Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
- Sonorisms I
- More than just a machine that runs along
- Nobody was doing anything
- NYLA
- Aggressively Zen
To see with fresh, uninstructed eyes and an open mind requires a deliberate, self-aware act by the observer. Abstract artworks represent themselves and should be first viewed for themselves. When looking at outdoor abstract pieces, concentrate initially on the unique optical experience produced by the artworks. See as the artist saw when making the piece.
A focus on optical experience does not deny stories, it postpones them. Viewing an artwork may evoke interesting narratives – or just tedious artchat recalling similar art or artists, concocting playful tales, realizing how scrap metal was repurposed into art, making judgments about the artist's intentions or character, or contemplating an artwork's provenance, price, politics. Let the artwork stand on its own. Walk around fast and slow, be still, look and see from
up down sideways close afar above below
, enjoy the multiplicity ofsilhouettes shadows dapples clouds airspaces sun earth glowing
. Your only language is vision.
What I suggest has usually happened [during the act of creation] is this: the artist has glimpsed something: he has seen, perhaps fleetingly and indistinctly, some particular relation or quality of visible features which had previously been disregarded, and which impressed itself on him by its beauty. By means of making a work of art he then seeks as it were to fix isolate and concentrate what he has seen.
No one has ever succeeded in demonstrating in principle how this is done, but done it is; and when we see it done we find it hard to understand why it should have been so intensely difficult to do.
Eboshi: What exactly are you here for?
Ashitaka: To see with eyes unclouded by hate.
Can repair sites and repair actors claim special insight or knowledge, by virtue of their positioning vis-à-vis the worlds of technology they engage? Can the fixer know and see different things—indeed, different worlds—than the better-known figures of "designer" or "user"?
She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. “I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”
Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn’t think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating.
She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.
I remember my mother sitting me down at the age of about five with pencil and paper to draw an acacia tree in the yard while she busied herself with her own sketchbook.
After a while she came over to see my efforts. “Splendid! But haven’t you noticed how the trunk narrows as it rises? And see how the branches flatten out sideways, not like that oleander over there, where they all go up at a steep angle. Now don’t rub that one out, just do another drawing to compare with the first one.”
I recently started a field notebook assignment for my upper-level Ecology class at the University of Montana. I asked my students to pick one “thing” and observe it carefully over the entire semester.
In addition to their field notebooks, the students also had to suggest at least ten research questions inspired by their observations.
Intuition means to see immediately, directly.
Considered as a form of activity, the seeing eye and the seen object are one, not two. One is embedded in the other. People who know with the intellect before seeing with the eyes cannot be said to be truly seeing.
With intuition, time is not a factor. It takes place immediately, so there is no hesitation. It is instantaneous. Since there is no hesitation, intuition doesn’t harbour doubt. It is accompanied by conviction. Seeing and believing are close brothers.
I have almost never judged a work of art by first looking at its signature. This way of assessment holds no interest for me. If what I see is good, it is good with or without a seal.
Whether it is a painting or a pot, you must first look at the thing itself.
Our epoch is fixing its own style day by day. It is there under our eyes—Eyes which do not see.
The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.
The newborn baby and the [blind man suddenly gifted with sight] do not have to learn to see. Sight is given to them. But they do have to learn to perceive. Perception is learnt and learnt slowly. Skill is required for perception as for speech. We are largely unaware of the skill we exercise. None of the things we have to learn to perceive are self-evident, or, apparently, instinctively evident. No doubt, however, we have an instinctive aptitude for this learning, and once we have learnt we cannot easily see as though we had not.
As Ruskin says, one has to strive, if one is to see with the 'Innocent Eye'.
The perception of solid form is entirely a matter of experience. We see nothing but flat colors; and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey indicates the dark side of a solid substance... The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of color, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify, as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.
