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Ecomedia
How the Natural World is Transforming the Nature of Media.
This weblog is not the usual blog of daily events. It contains a series of notes/thoughts designed to make connections between science and media art.
Sometimes these ideas are tied in with current events, but most of the time this blog is not in any particular order. It serves as a central area for a detailed examination of ideas first published in a 1999 Leonardo Journal article entitled 'Active Vision' that I hope to develop into a book that will discuss some of the current developments in science, ecology, media and society and how they inform and are informed by new technologies. The book will be written for artists working with digital media and anyone who is interested in future directions of the medium.
http://www.andreapolli.com
last modified Sep 7, 2006 at 13:00
In many ways, the language of dreams is the language of vision. Visual imagery is the most common sensation present in dreams. Often if a dream experience is auditory only, dreamers do not describe the experience as a dream and even claim they were not asleep at all.
Dream sensations are often enhancements of everyday sensations. For example; dreamers often describe telepathic abilities, being able to communicate without speaking or knowing what a dream character is thinking without her speaking. Dreamers also decribe teleportation abilities, suddenly arriving in a location known to be far in the distance in a split second, and the ability to see through walls.
Oddly, many of these abilities have been or are currently being developed with new media technology. Actual telepathic technology is out of reach of current technology, but certainly body monitoring systems have been in place in the medical community for a long time and these systems can tell more about the state of the patient than the patient himself can (particularly if the patient is unconscious during a surgical procedure).
Teleportation, or at least the ability to communicate remotely has been a priority in the development of communciations technology from the teletype to the telephone to videoconferencing, visual chats, and remotely controlled robotics.
Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed the RADAR Flashlight, a device that can detect the presence of a living human or other animal through doors and walls up to 8 inches thick. The device is being developed through funding from the National Institute of Justice for use by law enforcement officials. The RADAR flashlight works by detecting minute breathing motions and was first designed to help medics on the battlefield determine the vital signs of soldiers without having to remove protective gear.
Snyder, F. The Phenomenology of Dreaming 1970
Georgia Tech Research News April 12, 2001 "A Flash of Force: RADAR Flashlight Could Help Police Detect Suspects Hiding Behind Doors and 8-Inch Thick Walls" http://www.gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/newsrelease/radarflash.html
Newton said that although color appears tangible, it is merely an illusion that arises in the mind. Later studies were able to confirm that color perception is in the brain and not the eye. In the early 20th century, Louis Verrey reports patients who suffer from a loss of color vision due to strokes or other forms of brain damage. In 'An Anthropologist on Mars,' Oliver Sachs studies a color blind painter who has not only lost his color vision while awake, but had also lost the ability to see colors in his dreams. This suggests that color is formed in the mind in the same way dreams are formed, an illusion created through neural processing aided by memory. Seeing a color is very much like seeing a memory or a dream.
'An Anthropologist on Mars' Oliver Sachs
Isaac Newton started to study color in his twenties and developed his "New theory about Light and Colors" that included a color wheel for additive color mixing. He also discovered that white light contains all wavelengths of the visible spectrum. He believed that color was not a substance, but a property of light that is only recogniseable as color when interpreted by a perceptual system. He believed in mechanical principles of matter and that light rays were the mechanism through which subjective color is perceived. He was correct in the sense that the eye truly does not see color, as it was discovered later that it is the cortical region in the brain that interprets stimulation from the eye as color.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also developed a "Theory of Colors". Goethe's first publication on color theory, "Contributions to Optics" proposed a symmetric color circle with seven colors (six colors known now as primary and secondary colors with white in the center). Goethe and Newton had very different methods of investigating ideas. Newton's experiments were designed to prove theories in the traditional scientific method while Goethe was experimenting in an exploratory mode, without a known theory to prove or disprove. Goethe was interested in color as a perceptual phenomenon. He saw the combination of the eye, the brain, and the external world as a complex interactive system.
Another interesting treatise on vision from the same era that considers vision as a part of a system of perception is "An Essay on a New Theory of Vision" by George Berkeley. Of interest here is not necessarily the ideas about vision itself, many of which are repeated from the work of other great thinkers or have been proven to be inaccurate, but Berkeley's method of exploration into the theory of vision. The essay is made of a series of short statements, many of which are based on his own experiences of perception. Berkeley metaphorically compares different senses. For example, the experience of hearing language is used to prove points about the "true nature" of vision. He uses examples of a blind person's experiences and understanding of the world to prove his points about vision in relation to body experience.
References
Physics Today July 2002 Exploratory Experimentation: Goethe, Land, and Color Theory by Neil Ribe and Friedrich Steinle
H. von Helmholtz, in R. Kahl, ed., Selected Writings of Hermann von Helmholtz, Wesleyan U. Press, Middletown, Conn. (1971), chaps. 2 and 18; W. Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers, Harper & Row, New York (1974), chap. 10; W. Heitler, Man and Science, Basic Books, New York (1963), chap. 2; C. F. von Weizsäcker, in E. Trunz, ed., Goethes Werke, Hamburger Ausgabe, Band 13: Naturwissenschaftliche Schriften, Wegner, Hamburg, Germany (1955), p. 537.
I. Newton, Philos. Trans. R. Soc. London, 6, 3075 (1672), reprinted in I. B. Cohen, ed., Isaac Newton's Papers & Letters on Natural Philosophy and Related Documents, Harvard U. Press, Cambridge, Mass. (1958).
I. Newton, Opticks: A Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflections & Colours of Light, Dover, New York (1952), based on the 4th edition, London (1730).
M. Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol. 2, R. Taylor, London (1844), p. 140.
M. Faraday, Experimental Researches in Electricity, vol. 1, R. Taylor, London (1839), pp. 1-41.
T. Martin, ed., Faraday's Diary, vol. 1, Bell and Sons, London (1932), p. 367.
H. von Helmholtz, in R. Kahl, ed., ref. 2, chap. 15.
Birren, F. (1988). Light Color & Environment (2nd Rev. ed.). West Chester, PA: Schiffer Publishing Ltd.
Curtis, H. (1975). Bilogy (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Worth Publishers, Inc.
Zimbardo, G. (1988). Psychology And Life (12th ed.). Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company.
Cornell University Science News "Colors are composed by brain, not eyes, Cornell experiment shows" April 8, 1997 Roger Segelkenhttp://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/April97/vision.hrs.html
An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision (4th ed.) George Berkeley (1732) First edition published 1709
In 1989, sculptor Gregory Barsamian started to develop a means to animate his sculptures after being inspired by the 19th century early 2d animation device, the zoetrope. Barsamian took the idea of the zoetrope into the third dimension to create spinning merry-go-rounds ringed with sculptures that appear to transform themselves as the wheel spins. His stroboscopic sculpture evoke dreams and nightmares as the experience of the illusion movement created by the persistence of vision is exploited to startling effect. This work makes a connection between an actual optical phenomenon or 'illusion' and the illusive nature of dreams.
