Kader Attia: Holy Land

The reflective illusions of Attia's installation almost reflect the opposite of what you see, presenting you with whats behind you like a view finder, almost presenting the way in an upside down way- a new perspective. It plays unnaturally with the landscape allowing multiple points of vision, presenting another form of reality. 

The sombre and respectful tone that comes with the presence of tombstone sis translated onto every landscape Attia choses to use; its interesting how the piece changes with the environment its intoned it, the effects of day and night alter the mood and make the sculptures seem conscious in a way. it interests em the way the installation is permeant yet not, even though its fixed to the ground, the reflection changes every second of the day. 

“From a distance the mirrors shine brightly but the closer you get the less attractive they become because they reflect reality.” Kader Attia

The reflective tombstones evoke the human spirt, perhaps their perspective and acts as a reminder of mortality. By stretching the installation across the bench, Attia's is utilising and engages with the space,  an unexpected discovery of a new world. The reflection encourages reflection, mirrors act as a piece of dialogue, maybe a conflict of identity or more widely a conflict of reality. Attis's choice of gothic shapes tombstones interests me, int like have the old reflecting on the new, perhaps competing on modernised, looking at the 'new' world with old eyes. 

Upon Pillars of Sand, Pillars of Salt… Kader Attia’s Holy Land. By Octavio Zaya, 2008 (http://kaderattia.de/upon-pillars-of-sand-pillars-of-salt-kader-attias-holyland/)

"The referential realities and conflicts in Attia’s work, and the cultural crisis in which we live on both sides of the Mediterranean, continue to be understood and iden- tified in relation to a spectrum of binary oppositions and spatial and temporal distortions."

From Holy Land to Open your eyes. By Serge Gruzinski, 2012 (http://kaderattia.de/de-holy-lans-a-open-your-eyes/)

REPAIR or REWEAVE SOCIETY-

"A modest operation, often erased from the sources and, in theory, made to remain invisible, reparation, on reflection, soon appears to be ubiquitous. By dint of listing its uses we soon realize that it appears as a major and constant reconstruction process or simply one of cultures and societies construction. In history, absolute innovations as far as total destructions remain the exception since we wouldn’t know how to start from scratch and that there will always be remnants to fix or things to redo. Thus we spend our social and intimate existence repairing: a wound that heals is a tissue that is being repaired and cell biology teaches us that eukaryotic cells are able to repair damages caused to their DNA. We repair our machines. These have increased since the end of the eighteenth century and rule the way we consider the coming centuries. So much so that reparation has become a leitmotif of Western and Asian science fiction.  Blade Runner replicas along with all their Korean and Japanese descendants are fighting to repair aging organisms, defective or with limited life. Repairing the beloved becomes even a form of love, taking tragic, melodramatic and sometimes even humorous turns when WALL-E’s little robot strives to revive his dear EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator)."

Jess Flood-Paddock

"Jessie’s work seeks to expose the emotional dimensions of inert objects and what they reveal about human interaction. She often creates oversized but decidedly un-monumental versions of everyday objects, which can disturb the references that ground us in the everyday and rock our expectations of material reality."

(http://www.contemporaryartsociety.org/artist-members/jessie-flood-paddock/)

"Jess Flood-Paddock’s work explores the exchange value of objects and, more specifically, their emotional value. Working across a great variety of subjects – from Aztec fertility statues to wasabi peanut snacks – Flood-Paddock creates interwoven narratives that could be described as the ‘biographical life of things’.

Concerned with the rhetoric of over simplification and misrepresentation, Mindless, Mindlesstakes its title from Tottenham’s Labour MP David Lammy who described the 2011 London rioters as ‘mindless, mindless people’. A series of sculptures of scaled-up leather bicycle saddles are displayed on the floor; further leather saddles hang from a wire strung across the gallery, echoing the mysterious practice of ‘shoe flinging’ which allegedly originated in gang culture as a way of marking territory. Through these objects, the artist draws attention to the commonplace theft of bicycle seats. Leather saddles are highly sought after by cyclists. Easy to steal, they can be resold quickly, stolen and resold again, and have become an alternative currency of exchange. Flood-Paddock has framed these works with a series of photographs taken in London’s Broadway Market, an area in the grip of rapid gentrification and marked by the proliferation of chained-up saddle-less bicycles."

(https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/art-now-jess-flood-paddock)

"Jess Flood-Paddock unravels the emotional and cultural values woven into everyday objects and practices, constructing a ‘biographical life of things’ that is at once fantastical and incisive. She injects the comedy and tragedy of scale into work that also explores values held by various social demographics. As Lizzie Carey-Thomas notes: ‘In Flood-Paddock’s world, the touchstones that anchor us have been displaced and physical and mental limits between things brought into question.’ The result is an Alice in Wonderland-like sense of disorientation that prompts a fresh look at what may have been previously taken for granted."

(http://www.themovingmuseum.com/artists/jess-flood-paddock/)

 "Jess F-P sculpture often uses unfired clay to embody a private experience of looking and the atmosphere of observing. Newspapers and mobile phones often provide the subject matter and enable shifting between the intimate, personal and immediate, and a wider, accessible worldly view. The main theme is being in the middle of things (in medias res), being here and the mid point that can be interpreted psychoanalytically as well as literally to evaluate and process the moment of daily life that we find ourselves embedded in."

(https://www.artslant.com/5/artists/show/169946-jess-flood-paddock)

Charles Ray, Family Romance, 1993, painted fiberglass and synthetic hair, 53 x 85 x 11 inches

"This abstract family representation presents an alternative reality where the parents and children are all the same proportions/scale, creating a odd and slightly disturbing appearance. 

"Ray's work is difficult to classify. Style, materials, subject, presence, and scale are all variable. Critic Anne Wagner finds the consistent quality to be this: "In all his seamlessly executed objects, Ray fixates on how and why things happen, to say nothing of wondering what really does happen in the field of vision, and how such events might be remade as art."^[4] This and the level of art historical awareness behind his works has led many critics to call Ray a sculptor's sculptor. Nevertheless, his art has managed to find a large audience, thanks in part to its often striking or beguiling nature."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ray_(artist) 

"Two parents, two young children: "It's a nuclear family," as Ray says, the model of American normalcy. Yet a simple action has put everything wrong: Ray has made all of them the same height. They are also naked, and unlike the store-window mannequins they resemble, they are anatomically complete. This and the work's title, the Freudian phrase for the suppressed erotic currents within the family unit, introduce an explicit sexuality as disturbing in this context as the protagonists' literally equal stature.

Early works of Ray's submitted the forms and ideas of Minimalism to the same kind of perceptual double-take that Family Romance works on the social life of middle-class Anglo-Saxon America. He has worked in photography and installation as well as sculpture, and his art has no predictable style or medium; but it often involves the surprise of the object that seems familiar yet is not. Like other works of Ray's involving mannequins, Family Romance suggests forces of anonymity and standardization in American culture. Its manipulations of scale also imply a disruption of society's balance of power: not only have the children grown, but the adults have shrunk."

(https://www.moma.org/collection/works/81284)

"Sculptors and architects both work with form in space, albeit on different scales and using varying methods. Anthony Caro, known for taking sculpture off the plinth, likes the idea that the artform ‘has another sort of life… that’s a bit closer to architecture’. On the eve of his retrospective at Tate Britain – its largest sculpture show to date – American artist Charles Ray tells Michael Fried about Caro’s influence on his work

Michael Fried
When did you first become interested in Anthony Caro’s work, and what did it mean to you then?

Charles Ray

In 1971 at the University of Iowa. I enrolled in a sculpture class that was taught by Roland Brenner, who had been a student of Caro at St Martins in the early 1960s. Brenner was very strict in his approach to teaching the sculpture studio class. We learned to weld and were taken to the scrapyard to buy metal. We drew or sketched our ideas directly with the material at hand. He walked around and encouraged our configurations to move in certain directions. We looked at a lot of slides of Caro’s work, as well as other contemporary sculptors. The crit phase of the studio was constant. A lot of the students felt the class was too dictatorial. For me, it was liberating. As a young student I was unaware of the historical context, but I found this phase of Constructivism a wonderful time and place to enter sculpture. I really didn’t need to understand what I was doing. Caro’s work was like a template; I saw it as almost platonic. The formal rules as taught by Brenner were a kind of nourishment for me. The actual working in the studio was, in a sense, the expression. I was taught that the finished sculpture was maybe the end of a paragraph. Once a sculpture was completed it was critiqued and put back on to the scrap pile. This way of working taught me to think sculpturally rather than to think about sculpture. At this time in my life the historical context of high Modernism was really beyond my grasp. I saw Caro as super-contemporary. His work was, and is, so alive. It bridges a gap between the inside and outside of my mind.

