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Sonic acts festival XII
“The twelfth edition of the Sonic Acts festival is devoted to The Cinematic Experience and incorporates an international conference, a wide range of concerts and performances, an exhibition and a diverse programme of films. The central topic will be how the medium of cinema can be used as a means to make us conscious of our own physical experiences and realities. The programme focuses on the rich history of the cinematic experience, from magic lanterns, colour organs and zoetropes to experience machines and immersive environments. Sonic Acts will also peer into the future. Will cinema distance itself from narrative in the near future? What is the prospect for celluloid? And what role will sensory deprivation play in future cinema?”
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Gestalt psychology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gestalt psychology
Gestalt psychology is a theory of mind and brain that proposes that the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies; or, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. The classic Gestalt example is a soap bubble, whose spherical shape is not defined by a rigid template, or a mathematical formula, but rather it emerges spontaneously by the parallel action of surface tension acting at all points in the surface simultaneously. This is in contrast to the “atomistic” principle of operation of the digital computer, where every computation is broken down into a sequence of simple steps, each of which is computed independently of the problem as a whole. The Gestalt effect refers to the form-forming capability of our senses, particularly with respect to the visual recognition of figures and whole forms instead of just a collection of simple lines and curves.
The theoretical principles are the following
Principle of Totality – The conscious experience must be considered globally (by taking into account all the physical and mental aspects of the individual simultaneously) because the nature of the mind demands that each component be considered as part of a system of dynamic relationships.
Principle of psychophysical isomorphism – A correlation exists between conscious experience and cerebral activity.
Based on the principles above the following methodological principles are defined:
Phenomenon Experimental Analysis – In relation to the Totality Principle any psychological research should take as a starting point phenomena and not be solely focused on sensory qualities.
Biotic Experiment – The School of Gestalt established a need to conduct real experiments which sharply contrasted with and opposed classic laboratory experiments. This signified experimenting in natural situations, developed in real conditions, in which it would be possible to reproduce, with higher fidelity, what would be habitual for a subject.
Properties
The key principles of Gestalt systems are emergence, reification, multistability, and invariance.
Emergence
Emergence is demonstrated by the perception of the Dog Picture, which depicts a Dalmatian dog sniffing the ground in the shade of overhanging trees. The dog is not recognized by first identifying its parts (feet, ears, nose, tail, etc.), and then inferring the dog from those component parts. Instead, the dog is perceived as a whole, all at once. However, this is a description of what occurs in vision and not an explanation. Gestalt theory does not explain how the percept of a dog emerges.
Reification
Reification is the constructive or generative aspect of perception, by which the experienced percept contains more explicit spatial information than the sensory stimulus on which it is based.For instance, a triangle will be perceived in picture A, although no triangle has actually been drawn. In pictures B and D the eye will recognise disparate shapes as “belonging” to a single shape, in C a complete three-dimensional shape is seen, where in actuality no such thing is drawn.Reification can be explained by progress in the study of illusory contours, which are treated by the visual system as “real” contours.
Multistability
Multistability (or multistable perception) is the tendency of ambiguous perceptual experiences to pop back and forth unstably between two or more alternative interpretations. This is seen for example in the Necker cube, and in Rubin’s Figure / Vase illusion shown to the right. Other examples include the ‘three-pronged widget’ and artist M.C. Escher’s artwork and the appearance of flashing marquee lights moving first one direction and then suddenly the other. Again, Gestalt does not explain how images appear multistable, only that they do.
Invariance
Invariance is the property of perception whereby simple geometrical objects are recognized independent of rotation, translation, and scale; as well as several other variations such as elastic deformations, different lighting, and different component features. For example, the objects in A in the figure are all immediately recognized as the same basic shape, which are immediately distinguishable from the forms in B. They are even recognized despite perspective and elastic deformations as in C, and when depicted using different graphic elements as in D. Computational theories of vision, such as those by David Marr have had more success in explaining how objects are classified.Web-based forums and email providers rely on invariance of human perception to prevent automated bots from exploiting the services. A CAPTCHA test presents a distorted image of letters and numbers, not readable by computers, and prompts user to correctly type the string. Emergence, reification, multistability, and invariance are not separable modules to be modeled individually, but they are different aspects of a single unified dynamic mechanism.