Science and art meld in the area of optical illusions. Nothing in the contemporary art world illustrates this connection better than Chuck Close's paintings, which have been the subject of experiments by Denis Pelli, professor of psychology and neural science at New York University. Dr. Pelli studies viewing distances at which Close's paintings form coherent images for Museum of Modern Art visitors. This work is essential in helping visual researchers understand how the brain decides to identify objects.
Art on the Brain: Seen Close, Paintings Reveal a Different View
By Kenneth Chang ABCNEWS.com http://abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNews/artscience990805.html
Last night I was able to see Mars. In fact it was, besides the occasional plane, the brightest thing in the sky and nearly as brights as some planes. As I looked at the red planet, I noticed more flickering than a usual star. this might have been due to a slight cloud cover in New York that evening, but the flickering seemed to have the effect of making Mars even more prominent, highly contrasting against the night sky.
Well, it turns out that my experience viewing Mars is actually a documented optical illusion called Flicker-augmented contrast discovered by Dr. Stuart Antsis of UCSD and his colleague Alan Ho. They found that if a spot in the center of a grey or color field flickers, the perception of contrast is highly enhanced.
Professor Stuart Antsis home page http://www-psy.ucsd.edu/~santisis
In the Guardian yesterday, there was an article by Mike May, whose sight was restored three years ago through a transplant using stem cells. In the article, he talks about the experience of seeing for the first time in 43 years.
At the end of the article, he talks about how the blind construct detailed mental images in order to function better in society. He finds that unlike sighted people who can use signage to get around, he has had to, for example, construct a detailed image of the layout of airports in various cities
This brings to mind the lost art of building memory palaces. Half a millenium ago, Renaissance thinker Giulio Camillo (1490- 1544) envisioned a place where all information would be stored called the Memory Theater. This place, in which various information is stored in a spatial location, is built from mnemomic techniques that date back to the ancient greeks. This close relationship between architecture and information (it is even thought that the design of the cathedrals were created to aid in the memory of the scriptures) has influenced the field of information architecture.
Building a mental construct of an architectural space requires one to have a cross-sensory experience of space. The proprioceptive experience of walking through a space, the experience of the size of a space through echoing sound, and of course the visual experience of the space all play into the memory trigger.
The Guardian Limited Mike May 'The trees were a deeper green than I imagined, and so tall' http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1029268,00.html
Envisioning Cyberspace, Peter Anders
Dr. David Kelly was an expert in chemical and biological warfare employed by the English government to advise it on weapons in such warfare. He was a major player in the investigation of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. On the afternoon of July 17 Dr Kelly left his home, telling his wife he was going out for a walk, but he did not return, and on the morning of July 18, a body was found at Harrowdown Hill later identified as Dr. Kelly.
In 'The Garden of Forking Paths' Jorge Luis Borges describes the desperate acts of a German spy toward the end of World War I. His protagonist, Dr. Yu Tsun, is an expert in labyrinths, and at the end of Borges' short story, he discovers the secret of his great grandfather's work 'The Garden of Forking Paths.' In this sprawling work of symbols, which exists as both a book and a labyrinth, a maze of possible pasts, presents, and futures coexist in an infinitely complex manuscript. Yu Tsun himself is navigating this labyrinth, choosing his possible futures.
Borges' vision is seen as a precursor to modern hypertext fiction and the internet. Another short story, 'The Library of Babel' discusses how information takes shape and form in an architectural space echoing Camillo's Memory Theater.
The 'Library of Babel' is designed as a labyrinth of hexagonal rooms like a beehive, densely packing all the information that has existed and can ever exist. The design of the beehive is the most efficient use of space and material, creating the maximum amount of space for the minimum amount of material.
This hexagonal shape is the same as that used in the design of the Panopticon of Jeremy Bentham. In 1791, Bentham designed the Panopticon or 'inspection house' as an ideal architecture for surveillance, specifically in prison design. His design called for an arrangement of spaces around a central hexagonal observation area. From this central location, activity in all the surrounding areas could be observed with the maximum efficiency.
Artist Steve Mann's new series of Decon (decontamination/deconstruction) spaces, use the same panopticon hexagonal design in the creation of surveillance spaces for the decontamination of victims of chemical and biological terrorism. His work calls for surveillance cameras embedded in shower stalls and for the maximum number of victims to be processed through the decontamination system. His work clearly shows the blurring of roles between the victim and perpetrator, using the language of incarceration and control to examine the role technology is playing in increasingly stripping away human liberty and dignity.
But let us return to Dr. Kelly, who is reported to have said to a friend 'They will probably find me dead in the woods' in the weeks before his body was actually found dead on the edge of a forest. Kelly's life was dedicated to uncovering the truth, and even his words about his impending doom are a testament to his firm dedication to truth, even of a future reality. As one follows the investigation into Kelly's death uncovers a complex series of relationships between governments and the media, even resulting in the US government publicly identifying a CIA agent, one can only form a mental image of a labyrinth much like the Garden of Forking Paths in which any number of possible motivations and realities can govern the structure of relationships. What is forming this garden is the inter-relationships of each individual's mental image of the situation. However, each mental image is not only changing, but each one is in itself like the Garden of Forking Paths in that any number of possible scenarios can represent reality.
This complexity of relationships seems to imply a situation in which mutual understanding is impossible, however, the construction of the mental image or scene actually works to promote mutual understanding.
Mark Johnson's book, The Body in the Mind, presents a bodily basis for the construction of meaning. Like Luciano da Fontoura Costa, Johnson belives that the nature of our bodies and our experience have to be the starting point for the construction of abstract ideas. So, following Johnson's theories, an understanding of complex relationships, even relationships between spies and double agents whose real motivations may be hidden beneath several layers of identity, has to have a structure that mimics our physical experience of the world through the senses.
Allthough this concrete form might be an oversimplification of real relationships and identities, the construction itself has ramifications in the world. For example, the behavior of the stock market is in part determined by each individual's construction of future scenarios. In simplistic terms, if the majority of investors are optimistic, the stock market will behave differently than if the majority are pessimistic, and the pessmism or optimism of an individual is partially determined by the perceived pessimism of optimism of other investors.
In other words, perception creates reality. But, this is where the infinite looping labyrinth comes into play: if the mental image is based on sensory input, reality creates perception.
The Guardian Unlimited From dossier to death - the key moments, the key people http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,13747,1010937,00.html
Decon2 (Decon Squared) Deconstructing Decontamination Steve Mann The Leonardo Journal of Art and Science MIT Press Vol. 36 No. 4 pp285
Borges, Luis, Labyrinths, Selected Stories and Other Writings New Directions Pub. New York 1964 trans. Donald a. Yates
Mark Johnson The Body in the Mind University of Chicago Press 1987
9:10 am pdt
I had to go out to pick some things up at the supermarket a little while ago, and while I was there, I realized that a modern supermarket is a perfect example of a memory theater in action. A supermarket holds hundreds of different products, and shoppers have to locate specific ones often in the most efficient way possible.
In my own experience, when I enter a supermarket for the first time, I don't really know the layout or exactly where I can find what I need, but generally by moving around the store, I can find the products I am looking for through association. Jams and jellies for example in US supermarkets are usually located next to peanut butter. Coffee and cereal are usually grouped together because of their association with breakfast.
