Picture Plane Research Articles

Mental rotation and the motor system: Embodiment head over heels

We examined whether body parts attached to abstract stimuli automatically force embodiment in a mental rotation task. In Experiment 1, standard cube combinations reflecting a human pose were added with (1) body parts on anatomically possible locations, (2) body parts on anatomically impossible locations, (3) colored end cubes, and (4) simple end cubes. Participants (N=30) had to decide whether two simultaneously presented stimuli, rotated in the picture plane, were identical or not. They were fastest and made less errors in the possible-body condition, but were slowest and least accurate in the impossible-body condition. A second experiment (N=32) replicated the results and ruled out that the poor performance in the impossible-body condition was due to the specific stimulus material. The findings of both experiments suggest that body parts automatically trigger embodiment, even when it is counterproductive and dramatically impairs performance, as in the impossible-body condition. It can furthermore be concluded that body parts cannot be used flexibly for spatial orientation in mental rotation tasks, compared to colored end cubes. Thus, embodiment appears to be a strong and inflexible mechanism that may, under certain conditions, even impede performance.

Emotion recognition (sometimes) depends on horizontal orientations

Face recognition depends critically on horizontal orientations (Goffaux & Dakin, Frontiers in Psychology, 1(143), 1–14, 2010): Face images that lack horizontal features are harder to recognize than those that have this information preserved. We asked whether facial emotional recognition also exhibits this dependency by asking observers to categorize orientation-filtered happy and sad expressions. Furthermore, we aimed to dissociate image-based orientation energy from object-based orientation by rotating images 90 deg in the picture plane. In our first experiment, we showed that the perception of emotional expression does depend on horizontal orientations, and that object-based orientation constrained performance more than image-based orientation did. In Experiment 2, we showed that mouth openness (i.e., open vs. closed mouths) also influenced the emotion-dependent reliance on horizontal information. Finally, we describe a simple computational analysis that demonstrates that the impact of mouth openness was not predicted by variation in the distribution of orientation energy across horizontal and vertical orientation bands. Overall, our results suggest that emotion recognition largely does depend on horizontal information defined relative to the face, but that this bias is modulated by multiple factors that introduce variation in appearance across and within distinct emotions.

Discourse, Figure

Discourse, Figure

Thickness and surface: Towards a painterly space

ABSTRACTThe starting point of this reflection is deeply anchored in my practical work as a drawer. Knowing my work was never about illustrating space or about depicting it, I was forced to ask myself about the nature of space my drawing was creating, as a non-figurative art form. I noticed that numerous artists and critics where asking this very same question all along the twentieth century, opposing the flatness of the picture plane to a non-illusionist painterly space. I chose to extricate some of the prominent issues about space in modern painting to show the dense and multiple definitions the notion of space endured during the last century, trying to define more clearly the status of a painterly space made by shapes, layers and matters.

Mental rotation performance in primary school age children: Are there gender differences in chronometric tests?

In contrast to the well documented male advantage in psychometric mental rotation tests, gender differences in chronometric experimental designs are still under dispute. Therefore, a systematic investigation of gender differences in mental rotation performance in primary-school children is presented in this paper. A chronometric mental rotation task was used to test 449 second and fourth graders. The children were tested in three separate groups each with different stimulus material (animal drawings, letters, or cube figures). The results show that chronometric mental rotation tasks with cube figures – even rotated in picture plane only – were too difficult for children in both age groups. Further analyses with animal drawings and letters as stimuli revealed an overall gender difference in response time (RT) favoring males, an increasing RT with increasing angular disparity for all children, and faster RTs for fourth graders compared to second graders. This is the first study which has shown consistent gender differences in chronometric mental rotation with primary school aged children regarding reaction time and accuracy while considering appropriate stimuli.