Learning to design is, first of all, learning to see. Designers see more, and more precisely. This is a blessing and a curse—once we have learned to see design, both good and bad, we cannot un-see. The downside is that the more you learn to see, the more you lose your “common” eye, the eye you design for. This can be frustrating for us designers when we work for a customer with a bad eye and strong opinions. But this is no justification for designer arrogance or eye-rolling. Part of our job is to make the invisible visible, to clearly express what we see, feel and do. You can’t expect to sell what you can’t explain.
This is why excellent designers do not just develop a sharper eye. They try to keep their ability to see things as a customer would. You need a design eye to design, and a non-designer eye to feel what you designed.
The cause of the experience of beauty is a series of events, not a state of affairs existing continuously. That perhaps is why the cause of the experience is something we find impossible to point out. It will not stand still to be pointed at. We can point out only what we perceive. We can never point out or describe what we see.
Drawing requires that you pay attention to every detail—even the seemingly unimportant ones. In creating an image (no matter how skillfully), the lines and tones on the paper provide ongoing feedback as to what you have observed closely and what you have not.
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.
"One and one don't make two, but maybe five or eight or ten, depending on the number of interactions you can get going in a situation."
"The great misinterpretation of twentieth-century art is the claim advanced that many people, especially critics, that cubism of necessity led to abstraction. But on the contrary, cubism was about the real world. It was an attempt to reclaim a territory for figuration, for depiction. Faced with the claim that photography had made figurative painting obsolete, the cubists performed an exquisite critique of photography; they showed that there were certain aspects of looking—basically the human reality of perception—that photography couldn't convey, and that you still needed the painter's hand and eye to convey them." — David Hockney
I was thinking about this not long ago while reading in Petapixel an essay by a photographer named Scott Reither, “Long Form Study: Why Photographers Should Repeatedly Revisit A Scene.” In it, he described photographing one particular stretch of beach, over and over, throughout his career.
Of course that landscape has changed over time, and of course he’s had moments when he felt he’d captured the same territory so many times there was nothing left to see.
But there was always something more to see — maybe because of a change in Reither’s life, rather than in the physical environment.
Join me. Grab whatever you’ve got. Open the bag. Pinch it on its crinkly edges and pull apart the seams. Now we’re in business: We have broken the seal. The inside of the bag is silver and shining, a marvel of engineering — strong and flexible and reflective, like an astronaut suit. Lean in, inhale that unmistakable bouquet: toasted corn, dopamine, America, grief! We are the first humans to see these chips since they left the factory who knows when. They have been waiting for us, embalmed in preservatives, like a pharaoh in his dark tomb.
The story goes that the painter Al Held said, “Conceptual art is just pointing at things,” so John Baldessari decided to take him literally, and commissioned a bunch of amateur painters to paint realistic paintings of hands pointing at things.
As I wrote in Steal Like An Artist,
“Step 1: Wonder at something.
Step 2: Invite others to wonder with you.”Point at things, say, “whoa,” and elaborate.
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I:
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.
Kambara, detail by detail.
I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.
The results of intuition can be studied by the intellect, but the intellect cannot give birth to intuition.
"By making it possible for the photographer to observe his work and his subject simultaneously, and by removing most of the manipulative barriers between the photographer and the photograph, it is hoped that many of the satisfactions of working in the early arts can be brought to a new group of photographers. The process must be concealed from—non-existent for—the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in taking and not in making photographs. In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture, and our task is to make that possible."
— Edwin H. Land, co-founder of Polaroid
The hands want to see, the eyes want to caress.
If you would learn to think like reality, then here is the Tao:
Since the beginning
not one unusual thing
has ever happened.
To understand why people act the way they do, we must first realize that everyone sees themselves as behaving normally.
To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates.
It’s all too easy to argue that someone is exhibiting Bias #182 in your repertoire of fully generic accusations, but you can’t settle a factual issue without closer evidence. If there are biased reasons to say the sun is shining, that doesn’t make it dark out.
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.
Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.
