Perception and Art Terms Flashcards
Medieval Period
(5th- 15th centuries) artwork often lacked depth cues, making it seem flat and unrealistic
Eg. The Arrest of the Christ (unknown, c.1290)
Renaissance
(14th - 16th Centuries) saw increased use of pictorial depth cues in paintings which created great realism (representationalism)
Eg. Predica di San Marco ad Alessandria d’Egitto (Gentile and Giovanni Bellini c. 1504-1507)
Impressionism
(19th Century) reacted against verisimilitude of photographs, in contrast interpreted viewer’s perception of reality not just what the eye saw
Eg. Impression, Sunrise (Claude Monet, 1872)
Eg. Livingstone (2002) impression sunrise depicts glowing red sun appearing through dense morning fog in achromatic version the sun’s luminosity is equal to the background. Thus to where system sun is invisible. Visual disagreement between the Where and What systems gives the sun its vibrating jumpy intensity, when sun is altered to a more naturalistic lighter shade it loses its vibrancy
Post-Impressionism
often did not mix paints (subtractive colour mixing), but used complementary colors to achieve the same effect (additive colour mixing)
Georges Seurat (1859-1891): took more of a scientific approach, studied colour theory and develop pointillism (painting comprised of tiny dots of pure, intense colours) eg. La parade
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906): interested in simplifying natural forms to their geometric essentials, later paintings has increasingly naked canvas, wanted to know how much the brain would fill in the empty spaces
eg. Montagne Sainte Victoire
Cubism
(20th Century) liberated form by reassembling reality instead of portraying it, reduced objects to combinations of geometric forms which are perceptually reassembled (possibly by Gestalt Laws)
Eg. Violin and Grapes (Picasso) - applies similarity, proximity and closure
De Stijl
Dutch for The Style, aka neoplasticism (20th Century) advocated for pure abstraction to reduce things to their essentials, ignored natural form and colour, used vertical and horizontal lines and only black and white and primary colours
Eg. Piet Mondrian, Composition with Yellow, Blue and Red
Surrealism
(early 20th Century) “beyond reality”, emphasized how dreamlike states, symbols and workings of unconscious mind affect conscious reality, influenced by Freud’s writing on the unconscious
Eg. Las Trahison des Images (ceci nest pas une pipe) Rene Magritte
Eg. persistence of memory (salvador Dali)
Maurits Cornelis Escher: wanted people to think about nature of reality and process of visual perception, was directly affected by Gestalt psychology citing specific journal articles that inspired his work,
Rene Francois Ghislain Magritte: challenge people to think about conventions of painting, blurred line between real world and illusory world created by artist; asks question “what is reality”, many works depict paintings on an easel with the ‘real’ scene continuing at the edges
Surrealism frequently seen in photoshopped Images
Pop Art
(1950s) drew influence from popular culture, advertising, comic books. Experimented with variations in colour,
Eg. Marilyn Monroe (andy Warhol, 1962)
Exaggerated print techniques using widely spaced dots to create different colours like pointillism
Op Art
‘optical art’ aka perceptual abstraction, (1960s), is abstract constructed of lines or geometric patterns that affect the figure-ground relationship causing tension, results in visual illusions giving the impression of movement (kinetic art), vibration, patterns or depth and warping
Eg. Blaze 1 (bridget, Riley 1962)
Eg. Enigma (Isia Leviant, 1981)
Motion perception caused by microsaccades: minute involuntary eye movements (Troncoso 2008), these trigger neural signals of the higher-luminance (white) and lower-luminance (black) features, higher-luminance neural signals travel faster than lower-luminance signals, this discrepancy is interpreted as motion (peripheral drift illusion) -
eg. rotating snakes illusion
Victor Vasarely (1906-1997): called the father of op art, Tukoer-Ter-Ur (Vasarely, 1989), uses texture gradients and linear perspective to create illusion of depth
Trompe L’oeil
trick the eye”, employed as early as classical antiquity, but popularized in Baroque period and revived in 19th century America. Technique of creating highly realistic imagery that creates the illusion that an object is present, objects represented as (or appear to be) actual size
Eg. L.C., Which is Which? (donald Clapper, 2002) - what is real post stamp and what is painted
Perceptual Art
aka perceptualism (late 20th - early 21st century), viewer is an active participant in the creation of the experience (eg. by literally changing their point of view), the viewing experience is as important as the subject
Eg. Magic Eye autostereograms require observer to view it in a particular way
Anamorphic sidewalk chalk drawings; only work from one perspective
Neuroesthetics
explanation and understanding of the esthetics of art from the perspective of neuroscience, attempts to discover universals in art and esthetics using neuroscience, visual art reveals the brain’s perceptual capabilities (law of constancy, law of abstraction)
Eg. Solso (2000): recruited well-known portrait painter Humphrey Ocean and graduate student with no art training (both right handed), viewed and sketched 6 faces and 6 geometric figures while in fMRI, activity resulting from presentin geometric figures was subtracted from faces to control for motor activity, activity in V1 etc., RESULTS: increase in blood flow to face-processing regions in right posterior parietal (less activity for artist compared to novice), artist had greater right middle frontal activation (handles complex association and manipulation of visual forms)
Law of Constancy
despite variations in visual stimuli, we can determine essential properties of objects
Eg. cubism attempted to eliminate point of view, distance and lighting but we can still identify what is being depicted
Law of Abstraction
a specific instance or representation can be generalized due to limitations of memory
Eg. some cells process objects in a viewpoint-invariant manner
Peak-shift effect
One of Ramachandran’s 10 universal laws of art, first discovered in pigeons, training: animal reinforced for responding to a stimulus S+ (eg. rectangle), no reinforcement given for stimulus S- (eg. square), testing: greatest response occurs to stimulus that is more extreme than the training set (eg. very skinny rectangle). Also exaggerated depictions of art are preferred
