Questions of Perception: the Undulating Stability of How We See

JasonFreedmanArchitecture.com

The architecture of our time is turning into the retinal art of the eye. Architecture at large has become an art of the printed image fixed by the hurried eye of the camera. The gaze itself tends to flatten into a picture and lose its plasticity; instead of experiencing our being in the world, we behold it from outside as spectators of images projected on the surface of the retina. -Juhani Pallasmaa When one first glances at the famous M.C. Escher Image Up and Down, something very peculiar happens to every human being for a single startling instant nothing. It is not that we do not see, as we all do (and some with greater resolve towards the up or the down of the image than others). It is that in the same instant our brain registers the image, it is also being told that what it is seeing cannot be real resulting in a split second of physical sight without perceptual understanding. In this void exists a tension caused by the undulating experiences of a phenomenal multistability, defined originally by the school of Gestalt Psychology and built upon be the revered architectural theorist Colin Rowe. Rowe claims that when a person is denied the possibility of penetrating a stratified space, which can defined by either by real planes or their imaginary projections, the observer becomes locked in conflict between experiencing a space which is explicit and another which is implied.

From this tangled jargon we can deduce that the determination of space lies solely in the hands of the individual viewer, who eventually has to choose to interpret the space from a first person perspective, and therefore is responsible for his or her conception of the space. Rowe affirms, So, [it is] established that it is indeed the individual to whom the decision belongs, but the question is not of perception, but rather the tension that exists between perception and understanding. A more contemporary flavour of this perceptual tension can be found in the new generation of representation produced by the motion picture camera. The consequent 3D techniques of rendering space have had the most profound effect on how we define our perception today. The ability of the curved lens to realistically portray the multi-perspectival image and view it in rapid sequence has effectively conquered the quest to reproduce movement through the collapse of time and space. By inserting time into space and allowing for the dynamic perception of space within time, modern-day cinema gains the ability to express form at rest in movement, such as a panning camera would do. It is this principle that lead art historian Elie Faure to deem cinema a plastic medium, and he likewise refers to the representation of movement through time and space as cineplastic. The idea of the cineplastic goes beyond the notion of mere representation though, and begins to traverse into the phenomenological. New York Times art critic Herman G. Scheffauer insists that within 3D film a new stereoscopic universe that extended into what he

called the sixth sense of man, his feeling for space in a room his Raumgefhl exists in such a way as to transform reality itself. Although this may be painted as a Brechtian picture provoking one to suspend disbelief and actually participate in cineplastic reality, I believe it can be better understood as a foray into the simulacrum of space. That is, not a representation of the real but phenomenal truth in its own right: the space of the hyperreal. So, if the filmic and the cineplastic dominate our interpretation and conception of reality, then hypothetically we will conceive of space in the same manner. Further, if architecture is intrinsically bound to the way we conceive, then it too is a product of our capacity to construct reality through the cineplastic lens. In saying this, it can be argued that the human capacity to conceive not just architecture but any ideas is tied to the technology we in turn invent to depict it, ie. the representation of ideas is advanced by ideas of representation, and vice versa. As architecture shifts towards total digital emersion, it will no doubt have increasingly profound effects not only how we see and what we see, it may indeed change the way we understand the world we live in. Thus, as we close the void between perception and understanding, the implications of the work we do may be a heavier load than we ever had the ability to imagine.