Test Bed 4

The Centre of of Meaning

There is an idea called 'the centre of meaning', which describes a stage in the cognition process that precedes the textual identification of a subject. We find this in young children, who respond to visual signals before they master language. Recognition and interpretation, while leaving vestigial traces of the pre-linguisitic experience (of developing comprehension), remain hidden because conventional linguistic applications inhibit our potential to employ direct visual analysis. This is due to received codifications and their synthesis in words, and (consequently) remove our latent abilities to experience enhanced symbolic awareness. Although not formally the same as music, there are comparisons, which are helpful when seeing how language is disconnected from expression. The language of music is notation, but the audition (as opposed pure sound) is abstraction, which still makes sense when heard in its distinctive form. Why then can imagery not be seen as discernible from its explanatory consents?

What I am saying, is that a condition of disablement occurs when language becomes divorced from our perceptive power to recognise, and employ, the potential impetus held in imagery. If we consider the production and interpretation of naive art, as an exemplar of pre-textuality, we might miss the difference between the rendering and reading of the pictorial forms, and lose our understanding of the intellectual possibilities contained within the ideas as depicted and signified.

The other thing we should think about is the effect of abstraction on our perceptions. Whether or not the 'centre of meaning' indicates a true verification of the primacy of formalist significations over mainstream language codes, depends upon our propensity to be ready to accept alternative forms of discourse. To explain this, I will consider two practical methods (Arrays and Intermediates), which produce interventions that moderate and test linguistic assumptions and determinants.

Linear Array.

Marey's development of chronophotography in the 1870's/ 80's was highly influential, particularly in the work of Muybridge. Both pioneers were engaged in animated photography, but where Marey's phases of movement were recorded on one surface, Muybridge's triggered a number of cameras (exposed as a linear progression) to register the subject. Their significance can be still felt today when we consider the development of array photography. I must emphasise, at the outset that I am not interested in the animated evidence of the process, and I will not present the motion because I am interested in the precursors to semantic logic as can be found in the address of the viewing, as opposed to the reading.

A basic array is a matrix of cameras/lenses/sensors, which capture the same moment from different angles, simultaneously in a linear or matrix arrangement. The example I will use is an idea first developed in the 1990's. More complex arrangements with matrices are, of course, being achieved, but by using this simple model I hope to explain the underlying significance of the frozen image when captured as a frame for the action of animation. The diagram below shows the configuration, which has subject, variable point of view, and depiction. It samples only a few frames to emphasise the setting for my intended limits. 

The subject (a bird ) is a single frame (captured) by the linear array taking several pictures (12 simultaneous exposures from equidistant cameras ranged in a parabola ) to create varying points of view. The effect is to suspend the bird's frozen moment while working around it in real time, (ie.we see it in three dimensions, but not in real time). I want to simplify the mechanism in order to concentrate on the relationship between the point of view (POV) and the subject

The POV in the domain of the viewer is the subject (what it is), while the (frozen) bird, as manipulated, is the object (of what is happening). The signifier is the bird, and the signified is the temporal anomaly created while observing the 3D subject in suspended time. This is an example of addressing the image as a sensation rather than a literal event, relegating any textual coding to a secondary mode of interest, thus accentuating the impact of the phenomenon before rationalising its meaning. It is a pre-textual image because it defies normal experience. We see the bird, but are distracted from registering it as the principal feature, because it has become a meta-graph that has no tangible explanation outside the constructed event. We observe, but cannot express immediately (in words) the meaning of the incident, because it exists only as an experience, and moves us away from trying to identify it as an occurrence in language.

There are other techniques that I will look at in later postings, such as the 360 degree array, which shows all the details of a photograph, captured in non-linear multi-exposures.

Apart from the flexibility of examining every part of the panorama, it only allows observation from one point of view, and cannot construct the event as produced in a linear array, which targets the subject from many consistent points of view.

Intermediates between the Subject and the Lense.

The most common devices which exists between the subject matter, and the lens, are filters. They have uses, which are predictable in that they add to, or subtract from, the way light and form is modified. However, there is another type of intervention which reverses the process, by taking the focus of our attention away from the camera to the domain of the picture. The production is achieved by the realisation of the shot, but post-production methods manipulate the image in terms of not only its devising and its rendering, but also drawing out an intermediate effect of the meaning. As an example of how this works I will examine the following three prints -

In the first picture, a cat looks down at us from the top landing of a stairwell. The image is already strange by virtue of the composition; the sinister look and positioning of the cat. The signified is all to do with watching, but the question is to what extent are we the attention of its gaze?

Given that the cat is black and is occupying the 'high ground', we must assume that we would not be welcome (ascending) to meet it. It is defending territory, and any thoughts that it might be mere curiosity on the part of the cat are dispelled by the mise en scene.

Stairways feature large in the canon of dramatic narratives, and the transformational abilities of feline forms are well recognised in the genre. The setting determines the fictive unsettlement of the moment. If we are attracted to the image, we will be drawn to look more closely at the subject.

As we are now in the picture's domain, we take a magnifying glass to get a closer view of the cat. What is revealed is not getting us any closer to our initial regard of the subject, in spite of our closer proximity to the object as a dramatic idea. The index is darkly vertiginous by proxy, but the cat is in an illuminated sector of the picture, which has a freshness compared to the gloom pervading the lower parts of the stairwell. We are being seduced by a sign that may be unreliable; not calming our apprehension but heightening our alertness.

The final image is a distortion of how our rational view is contorted by the use of a convex lense. The aberration reinforces our misgivings, because the optics fit our preconceived ideas. The textual elements are based on feelings we have registered through stories, films and connotative indicators, and it is important to recognise that all this is happening within the depiction, but not as a denotative expression. The intermediate intervention, of the magnifier, changes our relationship with the formal distribution of the details, and introduces a device, which demotes language and encourages imaginary inclinations, which have no particular textual sense as they resurrect our emotional predispositions.

What you see is what you get. WYSIWYG is not a word, but an intermediate abbreviation to propose the ingestion of a 'gut feeling'. The 'centre of meaning' might, after all, be located in an unsuspected place.

In the next article I will look at how the effect of defamiliarising images disorientates essential elements through cognitive estrangements.