Michael Fried
What about Caro’s Early One Morning from 1962? It seems to have been a work you were particularly interested in?

Charles Ray
I’m still amazed by the experience of viewing Early One Morning. It is sculptural disjunction compressing and expanding space in such a hallucinogenic way. The sculpture seems to be an armature that space clings to like clay. In 1962 The Beatles were singing ‘I want to hold your hand’. The hallucinogenic scene didn’t explode on to pop culture until five or six years later. Not that this sculpture was prophetic of the coming youth culture involvement with drug experiences, but it was so born in its time. It is so alive in its making that it seems unlikely ever to die. Early One Morning is a work that I gauge myself by. I never re-created it, but at one time I wanted to use it as an image on an announcement poster for a show I was having at the ICA in London. There’s a wonderful painting by Edward Hopper with a young woman sitting nude on an unmade bed in a hotel room. I wanted to have a young woman sitting nude on the I-beam of Early One Morning. Caro agreed in principle. The sculpture is very fragile. The aluminium tubes and plate are so extended structurally that it’s almost magic that the sculpture stands at all. Caro did not want a public image of it that would suggest it might be strong enough to be sat on. He very generously gave me permission to photograph a model standing near it, but I declined, as that would not work for what I was attempting to do. I was trying to make a picture. I was thinking about time and its necessity for contemplation. Around the same time I was attempting to return to abstract sculpture. I was struggling. Every move I made bumped into genre problems. I had a photo of Early One Morning on my bookcase. A gallon apple cider jug somehow was turned on its side directly in front of the photograph. It instantly hit me that here was a possible solution to my sculpture problem. I could take the genre of a ship in a bottle and use its space to create a sculpture within – a short cut out of my problem? I began trying to assemble abstract sculptures in bottles. They never did what I wanted them to do. I learned that a ship in a bottle is not sculptural. You never need to walk around the back, or see it from the side. The bottle is a frame and you view the ship and the feat of its construction in a pictorial way. I did remain very interested in the space inside a bottle and eventually made Puzzle Bottle in 1995. There is abstractness to the space of Puzzle Bottle. The figure is really the armature to build both the space and the bottle that contains it. After making Puzzle Bottle I started working on a sculpture for Documenta and the sculpture show in Münster in Germany. I spent a year learning how to make my own clothes and shoes. My contribution was going to be a short 35mm film entitled Self-portrait with home-made clothes. It was to play as a trailer in the local movie theatres. There was a similarity to Puzzle Bottle with the utilisation of space associated with media and genre. I didn’t finish the clothes in time to make the film. A few years later I had to come up with an image for the catalogue of another show. So that’s me in my home-made clothes digitally placed in front of Early One Morning!"

(https://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/early-one-morning)

How John Berger changed our ways of seeing art: He taught us that photographs always need language, and require a narrative, to make sense

"The opening to John Berger’s most famous written work, the 1972 book Ways of Seeing, offered not just an idea but also an invitation to see and know the world differently.

“The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled,” he wrote.

Berger, who died on 2 January at the age of 90, has had a profound influence on the popular understanding of art and the visual image. He was also a vibrant example of the public intellectual, using his position to speak out against social injustices and to lend his support to artists and activists across the world.

The BBC programmes brought to life and democratised scholarly ideas and texts through dramatic, often witty, visual techniques that raised searching questions about how images – from European oil painting to photography and modern advertising – inform and seep into everyday life and help constitute its inequities. What do we see? How are we seen? Might we see differently?

“Berger’s theoretical legacy”, the Indian academic Rashmi Doraiswamy wrote recently, “is in situating the look in the context of political otherness”. Berger’s idea that looking is a political act, perhaps even a historically constructed process – such that where and when we see something will affect what we see – comes across most powerfully in the second episode of Ways Of Seeing, which focused on the male gaze.

In the episode, Berger showed the continuities between post-Renaissance European paintings of women and imagery from latter-day posters and girly magazines, by juxtaposing the different images and showing how they similarly rendered women as objects. Berger argued that this continuity constrained how certain forms of femininity are understood, and therefore the terms on which women are able to live their lives. He identified a splitting of the European woman’s consciousness, in which she “has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men, is of crucial importance for what is normally thought of as the success of her life”.

Historical context, scale, and perspective were recurring themes in Berger’s writing, films, performance and in his collaborative photographic essays with Jean Mohr, Anne Michaels, Tereza Stehliková and others.

Berger’s essays and books on photography worry at the political ambiguity of meaning in an image. He taught us that photographs always need language, and require a narrative of some sort, to make sense. He also took care to differentiate how our reaction to photographs of loved ones depends on our relationship to the person portrayed. In A Seventh Man, a collaborative book with Jean Mohr on Turkish migrant workers to Germany in the 1970s, he put it simply: “A photograph of a boy in the rain, a boy unknown to you or me. Seen in the darkroom when making the print or seen in this book when reading it, the image conjures up the vivid presence of the unknown boy. To his father it would define the boy’s absence.” Because he had been a painter, Berger was always a visual thinker and writer. In conversation with the novelist Michael Ondaatje he remarked that the capabilities of cinematographic editing had influenced his writing. He identified cinema’s ability to move from expansive vistas to close-up shots as that to which he most related and aspired.

Certainly Berger’s work is infused with a sensitivity to how long views – the narratives of history – come alive only with the addition of “close-up” stories of human relationships, that retell the narrative but from a different angle. For instance, writing about Frida Kahlo’s compulsion to paint on smooth skin-like surfaces, Berger suggested that it was Kahlo’s pain and disability (she had spina bifida and had gone through treatments following a bad road accident) that “made her aware of the skin of everything alive – trees, fruit, water, birds, and naturally, other women and men”.

Berger’s writerly inclinations and sensitivities seem to echo something of the “overall intensity, the lack of proper distance” for which Caravaggio was so criticised – and which Berger so admired. This intensity was not a simple theatricality, nor a search for something truer to life, but a philosophical stance springing from his pursuit of equality. He gave us permission to dwell on those aspects of our research or our lives that capture us intensely, and to trust that sensitivity. His was an affirmative politics in this sense. It started with a trust in one’s intuitions, along with the imperative to open these up to explore ourselves as situated within wider social and historical processes[...] He knew very well that writing has its limitations. By itself, writing cannot rebalance the inequities of the present or establish new ways of seeing. Yet he wrote with hope. He showed us in his work and – by example – other possibilities for living a life that was committed to criticising inequality, while celebrating the beauty in the world, giving attention to its colour, rhythm and joyous surprises. We remain endowed by and indebted to him."

(https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/john-berger-ways-of-seeing-a7518001.html)

How Scale in Art Influences the Viewing Experience

(https://www.widewalls.ch/scale-in-art/) 

"Enormous plastic ice cream, huge balloon dogs, or enlarged photo portraits plastered on buildings around the world are some of the examples where scale in art is the dominant element of the artworks’ aesthetics. Scale refers to a size of an object in relation to another, and is one of the principles of organization of structural elements in art and design. Scale does not stand for the size of an artwork, but is a relational principle which is usually defined through the ratio of an object to a human body or another object. Relational aesthetics stands at core of each artwork and human body is often the corrective against which the size of each piece can be discussed. As humans put themselves in the center of the visible world, as masters of the living environments, artworks are measured regarding proportion relative to generalized human scale. They became defined as large, life-size, miniature, or even enormous. The scale is thus something that is habitually examined, and is often an important factor in defining the meaning and significance of each work, particularly in contemporary art.

