LANGUAGE OF TRANSPARENCY

Please consider the following passage from Kepes’ Language of Vision;

“If one sees two or more figures overlapping one another, and each of them claims for itself the common overlapped part, then one is confronted with a contradiction of spatial dimensions. To resolve this contradiction one must assume the presence of a new optical quality. The figures are endowed with transparency: that is, they are able to interpenetrate without an optical destruction of each other. Transparency however implies more than an optical characteristic, it implies a broader spatial order. Transparency means a simultaneous perception of different spatial locations. Space not only recedes but fluctuates in a continuous activity. The position of the transparent figures has equivocal meaning as one sees each figure now as the closer, not as the further one.”

This really is a great passage. Maybe transparency was a new idea when Kepes wrote this in 1944. Thus it seems that transparency is given greater complexity and import than it deserves, at least in 2015.  His trying to establish a language of transparency.

Is transparency, as Kepes says, an “inherent quality of organization?” Maybe. Maybe not. But who cares. This is just a fun rumination on the focus of this project.