shape at all!). Further, by juxtaposing these objects which may or may not have any inherent relation, I'm forcing the mind to make subconscious judgements about the images' roles in a system and as individual representations. Association and pattern recognition are two of the most basic elements of visual cognition. I hope to develop this game to require more layers of thinking.

I used an open-source 3D content creation program called Blender and Creative Commons-licensed models to create the initial renders, then edited them into Photoshop to create the continuous gifs.

[jrundlebfa]

Miniproject 3: Faces

[jrundlebfa]

A few businessmen

[jrundlebfa]

A classmate referred me to an intriguing hypothesis in studies of face cognition called the “uncanny valley.” The term refers to a repeatedly observed phenomenon involving study subjects’ reactions to different faces ranging from total human likeness to faces totally inhuman. It is found that at the precipice of total human likeness—when a face almost resembles a human one—there is a statistically massive drop in positive reaction. Simply, people tend to be deeply perturbed, more so than anywhere else on the scale, by faces that approximate human form but barely miss it. At the very least, this is testament to our incredibly fine-tuned mental processes.

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I keep coming across this image:

Purportedly, these illustrations represent "ideal" human faces (female and male) based on geometry derived from the golden ratio. To begin with, I personally think the faces look sort of awkward and feel racially biased, and anyway I think that trying to overlay the golden ratio on everything is ultimately a hollow and silly pursuit. But they look pretty funny.

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This file has been kicking around my computer for a while...

Mesmerizing. Finally found the source:

amalgamation by dunun on Vimeo

[jrundlebfa]

Thoughts on the face: studying for miniproject 3

After my amusing failures in attempting to apply my "geons" to construct a human face, I decided to pursue the idea of face recognition a little deeper...

Last year, as part of their "7 Billion" series, National Geographic published the results of a study exploring the concept of "the world's most typical person." The magazine presented a number of easily digestible findings—that the average person has a cell phone but no bank account, for example—but what I find most compelling, and the reason I remember it, is their exploration of the typical human face. After discerning that the largest cultural group is the Han Chinese, and further that there are slightly more males than females in the world, the researchers composited 190,000 photos of Han men to approximate the most typical face in the world. I thought it to be a fascinating pursuit, and the image they came up with is quite striking:

Aesthetically, I'm drawn to its diffuse nature and the piercing sameness of the eyes, but more than that I think it touches on some thoughts on archetypical forms which I'm grappling with in my studies of visual cognition. For example, if this is the most typical face (at least for a Chinese person), does that make it the most easily recognizable face on a cognitive level? How does my cultural bias influence my perception of this face? Does it really say much about an "ideal" face? And finally, I wonder the following: what exactly about a face makes it so immediately recognizable?

If you have an appetite for kinetic type—which I don't, sorry motion students—you can watch the video I'm referring to here:  http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/the-magazine/the-magazine-latest/ngm-7billion-typical/

With these questions in mind, I sought out a little hard science. I rather easily came upon a very helpful initiation (a.k.a. "For Dummies" version) into face recognition, a study called "The Cognitive Neuroscience of Face Processing: An Introduction". Among countless incredible developments in the field, I gleaned a few basic understandings: that face processing is, on some level, a specialized mechanism in the brain. To quote (emphasis added):

The impression gained from the papers discussed above is that cognitive neuroscientists have been generally successful at identifying the neural substrates involved in extracting the different types of information conveyed by faces. One conclusion that may be drawn from these studies is that each of these neural substrates are face-specific processing components that together form a system which is itself face-specific…[a study by] Tong et. al.…shows that this area is activated by a wide variety of face stimuli (including cartoon faces and cat faces) compared to other nonface objects.

I have also read, in David Marr's seminal book on the subject Vision, that there may be a number of special neural processes for different objects, most centering understandably around human features. One such theory is the existence of so-called "Hand-detectors" and is helpful in forming a basis for general cognitive processes of vision. Here's an illustrated explanation:  http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~vgg/research/hands/index.html

I don't pretend to really grasp what these experts are talking about, but the ideas do help me along with forming a design-based understanding of cognition. Clearly, the biggest lesson for designers is simply that faces are incredibly powerful and emotive visual elements. I plan to make some studies to that effect...

[jrundlebfa]

Miniproject 2: Geons

[jrundlebfa]

Miniproject 1: Processing

The more I read into the field of visual cognition, the more I find that research is quite often oriented toward the pursuit of computer vision. A foundational hypothesis in the field is that if researchers can replicate, mimic, or otherwise transfer some of the currently intangible processes which constitute vision in a computer environment, then we can build a more complete understanding of our own brains. Concrete results have proven elusive.

For my first miniproject, I wanted to think simply about some of the ways that the brain might interpret forms given constantly shifting input. Motion tracking software seemed a good place to start, but as that is outside my area of expertise, I needed to reach out to someone who knew a thing or two about live video manipulation. 

I've been following the work of local designers and artists Christian J Petersen and Ben Van Citters, who worked until this year as Dumb Eyes and now collaborate as I Want You. I met the two through a mutual friend at the inaugural night of Electric Penetration, an audiovisual art/music night on Capitol Hill. I knew that Ben had been doing a lot of trippy motion tracking visualizations, most notably for this year's Bumbershoot, and I asked him about his methods. He directed me to a program called Processing. The program is a versatile script library useful for creating complex interactive environments with minimal effort (using "minimal" relatively). Processing excels at manipulating camera input, and comes loaded with a number of examples. I found a few presets which are interesting for my purposes. 

"Frame Differencing" analyzes each pixel in the video array and compares it to the same pixel of the previous frame. If the difference in hue and brightness exceeds a certain threshold, the pixel color is shown on the array. If the pixel does not change much from frame to frame, it becomes black. The result is a fairly effective method of detecting motion over a still background. Shown below is a bit of the code making this happen:

...and here are a couple gifs demonstrating the visuals.