Contextual influences of dimension, speed, and direction of motion on subjective time perception

Research has indicated that the direction of motion and the speed of motion can influence the subjective estimates of temporal duration of two-dimensional (2-D) stimuli expanding and contracting within the picture plane. In this study, we investigated whether the contextual cues of stimulus/movement-plane dimensionality (2-D stimuli with implied movement in the picture plane or depth-rendered "3-D" stimuli with implied movement in the depth plane) influence and interact with speed and implied movement direction during interval estimation. Participants viewed a series of standard stimulus durations followed by a test stimulus duration and determined whether the test and standard durations differed. The results indicated that moving stimuli were overestimated relative to stationary stimuli, regardless of the direction of motion or dimensionality. Also, faster-moving stimuli were overestimated relative to slower-moving stimuli. Importantly, an interaction between movement direction and dimensional cues indicated that the loom/recede distinction occurs for 2-D but not for 3-D stimuli. It is possible that the loom/recede distinction for the 2-D condition may be an artifact arising from reduced or from a lack of perceived motion in 2-D "recede" conditions, rather than a specific overestimation for looming stimuli.

Surface flows for image-based shading design

We present a novel method for producing convincing pictures of shaded objects based entirely on 2D image operations. This approach, which we call image-based shading design , offers direct artistic control in the picture plane by deforming image primitives so that they appear to conform to specific 3D shapes. Using a differential analysis of reflected radiance, we identify the two types of surface flows involved in the depiction of shaded objects, which are consistent with recent perceptual studies. We then introduce two novel deformation operators that closely mimic surface flows while providing direct artistic controls in real-time.

Late Gothic Abstractions

The steeply inclined ground planes of Early Netherlandish paintings are often covered with a drapery so stiff and heavy that it seems to break rather than fold. Known as the hard style—in opposition to the soft style common at 1400—this drapery tends to push up toward the flatness and verticality of the picture plane, where its angular folds rhyme reflexively with the rectilinear corners of the painted panels in which it appears. Despite its sweeping generality and seeming anachronism, Wilhelm Worringer's account of this drapery as a form of abstraction gets a good deal right. If Worringer is right—that what he calls Gothic drapery is, in an important sense, nonmimetic—that drapery, especially in its late hard form, may be more “thing” than picture—“thing,” that is, in the specifically medieval sense that Friedrich Ohly describes. Ohly's account of medieval Dingbedeutung (thing-meaning) lends unexpected support to Worringer's abstraction thesis by demonstrating the centrality of formal properties to certain modes of medieval exegesis. At the same time, Ohly's work suggests an important corrective to Worringer's formalism: because the formal properties of a painting relate it to all those things beyond its frame that share its properties, a painting should not be thought of as an autonomous entity. Reading Worringer through Ohly helps us see that the reflexive abstraction of hard-style drapery—with its flatness and its rectilinear folds, which echo the framing edges of the picture, particularly where they meet to form corners— opens the picture, in fact, first, to its own material substrate and, then in turn, to a wider world of things.

Speckle interferometry of magnetic stars with the BTA. I. First results

We present the results of speckle interferometry of a sample of 117 chemically peculiar stars with global magnetic fields. The observations were made in December 2009 at the BTA with a spatial resolution of about 0.02″ in the visual spectral region. Twenty-nine stars were resolved into individual components, 14 of them for the first time (HD965, HD5797, HD8855, HD10783, HD16605, HD21699, HD35502, HD51418, HD64486, HD79158, HD103498, HD108651, HD213918, HD293764). In twelve cases a companion turned out to be 2–4 m fainter than the main component—a magnetic star. Young hot Bp stars HD35502 and HD213918 are exceptions, since their companions are fainter by about 1 m . In all cases, the linear distance from a star to its companion at the epoch of observations in the picture plane exceeded 109 km. Eighty-eight magnetic CP stars revealed no secondary components within our study. Thus, the fraction of speckle interferometric binaries in our sample amounts to 25%.

