prosthetic knowledge
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Appearance Of Crosses by Ding Li
Continual painting series by Shanghai artist creates abstract colourful grids using the cross as his motif mark unit. He has been making these paintings for 20 years and is considered one of the most important abstract artists working in China today.
DING Yi’s signature takes the form of a cross that is repeatedly and carefully constructed across surfaces. With this minimalist visual rhetoric, painting is not about illusion and the representation of objects. Instead, DING Yi explores an abstract aesthetic through the systematic repetition and direct visual representation of the cross. Created by the layered intersection of vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines across the surface, the paintings encourage the process of perception. Viewed from a distance, everything gradually converges. But viewed up-close, the subtlety of lines and color are vibrantly present. The paintings simultaneously refer to themselves, as paintings per se, and to the reality around them that has only been distilled into grids and check pattern. Rather than creating a future reality, DING Yi proceeds from a preconceived reality. He has conceptually integrated the conditions of the work’s production and reception within the work itself. The abstract realism of the paintings have, especially, become an analysis of their conditions of production: the repeated motif of the cross has been re-made again and again, indefinitely and continuously for 18 years now. In his visual structures, he seems to be aiming for a meticulous systematization of simplicity opposed to the bombastic rhetoric of the literati tradition. Thus his crosses on the surface have been described as the embodiment of a deliberate “diffusion of pictorial illiteracy.”
More can be discovered at ShangART Gallery website here
PK Note: Goes without saying there is an (unintentional) fractal / digital quality to the work.
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Eye-tracking Fine Art: Odalisque a la culotte grise (Matisse), and the proposal of the “opsieme”
a - the original
b - areas of interest
c - foveal and perifoveal visionsJean Paul Courchia proposes the idea of the “opsieme”, a visual unit equivalent to the ‘phoneme’ and ‘graphemes’ used to deconstruct sounds and text:
According to cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, recognizing letters and their combinations — called graphemes — and then creating an interface between what’s written and what’s articulated (phonological awareness) is the way to gain access to the lexicon that we use to communicate. If we indeed pay attention to the basic elements that compose the written sentence, we find letters, syllables and words. However, the smallest significant element of the sentence is probably the grapheme, since the whole understanding process derives from it. The grapheme is the written equivalent of the oral phoneme. It is comprised of the smallest group of letters making a phoneme. For example, in French, the phoneme [o] has several graphemes : o, au, and eau. Unlike a letter, a grapheme represents better the phonology of a language, or what a language sounds like. The French language counts 130 graphemes.
Does this same concept apply to a painting or an image ? Just like in the reading process, the image undergoes several mutations between the retina and the sensory areas of the cerebral cortex, whereby the basic components of the image (forms, colors, orientation of the lines) are dissected first and then transmitted to the visual areas. It is only then that the image is reconstructed, and that it will be confronted against other known representations that are stored in our memory for an identification of the present image. Dismantling, reassembly and identification are the three steps in the process of the visual representation, whether artistic or natural …
… Fixation can be equated with the time necessary to identify the smallest significant visual unit in an image. Just as a phoneme is the smallest articulated unit, and a grapheme is the smallest written unit, we suggest opsieme as a designation for the smallest significant visual unit : « opsie » – from the Greek ops, opsis, which means eye, vision and « eme », suffix which signifies basic unit.
You can read the whole piece here
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More on this project at BLDGBLOG:
A mind-bogglingly awesome new project from MIT called Flyfire hopes to use large, precision-controlled clouds of micro-helicopters, each carrying a color-coordinated LED light, to create massive, three-dimensional information displays in space.
via chrbutler / notational
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Enter some text to be presented in pictures from Flickr’s One Letter and One Digit photo pools.
Results are embeddable.
Link to Spell With Flickr
via Make Use Of
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Isotype
Gerd Arntz designed around 4000 signs, which symbolized key data from industry, demographics, politics and economy, for the visual language Isotype.
The International System Of TYpographic Picture Education was developed by the Viennese social scientist and philosopher Otto Neurath (1882-1945) as a method for visual statistics. Gerd Arntz (1900-1988) was the designer tasked with making Isotype’s pictograms and visual signs.
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He also was one of the first doing graphics that are referred to as data vizualisation or information graphics today. Check the Statistics section to see examples. Now that’s being ahead of your times. Pretty impressive isn’t it?
Via NetDriver
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Slow numbers
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Geon
Geons (geometric icons) are simple 3-dimensional forms such as spheres, cubes, cylinders, cones or wedges. One often-cited[1] theory of object recognition, Biederman’s “Recognition by Components Theory” (RBC)[2] proposes that visual input is matched against structural representations of objects in the brain. These structural representations consist of geons and their interrelations (e.g., an ice cream cone could be broken down into a sphere located above a cone). Geons can be used to represent a large number of possible objects with very few components; e.g., 24 geons can be recombined to create over 10 million different two-geon objects.
Via Wikipedia entry