Different scaling is applied in art when something needs to be emphasised, or when through disproportionate size the importance of the represented is underlined. This does not mean that we are constantly bombarded with works that have unusual scaling patterns, but that scale is an essential element that is present and thought out even in works that at first observation do not seem to stand out regarding this element. Paying attention to and elaborating on scale in art is therefore an important aspect in any artistic evaluation and criticism. Exploring how scale influences viewing experience through examples, we will see that artists’ decisions on the scale of their works are based on the represented motifs, cultural traditions and the message they are trying to convey. Sometimes this message may not surpass the pure aesthetic enjoyment in each piece, but even in these circumstances scale is carefully decided on.

Upscaling Pop Art – Claes Oldenburg

One of the leading figures of Pop Art, Claes Oldenburg started experimenting with scale of his works in early 1960s, inspired by midtown showrooms on Manhattan displaying grand pianos and luxury cars. His exhibition in 1962 at the Green Gallery in New York showcased for the first time his soft sculptures created with the help of his then wife Patty Mucha, who made his sculptures from fabrics. Pliant material of Floor Burger, Floor Cake, and Floor Cone, to mention a few, was a groundbreaking moment in sculptural history transgressing its postulates of firmness and rigidity. The choice of motifs he represented in colossal scales, such as everyday food, brought humor and whimsy in high art and opened up the field of sculpture to subjects from everyday American life. As the artist stated: “my art is made for human beings, and it’s important that people enjoy the experience of seeing it.“ He continued his practice in this field over the years, and moved away from galleries to open spaces where his sculpture reached truly gigantic proportions such as in Dropped Cone or Shuttlecocks. These works were created in collaboration with his second wife Coosje van Bruggen. By enlarging ordinary objects to enormous proportions, Oldenburg shrinks the viewers, reversing in this way the traditional relationship between the viewers and the observed objects. His oversized sculptures also possess a critical edge showing an insight on American culture and aiming at its absurdities.

Shahzia Sikander’s Monumental Miniatures and Gigantic Videos

Miniatures are one of the art genres where scale is defined by the purpose of the works. Created in different periods and meridians they appeared in votive and religious books, such as illuminated medieval manuscripts, but portraits and paintings were also occasionally made in miniature. A Pakistani born artist Shahzia Sikander is one among the contemporary creatives who experiment with such artistic traditions and use scale to re-proportion the symbolic meanings such works inherently have. Her interest, among others, lies with Persian miniatures which represented religious or mythological themes. Even though Islam forbids figurative representations, in small-scale art made for private use such prohibitions were often ignored.

The Gopi women hairdos that are disembodied and seem to float and swirl into a Mughal court are one of her early motifs she used in large-scale video SpiNN (2003) and many miniature paintings before. Fascinated with their aesthetics that “had this wonderful silhouette… that could look like bats or birds”she continued to experiment with them, driven primarily by the interest in conceptual “distance between the translation and the original…of examining a style, school, genre, and developing a relationship, a language, a dialogue with it.” Sikander finds inspiration in the past, which she transforms and translates into contemporary genres. Scale of the works she references is encumbered with historical meanings and religious postulates. However, in her mixing of history, personal feelings and experience she shift the perception and challenges the ways we see both her work and the past. Mixing of imagery taken from different historical references, such as, for example, in The Last Post (2010), where a colonial officer of the East India Company appears in a Mughal court, creates a visual hybrid in which polarities between Hindu and Muslim, East and West, representation and abstraction seem blurred. The use of small-scale genre in her large-scale videos invites to a broader questioning of cultural relationships between the East and the West both in the past and the present.

Scaling Down New York – Miniature sculptures of Alan Wolfson

In contrast to Shahzia Sikander’s practice, Alan Wolfson takes as a reference one of the largest cities in the world, New York, and transforms its gritty reality into sculptural miniatures. Scaling down the streets, subway entrances, flats and other elements of urban environment, his primary interest is in the story behind them: “I’m providing you with clues to a narrative, telling a story with minute details… The real impact of my work is not in how small everything is but in the stories these small things tell.” His dioramas are free of humans, and resemble a contemporary memento mori made in sculpture, where graffiti, trash, or half-eaten food recalls human presence that was once there. He also immortalizes spaces and buildings that are lost to gentrification creating in this way a monument to a city that does not exist anymore. By putting such representations in miniature forms, Wolfson pushes for an intimate observation of urban conditions created by humans.

Scale in Art – One of Its Crucial Aspects

Scale is essential for viewing experience, not just in fine arts, but also in architecture and other visual media. It defines the meaning of a work, and is one of aesthetic elements central to its making and reception. Scale questions the role of the viewer and perhaps more than other elements directs attention to the relation between a work and location or place. It is one of the crucial aspects of art that affect the reception of each work as an actual artwork. As seen from examples given above, scale is used as an expressive element that is often pregnant with historical and cultural meanings. Referencing and rescaling of different works and objects infuses the reading of art with original interpretations, unencumbered with general theories of world art, and national and geographical distinctions. Among contemporary artists there are many who play with scale, including some of the best known such as Jeff Koons. Significance of their works partially comes from unusual scale their works have, which disrupts cultural traditions and viewing practices."

Giant spikes and other oddities take over a Scottish mansion grounds 

"A curious sight has taken over one of Scotland’s finest historic grounds. Environmental artist Steve Messam crafted XXX, a series of site-specific installations that add modern whimsy to the late 18th-century Mellerstain House & Gardens. Commissioned as the first works of the newly opened Borders Sculpture Park, the giant inflatable artworks create dialogue between the past and present – from the enormous roof of spikes atop a decrepit gatehouse to the floating white spheres on a lake.

Messam’s XXX installation comprises three works, all of which are large-scale and made from inflated white fabric that reference the marble sculptures originally intended to decorate the Mellerstain grounds. Each site-specific intervention uses the element of surprise to disrupt the way viewers typically perceive the historic landscape.

Richard Wilson: (https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/2050-1987-richard-wilson)

"The surface of the dark, dense substance mirrors the space above it and creates for the viewer the vertiginous impression of being suspended within a curiously doubled and seemingly infinite environment.

‘We all have preconceptions about architectural space, about rooms, about buildings – whether they’re galleries or museums or not’, Wilson has said, ‘– and if you can do something that unsettles those preconceptions, you can generate a whole new way of understanding your place in the world.’"

Jeppe Hein: (https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/360°-illusion-v-2018-jeppe-hein)

"Mirrors are ‘a tool for communication and dialogue’. The artist has made use of mirrors in interactive installations, sculptures and outdoor environments – artworks that he conceives of as social spaces. ‘You meet other people when you enter the mirror pieces’, Hein comments. ‘You are reflected, you see your own I... You open up.’

Hein’s kinetic sculpture 360° Illusion V (2018) – situated in the first room of the exhibition – consists of two large mirrored panels that have been placed at right-angles to one another. As well as reflecting the surrounding environment, each mirror also reflects its twin. As the artwork rotates, we see ourselves and other visitors suspended within its curious double reflection, a visual effect that prompts Hein to ask, ‘Are you outside or inside the work? You don’t really know’."

Anish Kapoor’s: (https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/sky-mirror-blue-2016-anish-kapoor)

"Anish Kapoor’s Sky Mirror, Blue (2016) is situated on one of Hayward Gallery’s outdoor sculpture terraces. This concave mirror doesn’t just reflect but also transforms the space around it; turning the reflected world upside down, it also saturates it in blue.

‘Concave objects do strange things to space’, Kapoor has said. ‘The space of the object is no longer on its surface, nor is it contained within the boundaries of the physical object’. Sky Mirror, Blue encourages what the artist has described as ‘a sort of metaphysical looking’: rather than looking at the artwork, we find ourselves looking through it and beyond it."

Artist statement: "I’m interested in contradiction. In the idea that what you see isn’t quite what you think you see."

"For Kapoor, whose work plays with the boundary of solid form, of the art world and the everyday world, mirrored surfaces represent the perfect reminder or our own place in the art world. With soft, curved surfaces and biomorphic twists, his Cloud Gate work draws hundreds of visitors every day, all ready to snap a photograph of their distorted image in the shiny surface of the giant sculpture and to watch their identity morph and adapt as they move around the object. Kapoor’s use of the mirror is at once personal and at the same time disorientating. We literally see ourselves in his work, but not as we have seen ourselves before. His work invites us to touch, to feel and to experience a different world, a world which is unique to us and simultaneously shared with those around us. Kapoor literally holds up a mirror to the complexity of our understanding of our identity and our place in the world."

