Digital images and Neuroasesthetics
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Themes of vision and memory are central to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). This film asks the most troubling questions about artificial intelligence and cloning. What is a human? If it looks just like one, but is made by humans, can humans terminate it? This is Decker's job, as a “Blade Runner”. When Replicants, the pseudo clone slaves of human society, return to earth, which they are banned from, it’s the job of a Blade Runner to find and “retire” them. Towards the film's conclusion, Roy, the violent, yet thoughtful, leader of the replicant gang, speaks the memorable lines to Decker: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain...” View.
Is the ability to associate images with personal experience distilled in memory a mark of being human?
In the past decade, the notion of bridging brain science and the visual arts has blossomed into the field of Neuroaesthetics. Advances in neuroimaging, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain’s activity, provides insights into neural processing that complement and support perceptions from the arts. In turn, the arts have been used to inform neuroscience. A proponent of this approach has been Semir Zeki, Professor of Neurobiology at University College London and founder of the Institute of Neuroesthetics, based mainly in Berkeley, California. His work has led him to believe that artists are instinctive neuroscientists with an innate understanding of how the human eye-brain system perceives the world. Zeki argues that artists are consistently attempting to find a visual language to represent this active process of seeing.
Understanding a work of art requires the selective and conscious retrieval of both short-term and long-term memories on both the part of the spectator and artist. Suzanne Nalbantian (2008) builds on the neurological studies of Jean-Pierre Changeaux who is concerned with identifying the molecules in the brain that lie behind its emotional contemplation of art. He associates the prefrontal cortex (front part of the brain) with artistic activity. To Nalbantian, memory processing is a salient element of Changeaux’s model, in conjunction with the view that memory is also a creative process. An image may suggest a plurality of meanings through different evocations of personal experiences. Contemplation of a work of art requires the selective and conscious retrieval of both short-term and long-term memories on both the part of the spectator and artist. Retrieving a memory trace involves an element of “alert anticipation”(Changeux, 1994, p. 193) whereby the viewer’s emotional state partially determines the level and quality of information retrieval. Artistic making involves deconstructing and recomposing memories. Nalbantian illustrates this by linking the work of Surrealist artist,Salvador Dalí, and dream researcher, Robert Stickgold. She argues that the manipulation of hallucinatory images, often recovered from memories of day dreams, hallucinations and reveries, is the keystone of Dalí’s aesthetic. Current research suggests that subjects involved in extended tasks require moments of rest or breaks in activity to refresh neural networks (Small and Vorgen, 2007).
Contemplation of an image begins with vision and this, in turn, enacts memory. A relatively large proportion of brain activity, an estimated at fifty per cent, is devoted to vision. While visual information can be processed quickly,the human eye-brain system has limitations. Melissa Terras (2008) argues that digital images have been developed to exploit weaknesses in human physiology. Surveying the fundamentals of the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) file format. Discrete Cosine Transfer (DCT) encoding, the basis of JPEG’s data compression, exploits the physiology of the eye-brain system, namely, that the human eye ignores high frequency changes in colour across small areas, being more concerned with light intensity. Data information that cannot be interpreted visually is omitted. This has made possible compressing images in a flexible image format, which can be exchanged across the Internet. This explains why JPEG is currently the most widely used format for digital images by private and institutional users like galleries and museums.
References,
Changeux, J. P., (1994). Art and neuroscience. Leonardo 27, pp. 189-201.
Nalbantian, S. (2008). Neuroaesthetics: Neuroscientific theory and illustration from the arts. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 33 (4), pp. 357-368 Read.
Small, G. & Vorgan, G. (2008, October). Your iBrain: How Technology Changes the Way We Think. Read.
Terras, M. (2008). Digital images for the information professional. Ashgate: Aldershot and Burlington. Details.
Zeki, S. & Marini, L. (1998). Three cortical stages of colour processing in the human brain. Brain, 121 (9), pp. 1669-1685.