Is This How it Ends or What?: Vernon Fisher, Image/Text, and the Postmodern Narrative Under Erasure

narratives of the world are numberless. Narrative is first and foremost a prodigious variety of genres, themselves distributed amongst different substances-as though any material were fit to receive man's stories.' --Roland Barthes (1) Vernon Fisher admits it: I feel like I'm making abstract paintings with the materials of a novelist. (2) And it could be argued, similarly, that Fisher makes short stories with the materials of a multimedia artist, because even his abstract paintings are not strictly paint on canvas. In Fisher's work, photographs function as settings, sculpture as punctuation, color as tone, text as voice, and his paintings as open books. But Fisher is more than a painter; he is a storyteller. His work is widely accepted and routinely described as stylistically narrative, and one cannot deny that his cast polyurethane punctuation on the wall creates clauses out of the imagery it joins, as in Cat, Mouse (2003); or turns a sublime landscape painting into a parenthetical, as in The Death of Marat (2002)--using multiple images and sequential picture planes to create the idea that one is not just a viewer of the work, but a reader of stories nesting within stories. Can one then label him literary? Postmodern? Where does a postmodern literary style or sensibility find its place in the work of a predominantly visual artist? Like postmodern writers Richard Brautigan or John Barth, for example, who explore the visuality of narrative while concurrently examining the narrativity of the visual, Fisher uses text within his multimedia works to nudge, if not to dare, the viewer to become a reader. And then there are the compulsory elements: mockery, sarcasm, pastiche, irony, wit, refusal, reversal, and ultimately, erasure. But postmodernism cannot be condensed into eight words, especially when it comes to the complexities of an and literature with a past, with a powerful ism looming like an apparition in its family portrait. One must allow postmodernism to be defined as more than that which followed, expanded, responded to, or reacted against modernism. Appealing to a wider, more mass-market audience than the art of modernism, the presumably art of postmodernism is simultaneously accessible and challenging. It is both high and low (or a collapsing of the two), humorous and serious, and, as theorist Brian McHale purports, dominated by ontological questions rather than epistemological ones. (3) A close examination of Fisher's seminal works 84 Sparrows (1979) and Heart of Darkness (Revised) (2007) will address these notions. To complete the discussion, Fisher's work will be framed within the context of WJ.T. Mitchell's problem of the image/text, which stresses both the positive and negative relationships between the two representational forms. But does Fisher's reckoning with the problem of image/text contribute to a postmodern aesthetic? What is the postmodern aesthetic? In postmodern literary fictions like Barth's Lost in the Funhouse (1968), one notable characteristic is an emphasis on the physicality of the book; similarly, Fisher emphasizes the physicality of the gallery wall while at the same time converting it into a larger-than-life page, as in his 1994 text installation Vacuum. Other postmodern works, like Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America (1967), admit to and playfully examine the existence of the reader as well as the author/narrator and his creative process; Fisher, too, playfully nods at viewers in self-portraits like Annette (1977) or Baseball Cap (1978) while also confessing personal shortcomings or revelations--seemingly face to face. There is laughter at Fisher's (and our own) expense, as well as a sense of shared cultural pathos that viewers must both accept and deny. Remnants and relics from American history (Mickey Mouse, Hiroshima, colonial expansion, awkward love triangles) appear repeatedly and in various contexts in Fisher's work in much the same way that Brautigan's lamentation over a waning American countryside takes the form of a used trout stream for sale at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard for $6. …

The Horror of Touch: Anna Morandi's Wax Models of Hands

When a hand moves, there is always something of the stranger in it. Perhaps it is because the hand rarely seems to be in sync with the rest of the body, frequently betraying the face or undermining the voice, and always casting doubt on the unifying power of consciousness. The hand has a tendency to stray, one moment disregarding the resolve of the body to which it is connected, the next directing it as if it knows better. Anna Morandi's wax model of two hands (Fig. 1) is unswerving in its pursuit of the strangeness of hands that act as if detached from the body, especially when they are not.1 These hands seem to be on the move, reaching forwards and upwards, stretching out fingers and pressing down with the palm. Suddenly, one recoils, twists, and curls inwards as if reconsidering its onward move. The two hands-agile, animated yet curiously indistinct-emerge out of large gathered sleeve cuffs, which might well have burst from below the small wooden ledge that provides one of their distinctive frames. Within this frame, the hands appear not only as three-dimensional entities in space, but also as part of a body elsewhere, underneath the ledge for instance. This sense of the hands as part of another whole is encouraged by their position, with the left and right acting together, at odds with each other no doubt, yet side by side nonetheless. But the sense of these hands as an embodied pair changes if they are considered within another frame, the one defined by the flat wooden surface against which one visualises the movement of the hands (Fig. 2). This brings the hands into something that is more like a traditional frame, where they seem to move in and out of the picture plane, and in the process reassert the boundaries of this surface as the privileged site of existence. But the unflagging movement of the hands implies that they also seek to escape the limits of this picture frame, even as they are becoming entrapped by it and turned into an autonomous whole. © 2011 The Author.

