Really Excellent

This was originally posted on Cosmic Variance on May 3rd 2006. It was a report on the Categorically Not! event that took place on 23rd April 2006, entitled “Really?”. I’ve decided to reproduce it here as a happy memory of the wonder that Artist and Educator Bob Miller brought into the lives of many. (See next post.) It was a marvellous event overall (probably my favourite Cat Not! event), with several excellent presentations, and so I’ll reproduce the post in its entirety (with slight corrections) to give you a sense of the evening. -cvj

Well, apologies to all concerned for taking so long to post this, but here it is. The Categorically Not! two Sundays ago was -as usual- extremely enjoyable and informative. This one was all about Illusion, in some sense, the theme being “Really?”.

We started out with a few opening remarks by Bob Miller, who specialises in what some might call “light art”. He’s well known for creating a large number of wonderful works using light and shadow, several of them forming the cornerstone of exhibitions in the Exploratorium in San Francisco, for example. Have a look at the “lightwalk”, linked here.

Bob did not talk much, because he wanted everyone to just play, learning from getting involved. And play they did. He’d been up all night preparing (with KC Cole’s help) various fun things for people to do (see the table in the picture above, for example). All simple, and all with a little printed explanation about what to do, and the operation of the thing they were playing with or effect they were seeing.

At the left you see him explaining to somebody how to close one eye and move their head to get a perfect imaginary cube (that your mind has created while looking at a cutout piece of paper – a slightly distorted convex corner) to rotate eerily. The cube you see looking at the convex cutout looks a bit like one of the cubes in the image to the right. Here is the blurb that came with the illusion:

To Do and Notice:

Place your corner/cube on a table top. – Adjust the foot-flap on the back so that the corner stands up on its bottom edge. – Stand back about 4 feet. – Close one eye (or cover one eye with a hand) and look at the corner/cube.

The concave corner may pop out and appear as a convex white cube. If/when it does, just relax and enjoy the illusion.

Now move your head back and forth (or walk by the cube), or move your head up and down. The cube will follow your motion!

It may take a few tries. You may have to try the other eye, or adjust your distance from the cube, but with a little practice, most people experience the illusion. Make sure there are no shadows being cast into the corner and that the lighting is uniform.

Some people get so good at popping out the corner that they can learn to see it with both eyes open; in this case, it may help to be farther away.

With enough practice, you may be able to hold it in your hand and, as you rotate the corner, the cube will move in a counter-intuitive manner.

Once you’ve learned to see the cube quite easily, you may notice a subtle but distinct change in the perceived luminosity when the switch from corner to cube occurs.

What’s Going On:

Cubes are such common shapes that your mind’s eye is already perfectly primed to see them even when they don’t exist. Using tricks of perspective, Bob designed the angles of the sides so that they help the corner look like a cube.

As you move your head back and forth or up and down, your eye/brain gets a new clue one that should immediately make you realize that you’re not looking at a cube, but rather at a corner. Yet it doesn’t.
Here’s why: We’re all familiar with parallax: When you’re driving, trees in the distance barely seem to move, while roadside fence posts whiz by.
When the corner turns into a cube, near and far suddenly get reversed. You would think the information you get from parallax as you move your head would destroy the illusion that is, telling you what is really inside and what is outside, close and far. Instead, the brain interprets the reversed parallax by seeing the cube follow you. It not only jumps to the wrong conclusion; it uses the new information to see something impossible.

So What:

As Alice learned, it’s remarkably easy to believe impossible things especially when we want to do so. Any additional information can compound the illusion rather than destroy it. Some people believe this can explain such seemingly impossible things as the continuing support for George Bush that persists in the fact of one contradictory fact after another.

Heh. He stepped out a bit on the last sentence. Funny.

Below are some other attendees in action with some of the other optical games:

Actually, that was Jeff Booth and author and USC professor Aimee Bender teaming up there. Below is another pair, Elizabeth Janssen on the right:

Next up was Richard O. Brown, a staff neuroscientist at the Exploratorium.

