EARLY EXPLORERS

As I read the far more scholarly and researched texts of others, it is always exciting to realize that early explorers have tread this pathway before us. Although they have not given us the tools, they gave us the philosophical background for our current efforts. It is helpful to highlight the terminology that others have used when thinking in this vein. While some of these terms seem outdated and antiquated, they are beneficial to consider, given the way that they help define Transparent Drawing.

Categorization Process. Arnheim gives us this term when describing what occurs in our minds when we perceive. Our memory of course has an immense effect on what and how we perceive. “No shape acquired in the past can be applied to what is seen in the present unless the percept has a shape in itself.” He is saying that we carry around mental images all of the shapes that we have seen. And in the process of understanding new shapes, we rely on what he describes as a categorization; we categorize our incoming sensory input based on the forms in our memories.  Visual Thinking.  P 81

Memory Image. We very likely have 3D forms floating in our heads. This is what Arnheim has called Memory Images. Perception is a continual process of interpreting, identifying and supplementing. When we see three sides of a six sided rectangular box, we rely on a synthesis between our incoming sensory input and the memory image in our minds. This synthesis then leads us to exclaim BOX! when we see this form, even though we cannot see all sides of it. While this may sound obvious, it is important to understand that our minds do complete the form in our brains. Despite the limitations of the perceptual stimulus, we induce the complete shape of the form.

Skeleton. Arnheim uses the word skeleton to describe the lines that form the sides of a common rectangle. I guess the term wire frame had not been invented yet. “Looking at the skeleton of a cube, one is perfectly aware that physically the cube has not walls, and yet one perceives these walls equally clearly as glassy, immaterial surfaces bounding the cube. The incorporeal quality of the walls (makes them) physically absent, and yet perceptually present.”   Visual Thinking. P 85.

If that is not a fundamental description and prediction of Transparent Drawing written in 1969, I don’t know what is.