(https://www.artdependence.com/articles/symbolism-in-art-anish-kapoor-mirrors/)

Kapoor influenced the ending of. my project drastically, even though I had been using the material of mirrored paper thought-out, it wasn't until I read about Kapoor and watched some videos of how people or the environment interact with his work. My site-specific investigation lead to have the environment relies/ have a relationship with the sculpture. The relationship of making and displaying the piece is the same or different locations. I made the sculpture are home and then assembled in it the studio, therefore creating this sense of a likeness between the piece and the room. This unfamiliar tension adds to the visual confusion looking at the mirrors reflections.

Anish Kapoor's Concave Mirror Sculpture

"On a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we "experienced" an untitled concave mirror sculpture by British artist Anish Kapoor. We say "experienced," because it's not a sculpture that one just looks at; rather, it prompts the viewer to interact with it. "Concave" means curving inward, and this sculpture contains countless little mirrors pieced together, and since they rest in a concave shape, they reflect against each other, creating interesting visuals based on where the viewer is standing. As one moves closer, the reflected image gets bigger, as more of the tiny mirrors are able to capture and reflect the image.

Below are some pictures that I took while engaging with the Kapoor's concave mirror sculpture. As you can see, the distance and angle that one stands from the mirror's surface affects how the image of the viewer is reflected. This is a very interesting work of art in that it brings the curiosity out in the viewer and creates a dance-like interaction with the sculpture, as one's tendency is to move around in front of the piece to see how that changes one's perception of it. The viewer can actually "create" their own visual experience based on how they stand and move in front of the mirrors."

(https://artsology.com/mirror-art.php)

Haruka Kojin: contact lens

“New spatial practices in architecture and art’. the show, a collaboration between yuko hasegawa, the MOT tokyo chief director, and SANAA architects (kazuyo sejima and ryue nishizawa), looks at the modern interconnectivity between technology, urbanism and the way designers respond and influence our changing global culture. Among 28 architects and artists presenting their work is hiroshima-born haruka kojin. the artist is the youngest of the exhibitors, kojin explores the distortion of reality through her newest piece, ‘contact lens’. two types of lenses are used, one completely flat and clear and the other with a warped surface to create interconnected circles of varying sizes. as the light travels through the acrylic, the images on the other side are flipped and contorted, changing the experience of the space. since the elements are clear with no frames or distinct features of its own, the physical material merges into the environment, only visiblethrough the transformation it causes. 

‘The metaphor of the world-views suggested by the artist resonate with the practical proposals of the architects, 
presenting images of future ‘humanity’ from a variety of different angles… an exhibition of the unknown experience, 
that cannot be explained through words, only through the ‘feel’ of the future.’

Architecture and art serve as a form of mirror, reflecting an image of the times and society which we are heading towards. Simultaneously, we believe that these serve as an important process in the creation of the coming age. for this reason, we expect each of the participating artists to put forward an architectural/artistic proposal aspiring towards a new kind of sensation, philosophy or experience. when we speak of a new era, we think it will be of one which is diverse and believe that architecture or art plays a major role to provide a world-model in which various values and dynamic relationships are able to coexist with each other. in this vein, we will not show each work in this exhibition distinctly instead, as much as possible, we aim to display them all together, without walls coming between them. we hope to see the entire museum functioning as an expression of diversity.’"

(https://www.designboom.com/design/haruka-kojin-contact-lens/)

Augmented Reality Will Reinvent How We Experience Art

"Art has been a relative latecomer to the digital revolution – at least where we’re referring to the traditional/classic end of the spectrum – people are used to associating the value of art to seeing it in person, hence the fact that museums and art galleries still rely on special exhibitions for a large share of their revenue.

When his platform first launched,  ArtFinder Co-founder Chris Thorpe told the Guardian that "The emphasis on art history and institutes has taken away the visceral, emotional experience of art. That experience and excitement should make you what to know more and deepen your engagement with it."

Artfinder built an IMDB-style searchable digital catalogue with hundreds of thousands of paintings, sculptures, and art-related media. The site also contains essays on artists, artworks and artistic movements, making it a useful (and free) reference resource for art discovery, while social features open up new opportunities for enjoying art. It allows you to virtually collect and share your favourite artworks, and as users build up a profile that reflects their particular tastes, the system also generates further recommendations of what they might like.

Thorpe believes this element of recommendations, when combined with geo-location, adds a crucial element of serendipity to art discovery and keeps that physical connection to the real world which is so crucial to connecting emotionally with a piece of artwork.

It means that when you're in Gateshead, the ArtFinder app can suggest that you go to the Baltic. But on a finer grain, because we know where the pictures are held, we can say the next time you're at Moma, remember to see Starry Night by Van Gogh."

Enhanced Experiences

For Artivive CEO Codin Popescu, however, the experiential element will always be central to how people enjoy and relate to artworks. The key, he believes, is to use immersive technologies such as Augmented Reality to seamlessly add digital elements to those existing and well-loved experiences, making them richer and more accessible in the process.

They want to become the go-to solution for artists, galleries and creators and change the way art is created and consumed while building a community and movement around augmented reality art.

I met Popescu at the Pioneers conference in Vienna in May, where Artivive had won the “Best Austrian Startup” category in the event’s competition. He told me that although his company was only founded in 2017, it had already accrued over 60,000 downloads, with users spending a collective 1.3 million minutes engaging with art via the app. In the past year alone, over 2000 artists in 65 countries have used the platform, supporting over 100 exhibitions 1.5+ million scans nearly 5k original artworks.

For an artist to create in augmented reality they previously had to build their own isolated solutions, which required technical skills and resources, but now those artists can take visitors on a journey in time and explain what lies behind, enhance the art with illustrations or show how the artworks were made. For museums, exhibitions, galleries and other art institutions it offers a new and innovative way for the audience to interact with the exhibits.”

They so far worked with many of the top museums in Vienna such as the Belvedere and MAK – The Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art as well as many international venues.

For the Albertina Museum in Vienna they also created digital content for the exhibition “Film Stills” and integrated AR experiences to the permanent collection “Monet to Picasso”

One of the examples in which this has already changed the gallery-visitor’s experience is that instead of the enormous and outdated audio guides upon which galleries have traditionally relied – and which many still cling on to – visitors can now navigate multi-sensory personalized experiences on their own mobile devices.

The fact that in such a short time Artivive boosts a turnover of over €150,000 also shows the monetizing potential for the technology, as does the fact that main platforms are making deliberate moves to supporting the sector. At this year's Google I/O for example, one of the most popular demos I went to showcased how ARCore could be used to augment both 2D and 3D artworks."

(https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicebonasio/2018/06/20/augmented-reality-will-reinvent-how-we-experience-art/#13a79f75636c) 

Dan Graham

"For fifty years, Dan Graham has traced the symbiosis between architectural environments and their inhabitants. With a practice that encompasses curating, writing, performance, installation, video, photography and architecture, his analytical bent first came to attention with Homes for America (1966–67), a sequence of photos of suburban development in New Jersey, USA, accompanied by a text charting the economics of land use and the obsolescence of architecture and craftsmanship. Graham’s critical engagement manifests most alluringly in the glass and mirrored pavilions, which have been realised in sites all over the world. These instruments of reflection – visual and cognitive – highlight the voyeuristic elements of design in the built world; poised between sculpture and architecture, they glean a sparseness from 1960s Minimalism, redolent of Graham’s emergence in New York in the 1960s alongside Sol Le Witt, Donald Judd and Robert Smithson. Graham himself has described his work and its various manifestations as ‘geometric forms inhabited and activated by the presence of the viewer, [producing] a sense of uneasiness and psychological alienation through a constant play between feelings of inclusion and exclusion.’ Considering himself first and foremost a writer-artist, Graham's writings and periodicals from the 1960s, including Figurative (1965) and Schema(1966), include published essays and reviews on everything from rock music and television culture to Dean Martin and Dwight D. Eisenhower's painting. These publications, predating Conceptual art, were a rejection of the limits of the art gallery’s ‘white cube’ format and an embrace of the ubiquity and disposable nature of monthly periodicals."