After going to the same store a number of times, usually returning to a store in my neighborhood weekly, I get to know exactly where to find what I need. Sometimes, I choose to wander around a bit, looking through the aisles for meal ideas, but most often I go directly to what I have on a list or in my mind, and although the store is large, I can usually finish shopping quite quickly and efficiently.
For the designers of supermarkets, an intuitive organization of products can help in deciding the placement of new products. Although sometimes a new product will be placed in a prominent location unrelated to the kind of product it is, usually at the same time it is also placed in its corresponding category based on the store's organizational scheme.
Compare this to a memory palace. Orators used a mental image of a palace that contained a mass of information. As a speaker talked about a specific topic, the mental spatial organization made it possible for her to wander about to other related topics, or to simply move through the speech to each important topic. I a new topic occurs to the speaker, it could be placed in a prominent place in the palace (an special area for new ideas). This idea would also of course be mentally placed with related ideas based on the layout of the palace.
There is a persistent legend that the philosopher Rene Descartes kept a mechanical doll replica of his daughter Francine, who died as a child. As the story goes, Descartes was traveling to Sweden, a journey that he accurately identified as the last long journey of his life. During the sea voyage, he insisted that he was traveling with his daughter Francine, but no child was ever seen, until some sailors searched his cabin and found a mechanical doll. The sailors were frightened of the doll, believing it to be a manifestation of a demon, and they threw her overboard.
Whether this particular story is true or not, it is well documented that Descartes was interested in mechanical toys and had in fact attempted to build some of various types, and that his daughter named Francine died at age 5 in 1640 of scarlet fever.
The doll that behaves as a human being in the early 18th century was a curiosity to some, a representation of the power of clockwork machinery. To others, like the sailors on Descartes voyage, such a lifelike doll could be nothing less than an evil spirit.
The doll that behaves as a human being in the early 21st century is still a curiosity to some, a representation this time of the power of robotic technology and artificial intelligence. Although a far cry from the lifelike doll in Steven Spielberg's A.I., Hasbro and iRobot have collaborated to create 'My Real Baby', a doll that they describe as "flat-out the most magical, lifelike, interactive toy experience ever." The power behind this lifelike experience is an array of sensors that allow the doll to respond to the merest touch combined with an artificial intelligence system that allows the doll to learn to speak words and simple sentences.
The goal of a lifelike mechanical human being may well be the same today as it was in the 18th century, but the means and philosophy of what constitutes 'lifelike' is very different. In Descartes' day, the emphasis was on lifelike movement, and if you view some of the existing automatons of the time, you will see incredible replication of complicated human movement, usually acrobatic and magic tricks. Today, according to Hasbro and iRobot, the definition of lifelike has to do with responsiveness and the appearance of emotion. Tellingly, in the faq about My Real Baby, Hasbro actually associates the doll's 'smarts' with the appearance of emotions.
"Q. What's the technology behind My Real Baby that makes her so smart to appear to have emotions?" http://www.irobot.com iRobot corporation product profile My Real Baby
Part of the research of Stuart Antsis at the University of California, San Diego has involved how people adapt to different kinds of visual stimulus. One of the first modern experiments in measuring how people adapt to a transformed world was the work of George Stratton who in 1896 published a paper documenting his experience wearing glasses that turned the world upside-down. What he found, amazingly, was that after a period of several days, he was able to function normally, somehow his mind was able to adapt to the inverted image. Other researchers followed Stratton with experiments on displacement, reversal, tilt, magnification, and scrambling, all effects possible using various types of optical lenses. Dr. Antsis's work is the first work to involve a digitally mediated and transformed world.
One of Antsis's projects was to see how a person could adapt to a world in which the luminosity was reversed, that is, a world in negative. He was particularly interested in the problem of recognising faces in negative. Participants in this experiment found that facial recognition was difficult, objects and scenes lacked depth, and that despite wearing the glasses for long periods of time, the mind never was able to transform the scene into a normal scene the way the upside-down world of Stratton was transformed. In the negative world, participants found food distasteful, saw people with black teeth, and found shadows to appear as brightly lit obstacles.
Although a brightness-reversed world makes perception difficult, a video mediated world could help to correct vision problem by emphasizing aspects of the scene that are difficult to see, and could enhance the perceptual experience of the normallly-sighted by allowing for control of detail and emphasis and perhaps by filtering extraneous details.
Carpenter G, Grossberg S (Eds) Neural Networks for Vision and Image Processing. Bradford Books, MIT Press, 1992
George M. Stratton. Some preliminary experiements on vision. Psychological Review, 1896.
Object recognition computer vision systems have reached the toy industry with Cindy Smart, a fresh-faced little blonde doll with a camera located in a bee on the front of her overalls. Cindy Smart can recognize 400 different words printed on flash cards and perform arithmetic using a computer vision system, bringing these systems to the comfort of a child's room. Although the doll hasn't yet become as popular as the furrbie or tickle-me-elmo dolls from a few years ago, she has shown that vision recognition systems have a place in your child's toy box.
Stuart Antsis of UCSD has researched how driving in a dense fog affects human ability to perceive motion (see August 10th). Fog also obviously affects our ability to see distances. In even the light fog this morning as I look out my window, buildings that I normally see easily have completely disappeared. This phenomenon may have been part of the inspiration for the iris hypothesis, that is, dense fog (the same kind of precipitation that causes clouds) in essence blocks out our vision the same way clouds block out the sun.
New media has once again turned conventional intuition on its head. The idea of fog making things invisible is challenged by the work of Dr. Ismo Rakkolainen and his team at Tampere University of technology. They have developed a FogScreen in which a thin film of water vapor is used as a walk through screen for video and computer projection. When I observed the FogScreen at Siggraph 03, the experience was like viewing a projected hologram or what I imagine an apparition or ghost to look like. Although the image was clear, the moving fog caused parts of the image to break apart, especially when the screen was disturbed by people walking through, and of course once the fog was gone, the image also disappeared. Rather than obscuring the image, the fog creates the artificial image.
Anyone who is involved in digital media these days has had some experience with digital imaging. Digital imaging presents our eyes with a visual scene, broken down into 2-dimensional colored blocks of light small enough for our eyes to resolve the blocks into a coherent scene. The FogScreen placng an image over the visible world evokes another aspect of digital imaging, transparency and layering. Its difficult to find an image that is not digital, and it's difficult to find a digital image that does not involve some kind of digital collaging and composite imaging, the language of layering and transparency is becoming a part of our contemporary language of images.
When I consider the experience of looking at a visual scene (see August 16) with all the illusions my mind needed to resolve (floaters, depth illusions, smoke distortion of the scene, and my scratched sunglasses) in light of layering and the FogScreen, I wonder if layered digital media is exploiting an aspect of the functioning of our visual system to present us with more information. Because our visual system can differentiate between a dragonfly on the window pane and a helicopter flying through the scene outside the window, our visual system can also easily resolve individual images layered one over the other.
