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Google image search: “brain tissue”

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 01:44:01 -0400

Google image search: “brain tissue”

Los Angeles. Spatial relations, including occlusion, between...

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:26:12 -0500

Los Angeles. Spatial relations, including occlusion, between objects depicted with radically different drawing systems.

Rory’s Kitchen, Pasadena, CA. Mimesis for deception, not...

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 11:16:04 -0500

Rory’s Kitchen, Pasadena, CA. Mimesis for deception, not communication.

"It would be interesting if some real authority investigated carefully the part which memory plays in..."

Sat, 05 Jan 2013 14:39:18 -0500

“It would be interesting if some real authority investigated carefully the part which memory plays in painting. We look at the object with an intent regard, then at the palette, and thirdly at the canvas. The canvas receives a message dispatched usually a few seconds before from the natural object. But it has come through a post office en route. It has been transmitted in code. It has been turned from light into paint. It reaches the canvas a cryptogram. Not until it has been placed in its correct relation to everything else that is on the canvas can it be deciphered, is its meaning apparent, is it translated once again from mere pigment into light. And the light this time is not of Nature but of Art.”

- Winston Churchill, Painting as Pastime, 1950

Roman Vase, Getty Villa, CA. Ancient line drawing; filled-in...

Fri, 23 Nov 2012 13:16:20 -0500

Roman Vase, Getty Villa, CA. Ancient line drawing; filled-in colors consistently disambiguate between foreground and background surfaces.

"One of my pet speculations is that philosophy will also become visual in this century. Objective IQ..."

Sun, 11 Nov 2012 23:13:00 -0500

“

One of my pet speculations is that philosophy will also become visual in this century. Objective IQ scores have been rising three points a decade in all industrialised nations (when they are not normed by decade). The discoverer of this effect, the philosopher James Flynn, shows that the gains have been greatest for tests that emphasise visual thinking such as the Raven’s Progressive Matrices. He traces the rise in IQ to a more visually stimulating environment.

I suspect this is why my students can understand Ned Block’s article about mirror reversal. Block advised me not to use it in class because a large percentage of his colleagues complained that they got lost in the mental rotations. But I found that some of my most inarticulate students started to speak up. Philosophy is prejudiced in favour of the discursive and needs to open to pictorial thinkers.

”

- Roy Sorensen (h/t Alex Morgan)

Plastic food displays, Little Tokyo, LA. These 3D...

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 20:04:05 -0500

Plastic food displays, Little Tokyo, LA. These 3D representations reduplicate the size, external shape, and visual appearance (modulo some shininess) of their referents, but not internal features.

A working model by my father’s firm, Greenberg Associate...

Mon, 29 Oct 2012 14:58:25 -0400

A working model by my father’s firm, Greenberg Associate Architects. The contour lines reveal a non-trivial projection from the represented 3D space to the 3D representation itself.

Two conventions for representing a line which extends...

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 16:15:53 -0400

Two conventions for representing a line which extends perpendicularly from a surface parallel to the picture plane in depicted space. (From Wikipedia on vectors.)

Venice, CA. The anatomy of an arrow, writ large: (1) the tail,...

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 16:26:15 -0400

Venice, CA. The anatomy of an arrow, writ large: (1) the tail, which determines the path of the arrow; (2) the head, which assigns a direction to the arrow’s path.

Perkins Home Center, West Chesterfield, NH. The central image of...

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 21:33:47 -0400

Perkins Home Center, West Chesterfield, NH. The central image of the house is tagged with call-out boxes which themselves contain tagged depictions of details of the house.

Bamboo grove warning, Huntington Library, LA. In this picture,...

Sun, 16 Sep 2012 13:27:46 -0400

Bamboo grove warning, Huntington Library, LA. In this picture, a single geometrical space is used to represent the disjunction of two generic activities: the sign does merely ban writing and carving, it bans writing or carving. But exactly what content is contributed by the image itself (minus the circle-slash symbol)?

Next Stage balcony, Putney, VT. More explanation hierarchies:...

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 13:58:00 -0400

Next Stage balcony, Putney, VT. More explanation hierarchies: “ANGLED STEP” explains “CAUTION!”; the picture of the man falling explains why “ANGLED STEP” explains “CAUTION!”.

Sidewalk stencil, Venice, CA. Hierarchical explanation...

Fri, 14 Sep 2012 15:00:25 -0400

Sidewalk stencil, Venice, CA. Hierarchical explanation relations: “DRAINS TO OCEAN” explains “NO DUMPING”; the picture of the dolphin explains why ”DRAINS TO OCEAN” explains “NO DUMPING”.

From the bill at Asahi Ramen, LA. A guide for waiters: iconic...

Sat, 07 Jul 2012 00:12:44 -0400

From the bill at Asahi Ramen, LA. A guide for waiters: iconic position of symbols indicates the ideal place to serve from, and the order in which to serve.

Screen shot from Cary Huang’s amazing interactive visual...

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 17:25:31 -0400

Screen shot from Cary Huang’s amazing interactive visual demonstration of The Scale of the Universe. This make it painfully clear how narrow a region of the universe’s scale bandwidth our hopes and dreams are directed towards.

A trans-temporal color histogram of Teenage Mutant Ninja...

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 12:08:35 -0400

A trans-temporal color histogram of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: each thin spike represents the color distribution of one frame. Image by Jordan DeLong, who shared these graphs at the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image annual conference in NY.

Venice beach. Indices of the day.

Fri, 08 Jun 2012 13:32:33 -0400

Venice beach. Indices of the day.

Collaborative representation. Photo by Jessica Rett.

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 17:42:18 -0400

Collaborative representation. Photo by Jessica Rett.

"For this is a commerce of light, which could give to us at once their work of thousands of years and..."

Mon, 04 Jun 2012 02:14:25 -0400

“For this is a commerce of light, which could give to us at once their work of thousands of years and render ours to them, and to double so to speak our true wealth for one and the other.”

- Leibniz on scholarly exchange with China, 1697