(https://www.lissongallery.com/artists/dan-graham)

“I wanted to keep all of those meanings but empty out the pejorative expressionistic meanings. On the other hand, I didn’t want to go as far as minimal. I wanted to show that minimal was related to a real social situation that could be documented.” - Dan Graham

(http://www.artnet.com/artists/dan-graham/)

Robert Morris- BODYSPACEMOTIONTHINGS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeUiL5vzSzA

Robert Morris- Refractions 

"Robert Morris is one of the central figures of Minimalism and Anti-form Movements. Through both his own sculptures of the ‘60s and theoretical writings, Morris set forth a vision of art pared down to simple geometric shapes stripped of metaphorical associations, and focused on the artwork’s interaction with the viewer. However, in contrast to Donald Judd and Carl Andre, Morris had a diverse range that extended well beyond the Minimalist ethos and was at the forefront of other Art Movements as well, most notably, Process Art and Land Art.

In his solo exhibition “Refractions” at Sprüth Magers in Berlin, Robert Morris brings together six works produced at various points during his career, from 1961 to 2014. This sequence of works conveys his unconventional handling of sculptural forms to create dynamic and sensory relationships between object, space, and viewer. Robert Morris turned to art and art criticism after studying engineering, writing a 1966 master’s thesis on Constantin Brancusi at Hunter College, New York. Since then, Morris has continued to write influential critical essays, four of which serve as a thumbnail chronology of his most important work: “Some Notes on Dance”(1965), “Notes on Sculpture” (1968), “Anti Form” (1968), and “Aligned with Nazca” (1975). During the ‘50s, Morris grew interested in dance while living in San Francisco with his wife, the dancer and choreographer Simone Forti. After moving to New York in 1959, they participated in a loose-knit confederation of dancers known as the Judson Dance Theater, for which Morris choreographed a number of works. Morris created his earliest Minimalist objects as props for his dance performances, hence the rudimentary wooden construction of these boxlike forms, which reflected the Judson Dance Theater’s emphasis on function over expression. During the ‘60s and ‘70s, Morris played a central role in defining three principal artistic movements of the period: Minimalist Sculpture, Process Art, and Earthworks.  “Untitled (Pine portal with Mirrors)” (1961), is an early example of Morris’ use of sculpture to engage the moving body, the illusion of a passageway invites the viewer to pass directly through the work, simultaneously appearing like a stage prop for a dance or performance. Meanwhile, the individual reflections in its mirrored surfaces solicit from the viewer a more familiar, static form of self-observation. In his installation “Untitled (Williams Mirrors)” (1976-77) the artist positions a double-sided pair of mirrors in the middle of the room and four pairs of one-sided mirrors at the corners – meaning that the reflection in each mirror appears to multiply infinitely. As the viewer moves through the space, weaving in and around the constellation, it becomes almost impossible to distinguish real bodies from their reflections, or to perceive their exact locations within the space, as the duplicated images appear to be dislocated from their surroundings. Exhibited here for first time, “Strike” (2012), is a monumental concertinaed structure of polished aluminum and arctic birch elements that is suspended from the ceiling. Other works are: the wooden sculptures, “Maple Arch” (2012) and “Roman Arch” (2014) that encourage movement in a different but related way, retuning the viewer to a sensory and unmediated experience of their surroundings as they pass through the human-scale channels of negative space created by the sculptures. And “Bench” (2013), where Morris reinforces the concerns addressed by the preceding sequence of works in the exhibition and foregrounds the continued legacy of Minimalism."

(https://www.dreamideamachine.com/en/?p=20759)

Mirror Sculpture is Inspired by Ancient Mesopotamian Temples

"This mirrored sculpture installation by Iranian artist Shirin Abedinirad uses its changing reflective surface to alter its appearance depending on a viewer's perspective.
Titled 'Mirrored Ziggurat,' the design is part of the Australian 'Underbelly Arts Festival' and was inspired by the temples of ancient Mesopotamia that were made to bring humans closer to the gods. Consisting of seven levels of steps -- representing the seven different heavens -- the reflective surface of the mirrored sculpture takes on different forms depending on where it is viewed. At certain angles, the surface reflects back slices of the natural landscape and transforms into a blue piece of the sky when viewed from above.

The 'Mirrored Ziggurat' acts as a staircase 'which seeks to connect nature with human beings while creating a union of ancient history and today’s world.' Abedinirad says on her website. "This installation offers a transformative view of the self.""

(https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/mirror-sculpture)

I Created A Mirrored Ziggurat To Connect The Earth And Sky In Sydney

"In this installation I have been inspired by the pyramidal structure of Ziggurat, a common form of temple in ancient Mesopotamia, attempting to connect earth and sky, so humans could be nearer to god.

The Mirrored Ziggurat acts as a staircase, which seeks to connect nature with human beings and to create a union of ancient history and today’s world. This installation offers a transformative view of the self.

The Mirrored Ziggurat has seven levels that represent seven heavens. For me, mirrors amplify this paradise, giving light; an important mystical concept in Persian Culture, and a medium creating an optical illusion."

(https://www.boredpanda.com/mirrored-sculpture-ziggurat-shirin-abedinirad/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=organic)

Mirrored park pavilion- gh*3

Located in Edmonton's Borden Park, the Borden Pavilion by gh3 blends into its nearby, natural landscape. Boasting a circular shape and a mirrored facade, this structure reflects its topography and almost blends into the greenery of its forest surroundings.

Toronto-based design firm gh3's concept aims to revamp the 100-year-old park that has been opened since 1906. Playing with curvilinear forms, the designers create an architecture piece that mirrors the beauty of nature.

The Borden Pavilion houses the park's vending machines and public washroom spaces while providing its visitors with gorgeous and vast views. In addition to its striking views and geometric construction details, this structure features a reflective glass coating that adds to its sustainable design concept.

(https://www.trendhunter.com/trends/borden-pavilion)

Castle Downs Park Pavilion- gh*3

"Awarded by a national design competition, the Castle Downs Park Pavilion unifies a wide range of outdoor recreational facilities within a suburban park, and helps imbue them with a sense of place. As an organizing device along an east-west axis, the low-slung linear pavilion responds to the prairie landscape and gives definition to a vast, flat site.

Faceting and inflection characterize the form of the punctuated bar—a mirrored pavilion that offers broken and distorted reflections of its immediate environment. As an object in the landscape, the pavilion has an important function in connecting the various sports fields directly to its north and south. Two intensely hued portals provide staging areas for users and further enhance connections through the building

Programmatic functions are grouped into three distinct zones separated by the two portals: storage components for the Seahawks soccer club are housed in the east module of the building; meeting and multipurpose rooms occupy the centre; and the western most module contains public facilities and a concession. These shifts in program are articulated as the building plan inflects ever so slightly across the site.

To amplify the energy of the park, mirrored stainless-steel panels skin the building. Impact friendly, the panels offer a combination of durability, renewability and playfulness. In plan, they are arranged in a zigzag configuration creating fragmented and reflected views of the surrounding park, its users, and the days and seasons. Operable façade panels conceal the concession when closed.

The accordian like exterior walls are held in tension by a horizontal roof plane. The shallow 150-millimetre depth of the facia is achieved through a combination of an inverted roofing system over the significant cantilever of the portals and a conventional roofing system for the remainder. The polished stainless steel fascia and soffit contribute to the pavilion’s uninterrupted reflectivity

The colour of the portals extends to the interior, enhancing the buildings permeability. The deeply saturated cobalt blue is a response to the intensity of the prairie sky, creating an altered experience in the interior by enveloping the user in an intimate cocoon in which the walls, floor and ceiling seem to dematerialize. Contributing to the seamless planar interior expression is the placement of building emergency devices, recessed, painted aluminum bases and corner guards, and smooth Corian-clad walls and benches. Durable recycled rubber lines the floor of the portal lobbies, washrooms and the Seahawks area to protect against skates and cleats.

In adopting an integrated approach to sustainable design, the building utilizes both passive and active strategies within a high-performance envelope. The pavilion’s reflective skin, highly insulated assemblies, and strategic glazing cohere into a buffer from climatic extremes. In combination with multiple skylights, a building management system controls through-wall venting in the glazing, ensuring uninterrupted daylight in winter months while facilitating passive venting for the building. Rainwater harvesting addresses stormwater requirements, and the high-performing exterior walls ensure that the material and energetic investment in the building will benefit its community well into the future."