The FogScreen http://www.fogscreen.com
In an article titled "Does the Earth Have an Iris Analog" in NASA's Earth Observatory publication, author David Herring outlines an intriguing idea presented by theortetician and professor of meteorology at MIT in the early 1980s. Lindzen, investigating regions of humidity in the tropics, noticed that there is a sharp boundary between regions of high humidity and low humidity caused by the cloud cover in the areas. He saw the areas of low humidity as 'openings', in the same way you might experience the clouds opening up to the sun on a cloudy day. Lindzen began to study the pattern of the opening and closing of the clouds and how this helps to regulate the earth's temperature. In his theory, the openings between clouds act like the iris of an eye. An iris keeps too much light from entering the eye and burning the retina, the clouds in Lindzen's theory help to keep global warming at bay.
This 'Iris Hypothesis' is still unproven, although Lindzen's team has made progress in determining just how certain kind of clouds might effectively filter ultra-violet rays from the sun. Whether or not Lindzen's hypothesis is an accurate description of the earth's atmosphere (and there is a significant debate about it), the strong metaphor used to compare the earth to the human eye can tell us something about how we construct knowledge about our environment.
Research tells us how the human body takes in information, and as we have already seen, there are those like Luciano Da Fontoura Costa who would argue that the way we understand the world is formed by how we take in the world. So why not see the world as operating in the same way? Meteorologists are still baffled by the stability of the Earth's atmosphere. In many of the most accurate current computer models that describe the atmosphere, there are situations when the entire atmosphere of the Earth is stripped away to disperse into outer space. Why has the atmosphere remained so stable for so many years? The approach in the case of the iris hypothesis is to look inwardly to the human body as a part of the natural environment on the Earth and as a part of the universe subject to the laws of physics. How has a system as complex as the human body existed for such a long time and perhaps even more importantly, how does this complex system function effectively enough to allow the contemplation of the universe?
Herring, David "Does the Earth Have an Iris Analog?" Earth Observatory, NASA 2001
Lindzen, Richard S. et. al. "Does the Earth Have an Adaptive Infrared Iris?" Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 2001 Vol 82, No 3, pp 417-32
Hartmann, Dennis L. and Marc L. Michelsen "No Evidence for Iris" Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (submitted 2001)
While thinking about large systems like the electrical grid, I decided to take a look at a 3D simulation environment designed for the simulations of artificial life and decentralized systems called 'breve' <http://www.spiderland.org/breve/>
In the demo section of the breve application, I saw a number of visual simulations of flocking algorithms. One of the first people to simulate visual flocking in 3D was Craig Reynolds. He has a number of java based simulations he calls 'boids' on his web site <http://www.red3d.com/cwr/boids/>. Flocking algorithms are a subset of artificial life in which objects that represent creatures like birds or buffalo are given a simple set of behaviors. For example, a bird in a flocking algorithm may be programmed to stay within a certain range of another bird (without colliding with the bird or any other obstacles of course). It's fascinating to look at the resulting visual simulation when a group of these creatures interact with eachother.
Today I noticed in breve a demo called 'vision flocking'. In the code, an aspect of a bird's behavior is actually based on a very simple simulation of the bird's ability to see. Simply put, an individual bird is only able to detect other birds that come within its line of sight (a 20 degree radius of vision). The resulting simulation of the flock of multiple birds suprisingly appeared to be less random than a flock simulation without the vision algorithm. The birds in the limited vision flock (although represented by simple triangles) appear to have a sense of purpose and direction whereas birds in flock simulations who have omnipotence (or, 360 degree vision) appear to fly in a much more haphazard way.
The latest information about the massive blackout last Thursday is that a majority of the loss of power occurred in a time frame of about nine seconds. The changes were happening literally at the speed of light. However, a full analysis of the cause of the blackout is estimated to take over a month. In the timeframe of nine seconds, hundreds of thousands of separate events occurred. A number of articles in the news this week have been addressing the complexity of large scale technological systems like the power grid and the difficulties in understanding how these systems fail.
The complexity of the electrical grid is more than just the pattern of the wires and circuits, the complexity lies in the events that unfold over time that demonstrate how different aspects of the system interact in various circumstances. The field of data visualization can assist in our understanding of this and other large scale complex systems by helping to visualize complex changes over time.
Visualizing complex changes over time can be done in some cases through static 2D and 3D maps and graphs. In other cases, adding the dimension of time by creating animated visualizations helps to clarify temporal information. Animations can serve to speed up events that occur on a large temporal scale (like events that happen in geological time), or serve to slow down complex events that occur on a very small temporal scale (like the failure of the electrical grid or any movements on an atomic scale).
Creating effective animated visualizations requires not only a strong knowledge of color and composition, but also requires a strong knowledge of temporal composition. In many contemporary textbooks about static visual composition techniques, considerable attention is paid to how humans perceive and process visual images. The texts include discussions of color perception and visual illusions. However, very few of these texts discuss human perception of motion. An understanding of how humans perceive and process motion, including optical illusions that occur with moving images, is necessary for the advancement of effective animated visualization techniques.
If both the scientific method and the new media art method involve creativity, focus on the process and not the 'product', and can be both grounded in physical reality or fanciful thought experiments, how does one differentiate between science and new media art? One distinguishing factor is the intent or the goal of the work. Scientific experiments (even thought experiments) have a quantitative goal of increasing human understanding of the universe, its structures, and its processes. New media art can have the same goal, but more likely the goal is qualitative rather than quantitative. Art lives in the world of intangibles: meaning, beauty, poetry, philosophy, emotion, etc., all qualities that currently cannot be measured.
One might argue that another distinguishing factor is that art is subjective while science is objective, but analyses of the scientific method and some scientific experiments themselves (particularly quantum physics) will argue that science is also subjective.
Are the qualitative values of art headed toward quantification? When I was in school, a popular topic of debate was whether or not psychology, considered a soft science, was going to become a hard science. Advances in neurobiology were making it appear that the human mind was becoming more and more quantifiable. Fifteen years later despite huge strides in neuroscience, the mind persists in having unmeasurable qualities. Computer robotic models of the mind employing neural nets and other alife systems are beginning to exhibit behavior indicative of mind, but here again the quality of thought and consciousness is a hot topic of debate. So, while artists must address advances in technology and scientific knowledge in relation to aesthetics, I suspect that art is in little danger of turning into science or vice versa any time soon.
Many artists using new media have chosen to develop what I describe as an experimental methodology rather than a visual language. Since much of the creativity of a project, specifically a project that involves the creation of interactive systems, is in its programming, the language used is already highly refined. Although it is possible to create computer programs that function like poetry, it is difficult to acheive both poetic programming and functional code. So, the language of new media programming can develop only as much as the code can be written to perform specific tasks. It is the task: the functions (actions) and sequence of actions that comprises the creative act. The activities chosen are the essential aspects of the form, and although these activities can certainly be involved with the development of new aesthetic languages, the development of languages can be thought to fall under a broader category: the development of methodologies.
The focus on the development of methodologies is part of the reason there has been an increasing interest in art and science collaborations. Developing a methodology in artistic practice is similar to designing an experiment in scientific practice. Like scientists, artists often have to work within the limitations of their tools, and both certainly have to work within the limitations of the physical world (although both can also perform thought experiments, for example Einstein's famous 'train traveling at the speed of light'). For the most part, physical limitations can inspire the creative process, encouraging artists to create new forms and structures.