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Themes of vision and memory are central to Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982). This film asks the most troubling questions about artificial intelligence and cloning. What is a human? If it looks just like one, but is made by humans, can humans terminate it? This is Decker's job, as a “Blade Runner”. When Replicants, the pseudo clone slaves of human society, return to earth, which they are banned from, it’s the job of a Blade Runner to find and “retire” them. Towards the film's conclusion, Roy, the violent, yet thoughtful, leader of the replicant gang, speaks the memorable lines to Decker: “I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time... like tears in rain...” View.
Is the ability to associate images with personal experience distilled in memory a mark of being human?
In the past decade, the notion of bridging brain science and the visual arts has blossomed into the field of Neuroaesthetics. Advances in neuroimaging, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the brain’s activity, provides insights into neural processing that complement and support perceptions from the arts. In turn, the arts have been used to inform neuroscience. A proponent of this approach has been Semir Zeki, Professor of Neurobiology at University College London and founder of the Institute of Neuroesthetics, based mainly in Berkeley, California. His work has led him to believe that artists are instinctive neuroscientists with an innate understanding of how the human eye-brain system perceives the world. Zeki argues that artists are consistently attempting to find a visual language to represent this active process of seeing.
Understanding a work of art requires the selective and conscious retrieval of both short-term and long-term memories on both the part of the spectator and artist. Suzanne Nalbantian (2008) builds on the neurological studies of Jean-Pierre Changeaux who is concerned with identifying the molecules in the brain that lie behind its emotional contemplation of art. He associates the prefrontal cortex (front part of the brain) with artistic activity. To Nalbantian, memory processing is a salient element of Changeaux’s model, in conjunction with the view that memory is also a creative process. An image may suggest a plurality of meanings through different evocations of personal experiences. Contemplation of a work of art requires the selective and conscious retrieval of both short-term and long-term memories on both the part of the spectator and artist. Retrieving a memory trace involves an element of “alert anticipation”(Changeux, 1994, p. 193) whereby the viewer’s emotional state partially determines the level and quality of information retrieval. Artistic making involves deconstructing and recomposing memories. Nalbantian illustrates this by linking the work of Surrealist artist,Salvador Dalí, and dream researcher, Robert Stickgold. She argues that the manipulation of hallucinatory images, often recovered from memories of day dreams, hallucinations and reveries, is the keystone of Dalí’s aesthetic. Current research suggests that subjects involved in extended tasks require moments of rest or breaks in activity to refresh neural networks (Small and Vorgen, 2007).
Contemplation of an image begins with vision and this, in turn, enacts memory. A relatively large proportion of brain activity, an estimated at fifty per cent, is devoted to vision. While visual information can be processed quickly,the human eye-brain system has limitations. Melissa Terras (2008) argues that digital images have been developed to exploit weaknesses in human physiology. Surveying the fundamentals of the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) file format. Discrete Cosine Transfer (DCT) encoding, the basis of JPEG’s data compression, exploits the physiology of the eye-brain system, namely, that the human eye ignores high frequency changes in colour across small areas, being more concerned with light intensity. Data information that cannot be interpreted visually is omitted. This has made possible compressing images in a flexible image format, which can be exchanged across the Internet. This explains why JPEG is currently the most widely used format for digital images by private and institutional users like galleries and museums.
References,
Changeux, J. P., (1994). Art and neuroscience. Leonardo 27, pp. 189-201.
Nalbantian, S. (2008). Neuroaesthetics: Neuroscientific theory and illustration from the arts. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 33 (4), pp. 357-368 Read.
Small, G. & Vorgan, G. (2008, October). Your iBrain: How Technology Changes the Way We Think. Read.
Terras, M. (2008). Digital images for the information professional. Ashgate: Aldershot and Burlington. Details.
Zeki, S. & Marini, L. (1998). Three cortical stages of colour processing in the human brain. Brain, 121 (9), pp. 1669-1685.
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