(https://www.gh3.ca/work/castle-downs-park-pavilion)

Why size is everything in public art

The latest large-scale sculptures soon to be unveiled are Anish Kapoor's four mirrored works in Kensington Gardens, in London. The immense pieces – the largest of which has a width of 35ft – will be placed among nature, by the bank of the lake and in the centre of the Round Pond near Kensington Palace, where the public will stumble across them, from September until March 2011. 

Constructed from reflective stainless steel, the giant mirrored surfaces will be visible across large distances. They will be installed as part of a six-month exhibition, entitled Turning the World Upside Down, organised by the Serpentine Gallery and the Royal Parks.

"The idea of the artist who understands craft, and the link between authorship and the hand, has been completely broken," he says.

Will Hunter, the deputy editor of The Architectural Review magazine, says such sculptures represent the growing distance between the sculptor and his or her workmanship in producing these works.

"Artists are more like architects, leading a team of people. They are the ones who will build these large sculptures. These sculptures, once they get to a certain scale, can't be made by your own hand."

Hunter believes that the trend towards large sculptures is a product of Tony Blair's Britain, and that we might now see a reversal of the trend, given these recessionary times. "Maybe it's got something to do with the culture of the Blair years, they spent a lot of money on... things that were not all that relevant. Having just come back from the Architecture Biennale in Venice, there was an art flash architecture group that had researched [this area] and at the end of 12 months, they found that people wanted pedestrian crossings and cleaner streets, not big sculptures," he says."

 (https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/why-size-is-everything-in-public-art-2067122.html)

Anish Kapoor:

""There are many tools an artist has," says Anish Kapoor, "and one of them is scale. We are suspicious of scale because it's difficult to do a big thing that works; but it's an important tool in the awe game. The scale of the Turbine Hall is really exciting and interesting.""

(https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2003/dec/15/1)

How Do We See Color?

An introduction to color and the human eye.

“The human eye and brain together translate light into color. Light receptors within the eye transmit messages to the brain, which produces the familiar sensations of color.

Newton observed that color is not inherent in objects. Rather, the surface of an object reflects some colors and absorbs all the others. We perceive only the reflected colors.

Thus, red is not "in" an apple. The surface of the apple is reflecting the wavelengths we see as red and absorbing all the rest. An object appears white when it reflects all wavelengths and black when it absorbs them all.

Red, green and blue are the additive primary colors of the color spectrum. Combining balanced amounts of red, green and blue lights also produces pure white. By varying the amount of red, green and blue light, all of the colors in the visible spectrum can be produced.

Considered to be part of the brain itself, the retina is covered by millions of light-sensitive cells, some shaped like rods and some like cones. These receptors process the light into nerve impulses and pass them along to the cortex of the brain via the optic nerve.

Have you ever wondered why your peripheral vision is less sharp and colorful than your front-on vision? It's because of the rods and cones. Rods are most highly concentrated around the edge of the retina.There are over 120 million of them in each eye. Rods transmit mostly black and white information to the brain. As rods are more sensitive to dim light than cones, you lose most color vision in dusky light and your peripheral vision is less colorful. It is the rods that help your eyes adjust when you enter a darkened room.

Cones are concentrated in the middle of the retina, with fewer on the periphery. Six million cones in each eye transmit the higher levels of light intensity that create the sensation of color and visual sharpness. There are three types of cone-shaped cells, each sensitive to the long, medium or short wavelengths of light. These cells, working in combination with connecting nerve cells, give the brain enough information to interpret and name colors.

The human eye can perceive more variations in warmer colors than cooler ones. This is because almost 2/3 of the cones process the longer light wavelengths (reds, oranges and yellows).

About 8% of men and 1% of women have some form of color impairment. Most people with color deficiencies aren't aware that the colors they perceive as identical appear different to other people. Most still perceive color, but certain colors are transmitted to the brain differently.

The most common impairment is red and green dichromatism which causes red and green to appear indistinguishable. Other impairments affect other color pairs. People with total color blindness are very rare.

Birds, fish and many other mammals perceive the full spectrum. Some insects, especially bees, can see ultraviolet colors invisible to the human eye. In fact, color camouflage, one of nature's favorite survival mechanisms, depends on the ability of the predator to distinguish colors. The predator is expected to be fooled by the color matching of the prey. Until recently, it was thought that dogs didn't see any color at all. Recent studies now show, however, that dogs can differentiate between red and blue and can even pick out subtle differences in shades of blue and violet.”

(https://www.pantone.com/color-intelligence/articles/technical/how-do-we-see-color)

The Story of Colour: An Exploration of the Hidden Messages of the Spectrum

Colour language and colour cognition: Brown and Lenneberg revisited

"We report two experiments that revisit the question raised by Brown and Lenneberg (1954) concerning the degree to which colours that are easier to name are also easier to communicate and to remember. Much subsequent research has suggested that such effects depend on context and task demands. In the present experiments communication accuracy and recognition memory were compared, varying the distractor array for items that are either best examples (focal) of the eight basic chromatic categories named in English, or peripheral (nonfocal) examples of them. Focal targets were communicated faster, more accurately, and with fewer words than non-focal targets, irrespective of array. However, they were not recognized more accurately under all conditions. With a randomized array of distractors, more akin to real scenes outside the lab, there was no recognition advantage for those colours that are easiest to code and communicate. We conclude that focal colours are not inherently more memorable.

The relation between colour language and nonlinguistic behaviour continues to engender lively debate (see Steels & Belpaeme, 2005). Historically, this debate was characterized by the opposing views that colour cognition is either shaped by language or completely independent of it. Recent investigations, however, suggest that the relationship is more subtle and complex than either extreme view (Drivonikou et al., 2007; Gilbert, Regier, Kay, & Ivry, 2006; Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, & Shapiro, 2004, 2005; Roberson, Pak & Hanley, 2007; Winawer et al., 2007). In a seminal investigation of this relationship, Brown and Lenneberg (1954) reported a positive correlation between a range of measures of codability for colours (speed of naming, consensus, communication accuracy) and the accuracy with which those colours were recognized. A number of subsequent cross-cultural studies also found evidence of a relationship between codability and nonlinguistic behaviour (e.g., recognition memory; Lantz & Stefflre, 1964). Brown and Lenneberg (1954) concluded that there is a tight link between language and colour cognition without specifying the direction of that relationship, but their research also showed positive correlations between recognition accuracy and the ease with which targets could be discriminated within an array of distractors that were independent of codability. So the exact nature of the relationship between discriminability, codability, and cognition remained unclear. Lucy (1992, p. 165) suggests that these factors interact, since codability is a property of a stimulus in isolation, whilst discriminability is a property of a colour stimulus ‘‘ in the context of a particular array’’ (italics in original). We here revisit the issue in an attempt to illuminate the nature of the relationship. We also compare recognition from arrays laid out in progressive order by hue, lightness, and chroma (colour saturation) with arrays in which the same set of colours are randomly distributed, which more closely resembles recognition in the real world.

Rosch (Heider, 1972) suggested that the best predictor of recognition accuracy was neither discriminability nor codability, but the status of an item within a category (good, central exemplar or poor, peripheral exemplar). Rosch proposed that the best (focal) examples of English basic colour categories (red, green, blue, yellow, pink, orange, purple, and brown) have privileged status. They are the most highly saturated (colourful) examples of each category and so may have enhanced salience for all humans in the natural environment. Rosch suggested that they would therefore become the foci of evolving categories in any language. Supporting evidence came from a language with only two basic colour terms (Heider,1972), whose speakers showed better recognition for the central (focal) items of English basic categories, than for items that were peripheral to  those categories (nonfocal). This advantage could not have been due to codability, since all the items would have been labelled with one of two terms. Rosch also balanced discriminability across both sets of items, although individually focal items had fewer close distracters than nonfocal targets. When the number of close distracters for each target was equated and the test array was randomly arranged, the recognition advantage for focal items disappeared (Lucy & Shweder, 1979)."