Once a methodology or series of methodologies are created, the results of the process can inspire new processes and help to refine the system. However, the results of the process is not the place where the artwork lies. Like in science, the results of an experiment can be used to provide evidence of the idea present in the experiment itself. The significance of an experiment in the scientific world is the repeatability of an experiment, the ability for others to perform the script or score of the work to obtain the same or similar results. But the results themselves may not be desireable. For example, lab rats with advanced cancer might be a result of an experiment testing the efficacy of a new drug. The rats themselves are not a prized result, in fact they are quickly euthanized at the end of the experiment. Rather, the information gained from the rats is the important part of the work.
In new media art a process is often shown to the viewer, and that process may or may not create some sort of output. For example, with a robotic machine designed to create drawings, although the drawings themselves are often valued, their significance is in what they tell us about the drawing machine's activity and methods.
Yesterday evening I sat on my rooftop looking at the New York skyline. It was a bright sunny August day and sunset was nearing. As I observed the visual scene, I considered the elements of the scene and how my eye and mind put these together. Then I noticed something I didn't expect. My clear, well-lit visual scene was littered with visual illusions and anomalies.
First, there were numerous aftereffects. The impending sunset created strong contrast between the skyline, Queensboro bridge and the sky, so as I moved my eyes I would see a faint outline of the bridge or buildings floating in the sky.
Then, I noted that because of the bright day I was wearing sunglasses, and tiny scratches on the surface of the lenses were obstructing my view and that tiny pieces of dust on the surface of my eye (known as 'floaters' because of the way they appear to float over the visual scene) were also a part of my visual experience.
Finally, my view was dotted with a series of smoke stacks that although at the time they weren't emitting visual smoke, the areas above the smoke stacks were distorted because of heat rising from the chimneys.
Well, if you were trying to design a computer vision system, you might not think that any of these visual illusions would prevent the system from obtaining accurate information about the visual scene, but my eye/brain visual system experienced otherwise.
In the scene, there were a number of airplanes visible at various distances taking off and landing from two nearby airports, Kennedy and LaGuardia. I could also see several trails left by previous planes. However, the afterimages from the bridge looked like very thin lines and were easily mistaken for the trails of planes. If I tried to examine a plane closely, it would inevitably fly near the heat rising from one of the smoke stacks in the scene and cause my image of the plane to distort and in some cases if the plane was very small or far away, completely disappear.
Some very far away planes and birds could be distinguished and their distances could be estimated. But, some of the scratches from my glasses and floaters looked like tiny birds in the distance of my scene. At one point, even, a large piece of dust at the corner of my eye kept fooling me into thinking that a pigeon had flown onto the rooftop and was walking next to me just outside my direct line of vision.
Now, for the most part, any of the visual illusions I experienced could be quickly verified by movements of my eyes or head. I wonder, however, how many illusions I experienced that I was not aware of. I didn't have information that confirmed exactly the distance of the objects in my field of view, so I suspect that many of my estimated distances were incorrect. And I imagine that there were many objects in this complex visual scene that I failed to observe because of illusion or simply limited visual ability.
Last night there was an electrical blackout that spanned most of the northern east coast from Washington DC up into Canada and west to Detroit affecting all the major cities that lasted for more than 1/2 a day. The current belief is that the blackout was caused by lightning striking a power plant near Niagara Falls. All five boroughs of New York City were without power. Instead of causing mass chaos, however, New Yorkers were suprisingly calm and helpful. I spent the evening on our roof examining a canopy of stars that probably haven't been visible over New York City for many years, even the color of the stars were distinguishable.
The mayor of New York, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, spoke on the radio (many stations were broadcasting over telephone lines because of a loss of auxiliary power) at nightfall. His response to questions about the reason for the blackout spoke to technology and infrastructure so complex that his words almost sounded philosophical.
In the 70s, New York City experienced a massive blackout and the city resolved to never let such a widespread failure ever happen again. They responded by re-configuing the power grid, but the events of yesterday show that the changes were not able to prevent a blackout of the pervious magnitude or larger (last night's blackout was the largest in history). When the mayor was asked why New York was not able to prevent this major blackout, he talked about how our society has become internationally inter-dependent through technology. He said that we were clearly dependent on our neighbors locally in this crisis, but the electrical needs in a city as large as New York cannot be met locally and that New York was dependent on hydo-electric power from the USA's neighbor to the North, Canada.
How and when did this electrical dependency begin?
As a child in Croatia, Nikola Tesla, the inventor of alternating current, first saw a steel engraving of Niagara Falls. He told an uncle that he would harness the power of the water with a huge water wheel, and thirty years later he achieved his goal.
In the early 1890's the idea of transmitting power all the way from Niagara Falls to any major city was a seemingly insurmountable task. The only transmission of electrical power available was Thomas Edison's DC power that could only be transmitted about 1/2 mile. However, the alternating current system created by Nicola Tesla made it feasible for Westinghouse corporation to create a system to transmit electric power from the the Falls, although such a system had never been tried.
Tesla's hydro-electric power system was a great success, eventually providing power to New York City but his great dream was to transmit the power for free without wires by transmitting it from towers at the falls. This plan unfortunately was never achieved.
It's a bit ironic that yesterday's blackout may have been caused by a bolt of lightening hitting the place of Tesla's greatest triumph, since Tesla himself was known as the "Master of Lightning."
Voices of Innovation Radio Program: The American Association of Engineering Societies. Tesla: Niagara Falls Program #75 December 13, 2002
PBS.org Tesla: Master of Lightning Documentary New Voyage Communications, Inc., 2000 http://www.pbs.org
My husband Chuck's father became blind as an adult as a result of being injured in the first World War. After the war, with his eyesight rapidly failing, he became a physical therapist and learned to read and write braille.
As a child, Chuck remembers a house constantly filled with sound. His father was a man who was very engaged with the world and who tirelessly listened to books on tape and radio news reports, and held long conversations with guests at his house. Although blind, John Varga had an incredibly sharp mind and keen memory, highly aware of his surroundings and of the fact that as a blind man some people might feel he was easily taken advantage of.
He recorded the voices and sounds of the children over the years, Chuck and his sister, sometimes embarrassing them at family functions by playing some ancient performances for the aunts and uncles just as if he was pulling out old baby phopto albums. One of Chuck's teenage memories of his father was a time when he was caught in a lie. While he spun his tale, he noticed his father pull out and flip through a box of audio tapes, running his fingers over the braille labels. Without a word, he popped a tape into the cassette player and Chuck heard the previously recorded sound of his own voice in direct contradiction to what he was saying. Besides being embarrassed about his fibbing, Chuck realized that his father's memory for sound and spatial location was much more acute than his own. Practice handling the tapes and finding exact recordings probably accounted for some of this ability, but perhaps the world of sound is more closely attuned to the world of memories than the world of vision.