Knowing the design can tell you much about the designer; and knowing the designer can tell you much about the design.
The essential thing in the art of epistemic rationality is to understand how every rule is cutting through to the truth in the same movement.
Your sword has no blade. It has only your intention. When that goes astray you have no weapon.
But the really fundamental problem with desiring the unattainable is that as soon as you actually get it, it stops being unattainable. If we cannot take joy in the merely available, our lives will always be frustrated.
The novice goes astray and says, “The art has failed me.”
The master goes astray and says, “I have failed my art."
Albert says that people have “free will.” Barry says that people don’t have “free will.” Well, that will certainly generate an apparent conflict. Most philosophers would advise Albert and Barry to try to define exactly what they mean by “free will,” on which topic they will certainly be able to discourse at great length. I would advise Albert and Barry to describe what it is that they think people do, or do not have, without using the phrase “free will” at all.
Reality is very large—just the part we can see is billions of lightyears across. But your map of reality is written on a few pounds of neurons, folded up to fit inside your skull. I don’t mean to be insulting, but your skull is tiny. Comparatively speaking. Inevitably, then, certain things that are distinct in reality, will be compressed into the same point on your map. But what this feels like from inside is not that you say, “Oh, look, I’m compressing two things into one point on my map.” What it feels like from inside is that there is just one thing, and you are seeing it.
There is an art to using words; even when definitions are not literally true or false, they are often wiser or more foolish. Dictionaries are mere histories of past usage; if you treat them as supreme arbiters of meaning, it binds you to the wisdom of the past, forbidding you to do better. Though do take care to ensure (if you must depart from the wisdom of the past) that people can figure out what you’re trying to swim.
Most applause lights are much more blatant, and can be detected by a simple reversal test.
For example, suppose someone says: We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI.
If you reverse this statement, you get: We shouldn’t balance the risks and opportunities of AI.Since the reversal sounds abnormal, the unreversed statement is probably normal, implying it does not convey new information. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for uttering a sentence that would be uninformative in isolation. “We need to balance the risks and opportunities of AI” can introduce a discussion topic; it can emphasize the importance of a specific proposal for balancing; it can criticize an unbalanced proposal. Linking to a normal assertion can convey new information to a bounded rationalist—the link itself may not be obvious. But if no specifics follow, the sentence is probably an applause light.
I once met a fellow who thought that if you used General Relativity to compute a low-velocity problem, like an artillery shell, General Relativity would give you the wrong answer—not just a slow answer, but an experimentally wrong answer—because at low velocities, artillery shells are governed by Newtonian mechanics, not General Relativity. This is exactly how physics does not work. Reality just seems to go on crunching through General Relativity, even when it only makes a difference at the fourteenth decimal place, which a human would regard as a huge waste of computing power. Physics does it with brute force. No one has ever caught physics simplifying its calculations—or if someone did catch it, the Matrix Lords erased the memory afterward.
Mystery exists in the mind, not in reality. If I am ignorant about a phenomenon, that is a fact about my state of mind, not a fact about the phenomenon itself. All the more so if it seems like no possible answer can exist: Confusion exists in the map, not in the territory. Unanswerable questions do not mark places where magic enters the universe. They mark places where your mind runs skew to reality.
There’s chocolate at the supermarket, and you can get to the supermarket by driving, and driving requires that you be in the car, which means opening your car door, which needs keys. If you find there’s no chocolate at the supermarket, you won’t stand around opening and slamming your car door because the car door still needs opening. I rarely notice people losing track of plans they devised themselves.
It’s another matter when incentives must flow through large organizations—or worse, many different organizations and interest groups, some of them governmental. Then you see behaviors that would mark literal insanity, if they were born from a single mind. Someone gets paid every time they open a car door, because that’s what’s measurable; and this person doesn’t care whether the driver ever gets paid for arriving at the supermarket, let alone whether the buyer purchases the chocolate, or whether the eater is happy or starving.