Prägnanz
The fundamental principle of gestalt perception is the law of prägnanz (German for conciseness) which says that we tend to order our experience in a manner that is regular, orderly, symmetric, and simple. Gestalt psychologists attempt to discover refinements of the law of prägnanz, and this involves writing down laws which hypothetically allow us to predict the interpretation of sensation, what are often called “gestalt laws”. These include
Law of Closure — The mind may experience elements it does not perceive through sensation, in order to complete a regular figure (i.e., to increase regularity).
Law of Similarity — The mind groups similar elements into collective entities or totalities. This similarity might depend on relationships of form, color, size, or brightness.
Law of Proximity — Spatial or temporal proximity of elements may induce the mind to perceive a collective or totality.
Law of Symmetry (Figure ground relationships)— Symmetrical images are perceived collectively, even in spite of distance.
Law of Continuity — The mind continues visual, auditory, and kinetic patterns.
Law of Common Fate — Elements with the same moving direction are perceived as a collective or unit. Gestalt laws continue to be play an important role in current psychological research on vision. For example, the object-based attention hypothesis states that elements in a visual scene are first grouped according to Gestalt principles; consequently, further attentional resources can be allocated to particular objects.The Gestalt laws are used in user interface design. The law of similarity and law of proximity can for example be used as guides for placing radio buttons. Gestalt psychology also has applications in computer vision for trying to make computers “see” the same things as humans do.
Criticism
In some scholarly communities (for example, cognitive psychology and computational neuroscience), Gestalt theories of perception are criticized for being descriptive rather than explanatory in nature. For this reason, they are viewed by some as redundant or uninformative. For example, Bruce, Green & Georgeson conclude the following regarding Gestalt theory’s influence on the study of visual perception:“The physiological theory of the Gestaltists has fallen by the wayside, leaving us with a set of descriptive principles, but without a model of perceptual processing. Indeed, some of their “laws” of perceptual organisation today sound vague and inadequate. What is meant by a “good” or “simple” shape, for example?” In other fields, such as perceptual psychology and visual display design, Gestalt principles continue to be used and discussed today as a predictive model of human behaviour.
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From the road
This is a photoreportage about the landscape perceived from a moving car. The movement of the unrolling landscape is too fast for the eye and its perception becomes blured. Our usual landmarks disapear and the elements we see lose their usual signification with the increasing speed and distance, they become part of a day dream.
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Under the city’s skin
This is a photoreportage on a few spots in the city were we can feel its evolution in time and see its many components exposed. The temporary destructions allows us to get in touch with the evolutive aspect of a city regenerating its tissues. It gives me the feeling of being in a surgery block looking in the intimacy of an open body, its skin ripped of. And until it is closed again we can have an eye on its fragile layers.
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VVVV
“vvvv is a toolkit for real time video synthesis. It is designed to facilitate the handling of large media environments with physical interfaces, real-time motion graphics, audio and video that can interact with many users simultaneously.
vvvv uses a visual programming interface. Therefore it provides a graphical programming language for easy prototyping and development.
vvvv is real time. where many other languages have distinct modes for building and running programs, vvvv only has one mode – runtime.”
With the VVVV tool, I created a program that could take snapshots of a moving 3D system and store them in a matrix. My idea was to confront different perspective of a same evolving system.
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Research proposal
At the end of this year, I will make a research proposal. Here is a very first draft I made for Edith Doove’s workshop.
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Piet Mondrian
I admire Mondrian working techniques and trajectory finding the right balance between methodical research and irrational intuition. He follows his own coherent quest but is curious of all that happens around him. He is a pioneer of leeving figuration for abstraction but doesn’t stop there. That is why I presented him in Christiane Wittig’s workshop as a significant influence in my thinking about my work.
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MAXXI musée: Zaha Hadid à Rome
”The Italian museum of Culture realises a new museal pole for the XXIe century arts in Rome. This museum will be the first national institution that will show contemporary culture in its more various shapes.The new building is the result of an international competition won by the anglo-iraki architect Zaha Hadid (Pritzker Price 2004). The collaboration with the “Centre National pour la ville, l’architecture et le paysage” (CIVA) is the occasion to show this ambitious architectural project in Brussels.”
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