Age-related changes in matching novel objects across viewpoints

Object recognition is an important visual process. We are not only required to recognize objects across a variety of lighting conditions and variations in size, but also across changes in viewpoint. It has been shown that reaction times in object matching increase as a function of increasing angular disparity between two views of the same object, and it is thought that this is related to the time it takes to mentally rotate an object. Recent studies have shown that object rotations for familiar objects affect older subjects differently than younger subjects. To investigate the general normalization effects for recognizing objects across different viewpoints regardless of visual experience with an object, in the current study we used novel 3D stimuli. Older and younger subjects matched objects across a variety of viewpoints along both in-depth and picture-plane rotations. Response times (RTs) for in-depth rotations were generally slower than for picture plane rotations and older subjects, overall, responded slower than younger subjects. However, a male RT advantage was only found for objects that differed by large, in-depth rotations. Compared to younger subjects, older subjects were not only slower but also less accurate at matching objects across both rotation axes. The age effect was primarily due to older male subjects performing worse than younger male subjects, whereas there was no significant age difference for female subjects. In addition, older males performed even worse than older females, which argues against a general male advantage in mental rotations tasks.

Allegóriától allegóriáig. Mantegna Assisiben

Abstract 1. Andrea Mantegna's painting known by the name Pallas Expelling the Vices from the Garden of Virtue (fig. 1) could not have been created without knowledge of three frescoes in the lower church of Assisi (figs 2–4). My arguments are not based on verbal but on visual sources. The former possibility is precluded by the lack of any written information on Mantegna's presence in Assisi. What is certain is that the Mantuan court painter was working in the chapel of pope Innocent VIII's Belvedere villa between June 1488 and the summer of 1490. It is hard to imagine that he did not visit Assisi's San Francesco basilica during this time, one of Christianity's main shrines of pilgrimage endowed with the promise of papal absolution. (Isabella d'Este is known to have been there in 1494.) Pallas – the second painting after Parnassus for the studiolo of Isabella d'Este in Mantua – was painted sometime between 1497 and 1502. The venue is the Garden of Virtues into which the Vices have intruded and they have imp...

"The Man of these Infinite Possibilities": Max Ernst’s Cinematic Collages

On more than one occasion in his critical writings of the 1920’s, surrealist leader André Breton compared Max Ernst’s collages to cinema. In his first essay on the artist in 1921, Breton aligned Ernst’s collages with cinematic special effects such as slow and accelerated motion, and spoke of the illusionistic ‘transformation from within’ that characterized Ernst’s constructed scenes. For Breton, Ernst’s collages employing found commercial, scientific and journalistic images approximated the naturalistic movement of film, and thereby contributed to the radical obsolescence of traditional two-dimensional media such as painting and drawing, which remained frozen in stillness. Thus, Ernst’s images were provocative witnesses to the way in which modern technology fundamentally altered the perspectivally-ordered picture plane. But at the same time that Ernst’s collages rendered painting obsolete, they likewise depended upon fragments of outmoded popular culture themselves. For Breton, Ernst was a magician, “the man of these infinite possibilities,” comparable to cinematic prestidigators like turn-of-the-century filmmaker Georges Méliès. By drawing on the influence of recently outmoded popular culture such as early trick films, Ernst provides a crucial early example of the post-war fixation on counter-temporalities and anti-production. At once technologically advanced and culturally archeological, