patternsthatconnect

What is fluorence anyway, and is fluorescent colour lighter than white?

Donald D Hoffman defines fluorence as “white that is whiter than white, a super white that almost glows”. I don’t know how I got into painting with fluorescent colours. I think this painting in 2011 may have been my first foray. I have been almost unable to put them down since then. They have a unatural quality, as if rather than reflecting light they generate it. And they seem to affect the whites. Since starting out with the flourescent colours I have also been including more white in my work, mostly the white of the primed canvas. In the above painting I noticed during the process of making it that, in certain lights, the white takes on a blueish grey tinge.

I wanted the white to glow as a colour in this painting that also contains a band of flourescent red

…and in this one, the flourescent colours seem to out light (or maybe out bright)  the white, so that it starts to look more towards grey

and perhaps in this drawing also

Hence my question, is flourescent colour lighter (brighter) than white?

Sir Isaac Newton’s experiments with prisms, where white light passing through a prism emerges in a spectrum of colours like a rainbow led him to conclude that “Colours in the Object are nothing but a Disposition to reflect this or that sort of Rays more copiously than the rest.” In other words, light is composed of different rays (we might now say different frequencies), a given surface reflects certain rays and absorbs others. If it reflects low frequencies and absorbs high, then its colour will be at the red end of the spectrum whereas if it reflects high frequencies and absorbs low then it will be towards the blue end of the spectrum. However, a study of simultaneous colour contrasts shows that the “same colour” will look very different depending on its context. So “pattern of reflectance = colour of surface” is not the whole story, there is the ‘subjective’ side of colour construction to take into account.

Donald D Hoffman, in his book Visual Intelligence shows just how complex a process this is, and suggests some of the rules we use to construct the colours we see. I borrowed one of his experiments/demonstrations (which he credits to Christoph Redies and Lothar Spillmann)  for my painting Glow Grid, where coloured discs are constructed by the viewer:

and more recently I have been playing with colour mixing and wondering about how much of this takes place on the canvas (out there) and how much takes place optically (in here).

In the New Testament (of all places) we read that “the light of the body is the eye” emphasising not the objective (out there) source of light and colour (as perhaps J.M.W. Turner did when he said “the Sun is God”) but the subjective “in here” construction of it.

According to Donald D Hofffman, when we construct colour, we use a wider area of our visual field to determine the colour we see at a point. The context changes what we see.

When we construct colour, rather than colour alone we construct several visual properties all at the same time, and we attempt to make those properties mutually consistent.

When we see the world we are far more than passive observers, the very act of seeing is an act of construction, of sense making, long before we even begin to consciously ‘make sense of it’.

I love this clip of NLP trainer Judith Lowe on visual intelligence at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Rss_bP-9bo

where in answering a question Judith points to methods ( NLP techniques) we can employ to improve our visual intelligence, by which we mean our visual representational system, and at the same time she emphasises the natural unconscious choices we all make in developing our sensory intelligence, perhaps favouring one system in preference to another, say visual rather than auditory or kinaesthetic. In developing one system well, we may find that another is less well developed. This is one of the ways in which we are different from one other. She cites a well known football player whose highly developed system of sight helps him to site the ball in the right place, whilst possibly displaying an underdeveloped auditory system.

Donald D. Hoffman uses the term visual intelligence for “the creative genius of the mind’s eye” or for “vision’s constructive powers”. We construct the world we see. We are a all lot more visually intelligent than we know.

I got the following little exercise from a paper by Donald D. Hoffman. It is possible to see one of two cubes here. (You can see them both, but not at the same time.)

The subjective Necker cube (Bradley and Petry, 1977)

One has corner A in front (cube A), and one has corner B in front (cube B).

Which of the two cubes do you see first?

Whichever one you see first, note that you’ve seen it, and then allow it to shift, so that you see the other one. Amazing, isn’t it? (Maybe it’s childish of me to get so fascinated by this and to keep on shifting from one to the other just for fun.)

If there were two of you viewing this figure together, one of you could be viewing cube A and one of you could be viewing cube B, thus seeing a different cube even though you are looking at the same thing. Then, when it shifts, one could turn to the other and say “I’m seeing the same one as you now” and the other reply “no I am not seeing that one any more, I am seeing the other one”. You could continue to look at the same thing together and both continue to see a different cube, even after it has shifted.

Now the important questions: where is cube A when you are viewing cube B? and what are the implications for our everyday perception of the world?

I am thoroughly enjoying the writing of Donald D. Hoffman

you could say I am a big fan

He writes about visual perception and how we construct the world in which we live. No room for gods in this world view?

Donald D. Hoffman is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, University of California Irvine, California. If you are like me, you may be a little tired of the Steven Pinker neuroscientists and their broad claims at having discovered the Soul or God in the human brain. Dr. Hoffman makes a clear case here as to what neuroscience knows and doesn’t know. Debates between theists and atheists often hinge, naturally enough, on advances in co … Read More

via Paying Attention To The Sky

Donald D. Hoffman‘s book Visual Intelligence has many wonderful things in it. Here’s one little experiment he says you can do on a napkin and impress your friends.

You start with red lines

and then add black lines as extensions of the red ones (better if the pens are the same tip size , unlike mine)

where does that glowing red disc come from?

(if you don’t see it at first look away slightly or reduce the image )

where does that glowing red disc come from?

even my son Luke must be able to see this one!

And again the question becomes how much of what we see is really out there and how much of it do we construct? An important question, not only for art and science. (Hoffman has some interesting answers in this article .)

He also has some great photos on Flickr here’s a link

In a previous blog I compared a coloured sketch to a subjective square and reflected on whether something similar was going on in each. (By the way you can see subjective squares and a whole load of other things explored in Donald D. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence, How We Create What We See.)

What happens when you square four subjective squares?

Subjective Squared, Ink on paper, 84cm x 84 cm

Relationships do develop between the figures, yet those subjective squares, slightly brighter than the paper ‘behind’ continue to assert themselves, occupying a space a few millimetres in front. Don’t you agree?