The Atmospherics/Weather Works project is expanding this year thanks to Glenn (Dr. Glann Van Knowe) introducing me to Atmospheric Scientist Dr. Patrick Market. An email from Dr. Market today states:
"I have been thinking a lot about the concept of sonifying the balloon soundings. I was reminded of how the old (1940-1970s) equipment used to work. Although the telemetried data came back in a numeric format, the operator did have an audio signal to which he or she could listen. When the atmosphere became very dry, the sound became very deep and sound like a boat's motor. Thus, the phrase "motor boating" was born in forecasting circles."
It's funny how a successful and useful sonification could have happened unintentionally as an artifact of the technology. How much more useful could they be if some thought and design was put into the sonic component of a technology?
Last night we saw the film September 11 in which a group of eleven international filmmakers were asked make to an eleven minute short film of their choosing. One of the short films stays with me, it was directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu from Mexico. For most of this 11 minute film the screen was black, but the screening room was filled with sound. First, the sound of chanting (my friend said it reminded her of a mantra) then, humming sounds, something like the sound of a wind tunnel, followed by radio and television broadcasts on the morning of the trade center attacks. There were very few images on the screen throughout the film, only a few flashes of imagery taken of the towers during the attacks. The combination of the rich sound track and the flashes of imagery brought back a flood of memories from that horrible day.
Especially strong for me were the humming and wind sounds. Those sounds for some reason brought me back to another time well before the tragedy when a flight I was taking from Chicago to Sao Paolo lost electricity while we were in the air. The combination of the fear of a serious problem with the plane and the constant humming of the engines is something I won't forget easily. While watching the film, the physical experience of that memory was for me almost stifling. In addition to remembering, I physically felt short of breath as if I was suffocating.
The traditional view of the scientific process is that it happens entirely without emotion. Emotion clouds rational thought. Trying to control emotional responses to information is certainly important in keeping scientific objectivity, but current research indicates that important decision making actually involves what is known as the 'emotional' brain, and music is well known to strongly influence emotion. Oddly (or perhaps not so oddly when emotional inteligence is considered), studies have shown that listening to music improves children's mathematical ability. In my own experience while in college, I found that if I listened to certain music while studying, the same music on headphones during the test could actually improve my ability to remember the material.
To me, all this points to another possible benefit of data sonification beyond the communication of specific data through sound patterns. Could sonifications be a memory aid to researchers listening to complex data over long periods of time? Might a sonification of data be a stronger memory trigger for a familiar pattern than a visual image of the same pattern? Or, in combination with imagery could sonification help researchers to remember details about previous data by helping to put them back in the emotional and mental state they were in when they heard the patttern previously?
Media is not reality. Despite arguments about the 'disorientation' or 'confusion' that a person might experience in immersive virtual reality, just ask anyone who has experienced virtual reality, the truth is that even with the highest level of technology it's obvious to even a young child that virtual reality is not the real world.
From the invention of the microscope and telescope to night vision goggles and remote viewing system, however, media has shown us aspects of the world that aren't part of our immediate physical perception. Media has forced us to look beyond the abilities of our eyes and listen beyond the abilities of our ears to perceive the infinitely small, large, or imperceptible. Media has forced us to ask how 'real' is our perceived reality?
The ability to observe what is beyond even our imagination has inspired the imagination to invent new ways to perceive. The creation of film, for example, has shown us that action in time can be broken down into discrete moments yet perceived as smooth motion through the persistence of vision. Film has given us a way to conceptualize time, thought by some to be the fourth dimension. This window into the fourth dimension, explored by the artists Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Max Weber, and Marcel Duchamp, continues to be explored by artists using traditional artistic media, film and video, and interactive media. In many cases, these explorations appear to have no intention of re-creating perceived reality.
The commentary on a Max Weber's retrospective exhibition at 291 in January 1911, published by Alfred Stieglitz in Camera Work, explains his intentions:
"Form, with him, is not the reproduction on canvas of the image formed on the retina. It is analyzed into its constituent parts, its bulk is emphasized, the relationship of lines and masses is explained..."
In a review of Arthur Miller's book Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc in Physics today, Stephen G. Brush observes that the work of Picasso and the work of Einstein were connected through ideas. He states:
"The French mathematician Henri Poincaré provided inspiration for both Einstein and Picasso. Einstein read Poincaré's Science and Hypothesis and discussed it with his friends in Bern. He might also have read Poincaré's 1898 article on the measurement of time, in which the synchronization of clocks was discussed--a topic of professional interest to Einstein as a patent examiner. Picasso learned about Science and Hypothesis indirectly through Maurice Princet, an insurance actuary who explained the new geometry to Picasso and his friends in Paris. "
Like today, scientific advances influenced the art of the early 20th century. What is also intriguing about the previous quote, however, is the transmission medium. Brush observes that both Einsteim and Picasso were introduced to the new theories through associates in the business world, the world of transactions of an increasingly global scale. Einstein was a patent examiner and Picasso's friend an insurance actuary. The practical management of business was intertwined somehow with these highly theoretical and seemingly impractical pursuits.
References
"The Fourth Dimension from Plastic Point of View," published in Stieglitz's photography journal Camera Work in 1910, was a groundbreaking internationally influential theoretical treatise.
Linda Dalrymple Henderson The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983)
Linda Dalrymple Henderson "Mabel Dodge, Gertrude Stein, and Max Weber: A Four Dimensional Trio," Arts 57, no. 1 (Sept. 1982), pp. 106–11.
Willard Bohn, "In Pursuit of the Fourth Dimension: Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Weber," Arts 54, no. 10 (June 1980): 166–69.
Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc
Arthur I. Miller Basic Books (Perseus), New York, 2001.
Art Mirrors Physics Mirrors Art. Stephen G. Brush, Physics Today Vol 54 Issue 12 p. 49 2001
Twice each day in the US, about 80 weather balloons are sent up in various regions to gather information about the weather. The information, taken in a straight line from ground level is called a 'sounding' like similar measurements taken from the surface of a body of water down.
There is a particular pattern of sounding data called a 'loaded gun' which is thought to be a strong indicator of a coming tornado.
Today I spoke with Dr. Patrick S. Market, a professor of atmospheric science at The University of Missouri, Columbia about new directions for the Atmospherics/Weather Works weather sonification project. We're going to develop a new series of sonifications perhaps based on information from these soundings.
Real Time Weather Data http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/
Texas A&M Weather Interface http://www.met.tamu.edu/personnel/students/weather/weather_interface.html
Unisys http://weather.unisys.com
Although eye movements and attention have been determined to be separate, there is an important link: attention is focused on a particular stimulus a split second before the eye is directed to look at it. The Volvo corporation has accepted the link between eye movement and attention and is using it as the basis of a new driving system that keeps track of the driver's eye movements and delivers a warning if the driver is not paying enough attention to the road.
Of special interest to Volvo is helping professional drivers monitor drowsiness. This work is the contemporary equivalent of Frank Gilbreth's work in the 1930's on workload management for machine operators. In the case of Volvo, there is an attempt to measure mental energy through the monitoring of eye movements rather than the physical energy monitoring of Gilbreth's photographs.
