GESTALT of the image and the Mind

Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Window, 1920 (MoMa, NY)

In Leon Batista Alberti 's treatise De Pictura (1435), where he discusses for the first time in western literature the concept of optical perspective, he mentions, in relation to art that, "it is impossible to take anything away from it or add anything to it, without impairing the beauty of the whole."

Illustration for Book 2, p.15

More recently, the American poet William Carlos Williams, talks about what he calls action “pruned to a perfect economy”, and goes on:

" To make two bald statements: there is nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant. Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. In a poem this movement is distinguished in each case by the character of the speech from which it arises."

I believe the same applies to the concept of design, which is, like Williams says, a well tuned machine, made of all the necessary elements but nothing more, since, by logic, anything not essential would be taking the place of what is. A place where form and function are interchangeable and indiscernible from each other.

Alberti said, in his famous visualization of painting as a window that the observer, from a fixed point of view looks 'outside'. The role of the artist/designer, is to establish the continuity between those two seemingly separate worlds, breaking so to speak, the metaphorical glass that stands between them.

Now, Alberti was not refering to the surface of the painting as a whole as the "window", but rather to the square, quadrangolo de retti angoli, that you draw as a boundary, limit or predetermination of the shape, size, proportion etc where the outside will be seen, like a hole punched in the very fabric of reality.

I only wanted to share these thoughts to make you think about that window, about the possibility to break it, once you know it is there. Is it possible to maintain the coherence or continuity without it? What happens in our media world where the view is fragmented or distributed around millions of tiny windows that together are more than the sum of their parts?



All images, except Duchamp's Window are from The Painting of Leone Battista Alberti facsimile that you can find at the Science, Engineering and Technology Linda Hall Library

Borgia

After watching the interview with Tom Fontana in class i decided to go home and watch Borgia. I was especially excited to watch this show because i have always been a huge fan of film's or television series' that are based on historical events, especially those that take place a very long time ago so naturally Borgia was right up my alley. While i was watching the first episode i thought it got off to a slow start. One of the main characters i thought was acted very poorly in the beginning but then it started to pick up once the show moved on. During the interview, Tom Fontana mentioned his writing style is one in which he focuses on developing the characters first and foremost. He said the story tends to grow around them when he has decided what kind of people they are and what kind of actions they would take. I feel like this is very common for shows or films that are depicting historical events. Most of the time the plot is written in such a way that it makes you focus on the characters themselves instead of the situations there in. I am a huge fan of shows and films that are constructed in this way and Borgia is definitely one of them.

Anamorphosis

István Orosz Anamorphic Column with Mirror

Hans Holbein's The Ambassadors

to see the anamorphic skull embedded in this painting click on it to enlarge it and then view the image from an extreme low angle from the left corner

This type of painting know as Anamorphosis (from the Greek "Formed Again") comes from a long tradition going back to the early Renaissance (15th Century) and even earlier, since the technique was actually invented in China before migrating to Italy. There are many famous examples, from Leonardo to Hans Holbein the Younger, from Andrea Pozzo to Marcel Duchamp and Salvador Dali, on to some of the street painters shown in the previous and this post.

This technique is also widely used in film to record a compressed image in a small frame (35mm for example) and expand

Here are some examples by Kurt Wenner and Julian Beever, contemporary masters of street art.

Kurt Weener's Ghetto

Kurt Weener's Office Stress

Julian Beever's Waterfall

The broken window

Marcel Duchamp, Fresh Window, 1920 (MoMa, NY)

In Leon Batista Alberti 's treatise De Pictura (1435), where he discusses for the first time in western literature the concept of optical perspective, he mentions, in relation to art that, "it is impossible to take anything away from it or add anything to it, without impairing the beauty of the whole."

Illustration for Book 2, p.15

More recently, the American poet William Carlos Williams, talks about what he calls action “pruned to a perfect economy”, and goes on:

" To make two bald statements: there is nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem I mean that there can be no part, as in any other machine, that is redundant. Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is the machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. In a poem this movement is distinguished in each case by the character of the speech from which it arises."

I believe the same applies to the concept of design, which is, like Williams says, a well tuned machine, made of all the necessary elements but nothing more, since, by logic, anything not essential would be taking the place of what is. A place where form and function are interchangeable and indiscernible from each other.

Alberti said, in his famous visualization of painting as a window that the observer, from a fixed point of view looks 'outside'. The role of the artist/designer, is to establish the continuity between those two seemingly separate worlds, breaking so to speak, the metaphorical glass that stands between them.

Now, Alberti was not refering to the surface of the painting as a whole as the "window", but rather to the square, quadrangolo de retti angoli, that you draw as a boundary, limit or predetermination of the shape, size, proportion etc where the outside will be seen, like a hole punched in the very fabric of reality.

I only wanted to share these thoughts to make you think about that window, about the possibility to break it, once you know it is there. Is it possible to maintain the coherence or continuity without it? What happens in our media world where the view is fragmented or distributed around millions of tiny windows that together are more than the sum of their parts?



All images, except Duchamp's Window are from The Painting of Leone Battista Alberti facsimile that you can find at the Science, Engineering and Technology Linda Hall Library

Wine in Florence anyone?

CHI 2008 a Social Data Analysis Workshop is coming up in April of this year, and in Florence of all places! the New Renaissance.

A blurb from their call for papers that might peak your interest reads:

In the last few months a new class of web site has emerged that enables users to upload and collectively analyze many types of data. These systems range from pure research projects to commercial business ventures. Sites like Many Eyes, Swivel and Data360 have attracted visualization fans, data geeks, journalists, scientists, and concerned citizens. The blogosphere has also taken notice, and bloggers frequently post about the ways in which they use these sites, the visualizations they create, and the data they upload.

Take a look at their submission papers.