He presented a series of really striking images showing the power of optical illusion. Some of them were just amazing! He spoke a lot about the basics behind how the mind plays with various perceptions, making adjustments here and there to add to what the eye actually sees, sometimes making terrible mistakes. This is interesting from the point of view of simple entertainment, but also vitally important in several important aspects of everyday life and society. Two examples which come to mind are the reliability of eyewitness reports, and the danger of driving while distracted (by for example a phone conversation). The point of the latter example is the fact that there are several cases where you simply don’t perceive something at all if you are engaged in another task, even though it is right there in the frame. There’s a famous video illustrating this, which he showed, and which I won’t spoil by telling you about its content. He talked about and illustrated several such things, complicated ones like that video and simple ones like our perception of light and dark being so variable. As an example of the latter, he did the following. He held up a card in front of the bright beam from the projector. It looked, as you can imagine, like a very bright white piece of card. But then he put another piece of card next to it, and only then did you realize that the first was in fact a black piece of card, by seeing how much brighter a real white card -the second- was. The point is that our perceptions of light and dark can swing between remarkable extremes depending upon the nature of the objects nearby with which comparisons are made. You all know a common example of this. The moon is not white -far from it in fact- but it sure looks like it, alone in a night sky, doesn’t it?

Well, here are some links he told us about. Have a look at Project Implicit for various tests and illustrations in “Social Cognition”. For a really amazing set of visual illusions, have a look at Michael Bach’s website, and be prepared to be bowled over by how wonderful they are. Another excellent site, that of Akiyoshi Kitaoka, shows several visual illusions which produce apparent motion when you look at them. You just can’t stop it! In fact, it can be so powerful for some viewers, I won’t put any of them up here, since it can induce dizziness and sometimes nausea. So be careful. Last, but not least, look at Jeremy Hinton’s amazing illusion at this link.

Click on the illusion to make it full size and follow the instructions. That green dot that appears from nowhere and circles around is entirely constructed by your mind. It is not there. Or is it? If nobody painted the green dot, but yet your mind constructs it and gives it motion, unfailingly, what does it mean to say that it is not there? I’m not sure. Maybe it is as real as the purple dots.

Next up was writer Aimee Bender, who is well known for many a marvellous piece of writing. Turns out she’s a professor at USC in the English department, which I only realized recently!

Aimee talked about the use of illusion in storytelling. Not necessarily fantastical stories -in any story. There is always an element of illusion used in order ot create something real within our minds. It was wonderful how she unpacked this and explained the storytelling process. She gave a number of examples, reading some wonderful stories. I decided to email her to get a reminder of the sources she read from, but also to get a description of what she was trying to get across to us directly from her, so that I don’t get it wrong. She sent me a reply, and I can think of nothing better but to simply paste it here:

The stories I read were “The Weather in San Francisco” by Richard Brautigan and “In a Room (Butterfly)” by Barry Yourgrau, from Wearing Dad’s Head. I think I referred to Flannery O’Connor, who says you can’t separate a theme from a story, and to Walker Percy, who talked about how words become shortcuts, from an essay of his called, I think “On Naming and Being”.

Mainly I was wanting to get across the idea that in fiction, illusion is reality, and reality is illusion, and the two are working together to create something for a reader that evokes something hard to capture, hard to articulate. And in that illusion– is access to the whole range of human experience and feelings and ideas.

Aimee also set up some audience participation activity, although we were running low on time, and so I think she did not go as far with it as she would have liked. Everybody had a bit of paper and a pen and, on her command, wrote down an emotion or feeling. Then they handed it to their neighbour,who turned the piece of paper over and wrote a little description or story which illustrated that feeling. We had a few of those read out to everyone. It was an interesting exercise, in that it immediately illustrated aspects of the process of trying to create something real (the feeling) by constructing a tale (the illusion) about it. I’m sure there was more there than that too, but I’ll stop there.

I had a great time talking to Aimee afterwards, and we were both intrigued by the possibility of maybe collaborating on something in the future, as we are both at USC with interests in crossing the borders between disciplines: The Arts meet the Sciences. I have no idea what we might create, but I can sense the possibility of promising ideas taking shape just because we are on the same wavelength on a number of things. Like happened when I started chatting with my colleague the playwright Oliver Mayer – ideas sparked there too, just because we got on the same page. And we wrote a play. So we shall see.

The evening did not end with the conclusion of the presentations. No, we all went to dinner and filled up a giant table in the nearby restaurant Typhoon, like last time. I won’t attempt to describe all the excellent conversations that I could hear going on around me there. Instead I’ll end with a lovely image of Bob Miller explaining about colour mixing and imagine through a pinhole (and how even after you take away the pinhole, its effects are still there -empty space is just a infinite number of pinholes-) to a transfixed impromptu gathering after the evening’s event was over, making us all late for dinner and therefore really really hungry for more discussion, interaction, and yes, food.

Feel free to share what you think about the links above, the event, and especially if you were there – feel free to fill in bits I left out.

-cvj