Volvo Trucks Researches Driver Distraction Volvo Truck Corporation Press Release May 7, 2003
The effect of an optical illusion can be more than just the pleasure of an enjoyable parlor game, it can literally be a matter of life and death. Anyone who has had to drive on the highway in a dense fog knows the terror of encountering a fast-moving car at close range with no warning, but Stuart Antsis of the Department of Psychology of the University of California San Diego has determined that in addition to low visibility, fog also creates the illusion of objects moving more slowly. Drivers not only fail to see fast moving cars in a dense fog (In 2002, 1200 fog-related vehicle accidents occurred in Wisconsin alone), but drivers misjudge their own speed and the speed of other cars. Antsis's work details the nature of the low contrast movement illusion and his work suggests that some simple graphic indicators on or around the road might save lives.
Human beings have only experienced high speed motion for a little over 100 years, far too short for any significant evolution of the visual system to adapt to this new kind of stimulus. It's essential that we understand how the human perceptual system works in the novel situations in which new technology is placing our bodies and do everything possible to give people the tools to more accurately analyze and understand these situations. It's not enough to merely give humans increased abilities through technologies, researchers must make sure the human perceptual system is able to handle these new capabilities and if not, create ways to augment human perception appropriately.
Moving in a Fog: Stimulus Contrast Affects the Perceived Speed and Direction of Motion. Stuart Antsis, Department of Psychology UCSD 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, CA 92093-Unpublished Paper 2002
From about 1997 to the present, I have been periodically performing using the Intuitive Ocusonics system as a musical instrument with different free improvisers. During that time, I have discovered that there is a small, close knit community of free improvisers around the world that perform together, and that performing with different improvisers is not only exciting, but also helps one to quickly develop skills in listening and performing. I have come to believe that the process of free improvisation can teach us ways to improve other communication systems, be they in-person social systems, systems mediated by the computer, or computer-human interaction.
A session of free improvisation has a lot in common with other uncertain systems, like the rise and fall of capitalist economies for example. During a free improvisation, any musician of the performng group is faced with a number of choices. For instance: he can continue playing what he was playing previously, he can respond to what another improviser is playing either by playing something similar or directly opposed, he can completely stop playing, etc. In a similar way in our free market economy, investors also have choices (buy or sell in response to the actions of others or independently, or do nothing)
Since a free improvisation has no previously determined structure, in a free improvisation with an audience, something very interesting happens. The audience itself has an effect on the performance. This is true even if the audience is simply the natural environment in the case of improvisers working with soundscapes, or if the audience is not physically present as in an on-line performance. In addition, the experience of the free improvisation can be radically different for different listeners. Sometimes the performers can feel that the improvisation did not go well while audience members loved it, and vice versa. Similarly in free market economies, investors' actions are affected by the actions of non-investors and both investors and non-investors can have radically different experiences of the same economic situation.
I'm not proposing that a mathematical analysis of a free improvisation session could help economists make more accurate predictions. I agree with parts of Paul Omerod's new general theory of social and economic behavior, Butterfly Economics in which he proposes that specific predictions about the economy might be impossible to make because of the nature of the system. What is curious to me is how although I have no background in economic theory, I was able to take to Ormerod's theory so easily. Part of this of course has to do with his delightful writing style, and part of it has to do with some background in the study of chaotic systems, but I think that most of it has to do with having experienced free improvisation. I think there is a kind of intuitive understanding of complex social and ecological systems that can be developed through free improvisation.
Maybe what I am really proposing is that economists and anyone interested in forecasting should pick up and instrument and a few friends and perform a free improvisation. It may open some eyes.
Paul Omerod. Butterfly Economics. New York: Random House 1998.
The Human angle of vision is about 200 degrees, however it is only within about 15 degrees in the center of those 200 degrees that high resolution images are formed.
In contrast, according to Titus R. Neumann from the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, insect vision, although generally low resolution, has a much wider angle of view, allowing insects to practically see in all directions at once. Neumann's research has shown that the size and location of areas of more acute vision varies between different insect species. Insects living the the desert or other flat environments have acuity around the horizon while some flying insects, for example the dragonfly, have acuity in the frontal regions. Neumann has modeled compound eye optics that show an entire spherical field of view in a flat image by taking a cubic computer model of a world and creating a filtered transformation.
Looking at these transformed image representing the fly's eye view of the world, I am reminded of flattened images I have used for quicktime vr panoramas and projected immersive environments I have seen such as the CAVE.
Neumann's team is using a variety of spherical eye models to model visual information processing in insects and state that this technique could be used in the development of biomimetic computer vision systems, that is systems like the mars rover that will be able to see 360 degrees at once like an insect. While this kind of vision could provide information to the rover itself aiding in navigation, how will the simultaneous viewing of 360 degrees be interpreted by the humans who remotely view the vision of these robots? Does this insect vision system have the potential to 'improve' human vision through augmentation? Could drivers use such a system to become aware of traffic on all sides of their vehicles? And, would the use of this system change our visual image and conception of our world?
Modeling Insect Compound Eyes: Space-Variant Spherical Vision Titus R. Neumann Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Biologically Motivated Computer Vision (BMCV 2002) Eds. H.H. Bulthoff, S.W. Lee, T. Poggio, and C. Wallraven LNCS 2525 pp. 360-367 Berlin: Springer-Verlag (2002)
Hecht, Eugene, Optics, 2nd Ed, Addison Wesley, 1987
Hecht, Eugene, Optics, Schaum's Outline Series, McGraw-Hill ,1975
In just a few months, two six wheeled robotic geologists are scheduled to land on Mars in search of evidence of water. Each robot is equipped with several high resolution color, infrared, and microscopic computer vision systems designed to identify mineral compositions in rocks and soil. As part of preparations for this voyage, rovers were taken into a remote desert in Chile that although very dry and desolate, is teeming with an enormous variety of life. Although life was present at almost every turn and detectable by human observers, the rovers were unable to find any signs of life during their test run.
The rovers left Earth during a very specific launch window in June when the earth, mars, and the sun align to create the shortest and most efficient path between earth and mars. In just a few weeks, August 27th 2003, mars will be closer to earth and brighter than it has been in thousands of years, providing ideal observation conditions.
NASA Computational Sciences Division: Destination Mars August, 2003 http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/
Computerized vision systems have to be able to distinguish form and color in various lighting situations, and perhaps most importantly, they have to be able to perceive various kinds of movement. Robotic (moving) vision systems also have to be able to differentiate between internal movement (i.e. the movement of the robot itself or the camera input) and external movement.
Since most computer vision systems use digital video as the input source, it is possible to detect a change in pixels between one frame to the next and compare the changes to camera movement data and other information.
Although perceived motion in human vision can be described similarly as subtle changes in retinal illumination over space and time, the human vision system perceives motion in a very different way than current computer vision systems. This is clear when one considers the phenomenon of motion induced blindness (MIB). MIB is a phenomenon of visual disappearance where important static visual information in a scene that includes smooth motion is perceived to disappear.