Another method of differentiating forms in an image is known as "Brightness Thresholding." Pixels are changed either to black or white depending on brightness (<50% black, >50% white). There is evidence that the brain relies on a similar method for some tasks.

...and an example.

[jrundlebfa]

Project proposal, draft 1

Sure to change, but here's what I got. Constantly struggling against overwriting.

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ABSTRACT

[Title] explores the mental processes that create meaning from visual stimulus. Considering first the fundamental mechanics of perception, the project follows the cognitive path to understanding and identifies the elemental roles of association and pattern recognition in building awareness. I am especially interested in the relationship between raw, quantifiable information (what is given) and the generation of subjective connotations (what is received). In working dually with optics and cognition [Title] create a dialogue between the empirical phenomena of sensory perception and the human mind's vast powers of synthesis. Inviting initial inspection through stark, simple graphics and entertaining illusions, the viewer finds ever more layers of conceptual depth as the focus shifts from the dry science of optics to more philosophical matters of belief systems, daily experience, and memory. The project offers the viewer an introspective look at what it means to see and what it means to know.

PROJECT PROPOSAL

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? —T.S. Eliot, from The Rock (1934)

Meaning exists at the confluence of perception and cognition. What the human mind understands to be “real” is deeply removed from the raw information received by the senses, which at their most basic level are data gathering mechanisms. The brain receives, processes, and analyzes sensory input on a continual basis, and at every point in these concurrent actions searches for connections and associations that it can identify as being of significance. There exist multiple fundamental viewpoints from which one can understand these phenomena. There is foremost the scientific perspective, which endeavors to map the functions of the brain computationally, as an electrician studies a skyscraper. But to my mind such a deductive approach, though appealing and worthy, is incomplete — while neuroscience will undoubtedly discover the specific synaptic channels that identify, say, the visual form of the human hand, the lab may never approach the sublimity of daily experience, of memory and creative thought. [Title] asks: what does it mean to know? Utilizing the precepts of visual perception as an analog for perception in general, the project first presents some of the basic optical processes that make vision possible and extends these ideas to the more onerous task of creating understanding. Revealed is a hierarchical system of cognition which exists beyond the eye, beginning with basic computations and moving through a set of successive “levels” which arrive at an ultimate purpose —awareness. Of course, the buck doesn’t stop here... any identification carries with it a lifetime of context and belief through which the information is filtered. [Title] explores the universal but deeply subjective role of connotation and association in establishing meaning. In one example, basic forms resembling many possible objects are shown in an array, and it is the viewer’s role to connect and come to understand the imagery. Keep in mind that this process requires no prompt or goading — it occurs naturally and before any prejudice or inhibition can take place. With this in mind, I will explore the possibility of subverting reinforced channels of cognition established in the mind, conveying personal meaning and significance where there is none, or embedding information in apparent randomness. Overall, I hope to leave the viewer with some heuristic sense of their own sensing, and challenge them to question their automatic modes of creating their world and their place in it.

[jrundlebfa]

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

Excerpt from The Rock (1934) by T. S. Eliot

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A few weeks before the onset of my final year of design studies at Cornish, I traveled to Denver, Colorado, my hometown, to visit my family. I’d spent the bulk of my summer vacation clocking day job hours at Easy Street and working on freelance projects, purging the mental clutter which had built up in the corners of my student-mind. I was in an odd sort of limbo—the majority of my academic career was then behind me, but its most significant challenge, the year-defining BFA project, loomed ever closer. I felt charged, and anticipated the week of relaxation to be all I needed to dive headfirst into my studies.

Making our way through the 45-minute drive from DIA to the city, my father inquired about my current thoughts on my big project, and I was eager to offer them. For me, the reality of this final and most challenging task was no longer spectral; I was fortunate to spend a huge amount of time mingling with the senior class in my previous year, and even before that the seeds of my thesis were already germinating. The previous summer, I had soliloquized my vague premise to two rather baffled parents, and I could have been heard proclaiming,

“My project is all about wonder”

and

“I want to encode meaning in apparent randomness”

and

“It’ll be pretty trippy and confusing.”

In the intervening months, I had done some deeper thinking about my project. I knew that, at its core, it was about sensory input and the ways the brain interprets raw data (specifically visual) to create context, meaning, and a mental formulation of "reality" in general. My earlier ideas had centered around illusion, distraction, and misperception to communicate fallacies in interpretation, but I had shifted toward a more benevolent approach. I thought, "Why present my findings on visual cognition through subversion when I can do so instructively?" I didn't want to give up on the possibilities for social commentary that information manipulation promised, but I knew that I would have a stronger piece if I pulled from hard science and existing mental models.

As I did my best to explain my thought process to my dad, I could tell that I was dealing with more fleshed-out ideas. He, a critical and systemic thinker, began to connect some of the implications of my ethereal thoughts, and unsurprisingly brought them to a philosophical perspective. My father is a middle school principle, and is continually observing an ever greater mass of information bombarding the minds of his tech-fixated students. He worries that all this input is dangerous in that it distracts from the oft-neglected act of simply being, of perceiving purely and without conceit. To this end, he offered a quote to me (quotes are among his favorite hobbies), an excerpt from a T. S. Eliot poem entitled The Rock, which I have included as an epigraph to this post. I thought it a wonderful encapsulation of the modern condition, and a beautiful counterpoint to a more objective analysis of optical phenomena. I want to know how we see, how we know, and how both of these processes can be both augmented and jammed.

Having scribbled a set of new thoughts in my notebook, I felt a renewed optimism. I could now combine my high-minded ambitions with practical pursuits. I was ready to attack the year head-on…after a few homemade meals on the couch.