(https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233124407_Colour_language_and_colour_cognition_Brown_and_Lenneberg_revisited)

Nancy Fouts (Surrealist Sculptor)

"Everyday objects take an unusual turn in Nancy Fouts‘ bizarre sculptures. Playing with unexpected combinations of violence and peace, the natural and manmade, interiors and exteriors, Fouts challenges viewers to rethink the categories we habitually place different objects in. The American-born, London-based artist studied at the Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College of Art. Prints of some works are available on Artsy and you can meet Fouts in the video below by Black Rat Projects."

(https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/01/the-surreal-objects-of-nancy-fouts/)

"Imagine cracking an egg open, only to find another egg inside of it! Or imagine going about your normal morning routine, when you grab your toothbrush and find out that it’s made out of teeth! London-based American artist Nancy Fouts has conjured up these creative scenarios and beyond. In her remarkably intriguing sculptures, Fouts combines objects in playful and completely surprising ways. Her surreal sculptures are unexpected juxtapositions meant to entertain her audiences. Often there isn’t a straightforward explanation for the combinations and Fouts leaves the interpretation of each piece up to her viewers. She said her work is, “All about manipulating the object to realize my idea. Everything starts with the idea."

(https://www.feeldesain.com/surreal-sculptures-nancy-fouts.html)

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature

The Strange, Familiar, and Forgotten: A Trailblazing Exploration of Consciousness, Memory, and How Our Sense of Self Arises

"What we say and do often hides motives that we keep from others and even from ourselves. Modern psychology began when this observation, as old as the writing of history, was turned into a principle: that our thoughts and actions are to a great extent determined by ideas, memories, and drives that are unconscious and inaccessible to conscious thought; that unknowable forces determine our actions. Thus the study of the unconscious became the cornerstone of twentieth-century psychology. Consciousness itself was ignored, since after all elucidating the unconscious seemed to tell us so much. People came to presume that when they talked of their “memories,” they meant experiences and learning that were carefully stored away in their brains and could be brought into consciousness, or made conscious. But this was to ignore the possibility that memories were in fact part of the very structure of consciousness: not only can there be no such thing as a memory without there being consciousness, but consciousness and memory are in a certain sense inseparable, and understanding one requires understanding the other.

[…]

Human memory may be unlike anything we have thus far imagined or successfully built a model for. And consciousness may be the reason why."

One of the most remarkable aspects of consciousness, Rosenfield points out, is “its utter subjectivity, the uniqueness of each individual human perspective.” This makes our capacity for empathy an extraordinary feat, for it requires that we acknowledge the subjectivity of our own reality and accommodate that of another, and yet we remain by and large entrapped in our subjectivity. As the great physicist David Bohm memorably articulated the problem, “Reality is what we take to be true. What we take to be true is what we believe… What we believe determines what we take to be true.”

Rosenfield captures this paradox:

"In this subjectivity, oddly, we nonetheless feel or believe we are experiencing the objective truth about the world, and we call that knowledge; we usually think of knowledge as something that can be understood and also transmitted from one person to another."

But this, Rosenfield cautions, seeds one of our gravest misconceptions about consciousness — the expectation that it is contained in specific units of knowledge or records, so to speak, of sensory experience, stored in particular areas of the brain. Although scientists have shown that specific brain tissues do respond to stimuli like shape, color, and motion, and neuroscience has made tremendous strides in the quarter-century since the book was published, Rosenfield’s critique of the broader limitations of such neurophysiological hunts for the seedbed of consciousness remains remarkably astute:

"If one thinks about the ordinary human experience of being conscious, of being aware and alert to the meaning of one’s ongoing experiences, it seems unlikely that perceptions become conscious by these re-creations or representations in the brain, however complex they are supposed to be. This notion presupposes a static model of brain function; but consciousness has a temporal flow, a continuity over time, that cannot be accounted for by the neuroscientists’ claim that specific parts of the brain are responding to the presence of particular stimuli at a given moment. Our perceptions are part of a “stream of consciousness,” part of a continuity of experience that the neuroscientific models and descriptions fail to capture; their categories of color, say, or smell, or sound, or motion are discrete entities independent of time. But … a sense of consciousness comes precisely from the flow of perceptions, from the relations among them (both spatial and temporal), from the dynamic but constant relation to them as governed by one unique personal perspective sustained throughout a conscious life; this dynamicsense of consciousness eludes the neuroscientists’ analyses. Compared to it, units of “knowledge” such as we can transmit or record in books or images are but instant snapshots taken in a dynamic flow of uncontainable, unrepeatable, and inexpressible experience. And it is an unwarranted mistake to associate these snapshots with material “stored” in the brain."

This dynamic dimension of consciousness — or what Sarah Manguso has so beautifully termed “ongoingness” — is why our various experiences of time are so integral to our very humanity; it is how we’re able to transmute information into wisdom; it is ultimately what makes us superior to computers. Rosenfield writes:

"Conscious perception is temporal: the continuity of consciousness derives from the correspondence which the brain establishes from moment to moment. Without this activity of connecting, we would merely perceive a sequence of unrelated stimuli from moment to unrelated moment, and we would be unable to transform this experience into knowledge and understanding of the world. This is why conscious human knowledge is so different from the “knowledge” that can be stored in a machine or in a computer."

[...]

"Confusion and understanding are aspects of conscious behavior, indeed they are states of consciousness, suggesting very different sets of relations between the individual and the world, and there is no way to grasp what they are without some idea of what we mean by consciousness. Computers, for example, which lack consciousness, do not become confused when they arrive at contradictory conclusions or when part of their “memory” is lost; it might also be said that they never “understand” what they are doing.""

(https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/17/the-strange-familiar-and-forgotten-israel-rosenfield/) 

Social Mirroring:

"Social Mirror Theory (SMT) states that people are not capable of self-reflection without taking into consideration a peer's interpretation of the experience. In other words, people define and resolve their internal musings through other's viewpoint. SMT's background is derived from the 1800s from concepts related to the study of public opinion and social interaction by Wilhelm Dilthey, the German philosopher and sociologist.

SMT suggests that people, in general, are not capable of self-reflection without taking into consideration a peer's interpretation of the experience. Burgoon and Hale (1984) conceptualized relational communication as the verbal and nonverbal themes present in people's communication that define an interpersonal relationship.

Lacan: The Mirror Stage

"The idea of the "mirror stage" is an important early component in Lacan’s critical reinterpretation of the work of Freud. Drawing on work in physiology and animal psychology, Lacan proposes that human infants pass through a stage in which an external image of the body (reflected in a mirror, or represented to the infant through the mother or primary caregiver) produces a psychic response that gives rise to the mental representation of an "I". The infant identifies with the image, which serves as a gestalt of the infant's emerging perceptions of selfhood, but because the image of a unified body does not correspond with the underdeveloped infant's physical vulnerability and weakness, this imago is established as an Ideal-I toward which the subject will perpetually strive throughout his or her life.

For Lacan, the mirror stage establishes the ego as fundamentally dependent upon external objects, on an other. As the so-called "individual" matures and enters into social relations through language, this "other" will be elaborated within social and linguistic frameworks that will give each subject's personality (and his or her neuroses and other psychic disturbances) its particular characteristics.

(http://www.english.hawaii.edu/criticalink/lacan/)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agTYUU4gTOo

Mirror test

"The mirror test – sometimes called the mark test, mirror self-recognition test (MSR), red spot technique, or rouge test – is a behavioural technique developed in 1970 by psychologist Gordon Gallup Jr. as an attempt to determine whether an animal possesses the ability of visual self-recognition. The MSR test is the traditional method for attempting to measure self-awareness. However, there has been agreement that animals can be self-aware in ways not measured by the mirror test, such as distinguishing between their own and others' songs and scents. On the other hand, animals that can pass the MSR do not necessarily have self-awareness.

In the classic MSR test, an animal is anaesthetised and then marked (e.g., painted, or a sticker attached) on an area of the body the animal cannot normally see. When the animal recovers from the anesthetic, it is given access to a mirror. If the animal then touches or investigates the mark, it is taken as an indication that the animal perceives the reflected image as itself, rather than of another animal.

Very few species have passed the MSR test. As of 2015, only great apes (including humans), a single Asiatic elephant, dolphins, orcasand the Eurasian magpie have passed the MSR test. A wide range of species have been reported to fail the test, including several species of monkey, giant pandas, sea lions, and dogs.