Motion Induced Blindness, Yoram Bonneh, Alexander Cooperman, and Dov Sagi October 2000 http://www.keck.ucsf.edu/~yoram/mib.html
An article by Shaoni Bhattacharya in the New Scientist news service presents a recent genetic study that seems to indicate that the development of color vision in the primate ancestors of humans may have caused them to lose the some of their sense of smell.
Bhattacharya cites Genetics Scientist Jianzhi George Zhang of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor whose work indicates that the ability to detect highly specific scent molecules was lost in primates about 23 million years ago, at approximately the same time full color vision was developed in both male and female primates.
Zhang and his colleague David Webb point out that there is a genetic gender-based difference in full color vision ability. To see full color, two genes are required: one for red and one for green color vision. Both these genes reside on the X chromosome, indicating that female primates have had color vision longer than males.
Both scent detection and color vision are useful in the selection of a mate, and Zhang speculates that the loss of detailed smell and gain of color vision are related. He hypothesizes that there may be an advantage to choosing a mate over long distances using color rather than scent.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1331721100)
Color Vision Ended Human Phermone Use. Shaoni Bhattacharya New Scientist news service 16 June 2003
In the late 19th century, G. T. Fencher first described the phenomenon known as "pattern-induced flicker colors", an example of subjective color. He determined that false color is perceived in the light areas of a light/dark stroboscopic pattern.
In 1894, toymaker C.E. Benham popularized this idea through a creation he called the "artificial spectrum top" that he sold through Messrs. Newton and Co. This top, now called "Benham's top" was a spinning disk that was colored half black and half white with thin black lines. <see http://www.swin.edu.au/bsee/mazzo/suitcase/kits/lop/lop1.htm> When the disk spins fast enough, the eye transforms the curved thin black lines into circles on the surface of the disk like grooves in a record. The viewer perceives each ring of lines as tinted with a different color because the lines occur at various times afer the flicker. When I viewed Benham's top, I saw the lines that came closer to the flicker as a dull red color, and those that occurred later as a dark blue, when I reversed the direction of the spinning disk, therefore reversing the sequence of thin lines, the colors I perceived reversed.
The concept of pattern-induced flicker colors was used in the 1950's in an early experiment with color television called the Butterfield color encoder. Using black and white images produced using red, green, and blue blocking filters, the engineers created a flicker pattern for a soft drink advertisement over KNXT in Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the effect of subjective color is so subtle and diferent for every viewer that many viewers did not believe the colors seen were deliberate and certainly didn't see them as naturalistic.
The flicker effect of the Butterfield color encoder never caught on as a method of producing color television, but sometimes its efffect can be seen, for example when a television camera sweeps past a bright light, sometimes a spectrum of color can be seen streaking across the screen. This effect is also sometimes created in still images, for example when the eye moves quickly over a black and white patterned image. In this case, the eye movement is creating the spinning effect.
Pattern induced flicker colors are believed to be caused by lateral inhibition and diffferent rates of stimulation for color-specific retinal ganglion cells.
Adamczak W (1981) The amacrine cells as an important processing site of pattern-induced flicker colors. Vision Res 21:1639–1642
Benham CE (1895) The artificial spectrum top. Nature 2:321
Cohen J, Gordon DA (1949) The Prevost-Fechner-Benham Subjective Colors. Psychol Bull 46:97–136
Festinger L, Allyn MR, White C W (1971) The Perception of Color with Achromatic Stimulation. Vision Res 11:591–612
Christoph von Campenhausen & Jürgen Schramme (1995) 100 years of Benham’s top in colour science. Perception 24:695–717
Fechner GT (1838) Ueber eine Scheibe zur Erzeugung subjectiver Farben. In: Poggendorf JC (ed.) Annalen der Physik und Chemie pp 227–232 · Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, Leipzig
The Colors of Flickering Lights Art Winfree http://www.sas.org/E-Bulletin/2002-05-03/ad/Benham.html
Science Snacks: Benham's Disk The Exploratorium http://www.exploratorium.edu/snacks/benhams_disk.html
In 1856, Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux created the winning design for Central Park in New York City. They called their design "Greensward," and designed the park to provide visitors with an endless variety of visions of the picturesque natural landscape. Their vision of the park was part of the cult of nature of the Romantic Era, the same movement that inspired the Hudson River School of painting. In fact, the park's designers believed their creation to be a great work of visual art in itself, providing living landscape paintings to city dwellers suffering under the environmental pain of the industrial age.
The park was originally designed in a part of the city frequented by the upper class and nearly inaccessible to the working class until the late 19th century. The park's designers, however, planned for a high level of movement through the park, designing an elaborate circulation system of wide tunnels and bridges, each one different in keeping with their concept of the endlessly changing landscape. The park, which remains essentially unchanged today, is filled with people from all walks of life, both city residents and visitors from all over the world. The park's designers vision was one created for a lasting future.
In 1957, the world was hit between the eyes with another vision of the future. The USSR launched Sputnik, first artificial earth satellite. In response, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was formed by the US Department of Defense to try to re-establish the US as the world leader in science and technology. At the same time, there was a growing movement within the then relatively small computing community of visionaries who imagined a future where people would interact with computers and other computer users around the world in real time. ARPA researcher J. C. R. Licklider like his contemporary visionary Vannevar Bush believed that computers could enhance human ability for form new insights and together with W. Clark of MIT developed the concept of the intergalactic network of distributed social interaction, a name clearly inspired by the new space exploration movement.
Two years later in 1964, Paul Baran of the RAND corporation developed the concept of packet-switching networks, the backbone of the internet, and by 1966, a plan was developed for the first ARPANET data network by Lawrence Roberts of MIT. The first packets were sent in 1969. The ARPANET was conceived of and designed with a vision of an inteconnected interactive community of people. The 'interglactic network' concept, formed in an era of utopian social experiments and optimistic dreams of space exploration has proven sustainable where many other social experiments have failed.
Like the design of Central Park, the concept and design of the internet started with a utopian vision of a future built on social interaction and shared resources.
The Sidewalks of New York, Heritage Media Corporation 1999
Country, Park, & City The Architecture and Life of Calvert Vaux Francis R. Kowsky. Oxford University Press 1998
The Park and the People: A History of Central Park by Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992)
Encyclopedia of New York City edited by Kenneth T. Jackson (New York, N.Y.: New-York Historical Society, 1995)
The WPA Guide to New York City (New York, N.Y.: The New Press, 1992)
Rebuilding Central Park: A Management and Restoration Plan by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers (Cambridge, M.A.: The MIT Press, 1987)
Guide to Central Park (New York, N.Y.: James Miller, 1874)
A Study of Central Park by E.S. Savas (New York, N.Y., 1976)
J.C.R. Licklider & W. Clark, MIT: "On-Line Man Computer Communication" (August 1962)
Paul Baran, RAND: "On Distributed Communications Networks" 1964
Lawrence G. Roberts, MIT: "Towards a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers" (October 1966)
Hobbes' Internet Timeline http://www.zakon.org/robert/internet/timeline
History of ARPANET Behind the Net - The untold history of the ARPANET By Michael Hauben http://www.dei.isep.ipp.pt/docs/arpa.html
Bush, Vannevar As We May Think July 1945
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