Rouge test: Human child exploring his reflection

The rouge test is a version of the mirror test used with human children. Using rouge makeup, an experimenter surreptitiously places a dot on the face of the child. The child is then placed in front of a mirror and their reactions are monitored; depending on the child's development, distinct categories of responses are demonstrated. This test is widely cited as the primary measure for mirror self-recognition in human children.

Developmental reactions

From the age of 6 to 12 months, the child typically sees a "sociable playmate" in the mirror's reflection. Self-admiring and embarrassment usually begin at 12 months, and at 14 to 20 months most children demonstrate avoidance behaviours. Finally, at 18 months half of children recognise the reflection in the mirror as their own and by 20 to 24 months self-recognition climbs to 65%. Children do so by evincing mark-directed behaviour; they touch their own nose or try to wipe the mark off.

It appears that self-recognition in mirrors is independent of familiarity with reflecting surfaces. In some cases the rouge test has been shown to have differing results, depending on sociocultural orientation. For example, a Cameroonian Nso sample of infants 18 to 20 months of age had an extremely low amount of self-recognition outcomes at 3.2%. The study also found two strong predictors of self-recognition: object stimulation (maternal effort of attracting the attention of the infant to an object either person touched) and mutual eye contact. A strong correlation between self-concept and object permanence have also been demonstrated using the rouge test.

Implications

The rouge test is a measure of self-concept; the child who touches the rouge on his own nose upon looking into a mirror demonstrates the basic ability to understand self-awareness. Animals, young children, and people who have their sight restored after being blind from birth, sometimes react to their reflection in the mirror as though it were another individual.

Theorists have remarked on the significance of this period in a child's life. For example, psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used a similar test in marking the mirror stage when growing up. Current views of the self in psychology position the self as playing an integral part in human motivation, cognition, affect, and social identity.

Methodological flaws

There is some debate as to the interpretation of the results of the mirror test, and researchers in one study have identified some potential problems with the test as a means of gauging self-awareness in young children and animals.

Proposing that a self-recognising child or animal may not demonstrate mark-directed behaviour because they are not motivated to clean up their faces, thus providing incorrect results, the study compared results of the standard rouge test methodology against a modified version of the test.

In the classic test, the experimenter first played with the children, making sure that they looked in the mirror at least three times. Then, the rouge test was performed using a dot of rouge below the child's right eye. For their modified testing, the experimenter introduced a doll with a rouge spot under its eye and asked the child to help clean the doll. The experimenter would ask up to three times before cleaning the doll themselves. The doll was then put away, and the mirror test performed using a rouge dot on the child's face. These modifications were shown to increase the number of self-recognisers.

The results uncovered by this study at least suggest some issues with the classic mirror test; primarily, that it assumes that children will recognise the dot of rouge as abnormal and attempt to examine or remove it. The classic test may have produced false negatives, because the child's recognition of the dot did not lead to them cleaning it. In their modified test, in which the doll was cleaned first, they found a stronger relationship between cleaning the doll's face and the child cleaning its own face. The demonstration with the doll, postulated to demonstrate to the children what to do, may lead to more reliable confirmation of self-recognition.

On a more general level, it remains debatable whether recognition of one's mirror image implies self-awareness. Likewise, the converse may also be false—one may hold self-awareness, but not present a positive result in a mirror test."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_test)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agTYUU4gTOo

What Do Dogs See in Mirrors?

They're not looking at themselves, but mirrors aren't meaningless to dogs

"Dogs don't use mirrors to refer back to themselves like we do. No dog will ever gaze into a mirror and reflect, "So THAT'S what my ears look like." But that shouldn't suggest mirrors are meaningless to dogs. Instead, their relationship with mirrors seems to come in three equally interesting flavors.

Upon first encountering a mirror, dogs—like other animals—may react as if the image is another member of their species, in this case, another dog. Young dogs often treat the image in the mirror not as themselves, but as if another dog play bowed, pawed, barked, or started to zoom around the room."

(https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/dog-spies/what-do-dogs-see-in-mirrors/)

Does My Dog Recognise Himself in a Mirror?

"Many people are puzzled by the fact that dogs seem to ignore images of themselves reflected in a mirror. Young puppies encountering mirrors for the first time may treat the image as if it is another dog. They may bark at it, or give a little bow and an invitation to play as if they are encountering a real dog and engaging in a social interaction. However, after a short while they lose interest. Afterwards then often seem to treat their reflections as if they were of no consequence at all.   

When we humans look into a mirror we immediately recognize that the image that we are gazing at is our own. It seems so natural that we tend not to think about it is something special, however psychologists treat this as a major mental feat because it requires self-awareness, which is one of the most sophisticated aspects of consciousness. In effect we must be able to mentally step outside of ourselves and consider ourselves as separate entities from the rest of the world.

We are not born with the ability to recognize ourselves in mirrors. Young infants may be fascinated by their reflection, however they view this as a social interaction with what appears to be another baby. Somewhere between the age of 18 and 24 months babies begin to understand that they are looking at themselves in a mirror. This was demonstrated by Jeanne Brooks-Gunn and Michael Lewis who surreptitiously placed rouge spots on the baby's face. If the baby thinks that he is looking at another child, or some sort of image, the red spots that he sees evoke little interest. However once he understands that he is looking at his own image he will begin to selectively touch and explore those spots while looking at the mirror, since he now understands that this is a representation of himself."

(https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/canine-corner/201107/does-my-dog-recognize-himself-in-mirror)

A Comparative Study of the Use of Visual Communicative Signals inInteractions Between Dogs (Canis familiaris) and Humans and Cats (Felis catus) and Humans

'Clear Cut' Land Art Installation / Kjellgren Kaminsky Architecture

"We wanted to connect these trees to time. We wanted the installation to visualize a memory of earlier generations of pine trees that have stood here and forecast the clear cut that will soon replace them. Perhaps the mirrors could absorb the light, colours and smells of this place and save them for the future? Joakim and Maria stayed in the forest during a day and a night observing how the installation changed in dialogue with its surroundings; during midday, as the sun set, as a mist came in, during the dark night and as the sun rose. Then they left, leaving no trace."

 (https://www.archdaily.com/159897/clear-cut-land-art-installation-kjellgren-kaminsky-architecture)

Carsten Höller: Decision 

"Carsten Höller likes to unsettle, upset, delight and surprise. You get out of one of his shows and feel like you’ve lived through ‘something’ new and totally unexpected. The Hayward retrospective is an experiment, from the perspective of the artist but also from the one of the visitor, in perception and decision-taking: are you going to enter through the doors on the right or on the left? Will you dare to be harnessed to a flying machine? Will you ingest one of those curious little pills that are dropped from the ceiling? Or will you just watch and see what other people chose? And in the end, will you conclude that this was fun but a bit shallow or that it was thought-provoking and enlightening? Is this art or just entertainment?

[...]

The first decision you take is whether to access the show by the entrance on the right or the one on the left. I chose the left one and very quickly regretted it. I found myself in the darkness of a long, a very very long steel corridor. It sometimes goes up, sometimes down, it bends to the right or to the left. With each step, i was wondering whether i should keep on walking or whether i should just hurry back to where i came from and take the other entrance (which takes you to a similarly awful corridor if i understood correctly.)

[...]

Right after the red and white mushrooms, you encounter a growing pile of red and white little pills. Every three seconds, a little capsule drops from the ceiling. You’re actually free to pop one with water from the nearby mini sink. There’s no information about what is inside the pills. That’s part of the experiment, of course, it’s another decision you have to take. 

People were queuing to try the Upside Down Goggles. The goggles are based on an experiment carried out by George Stratton in the 1890s. While studying the perception in vision, the psychologist wore special glasses which inverted images up and down and left and right. He found that after 4 days wearing them continuously, his brain started to compensate, and he could see the world the right way up again.

Höller’s perception-altering goggles are very disorientating. You feel a bit seasick and unsure of your steps."

(http://we-make-money-not-art.com/carsten_holler_decision/)

(https://waysofcurating.withgoogle.com/exhibition/take-me-im-yours-serpentine/media/4823480872730624)

https://slideplayer.com/slide/600342/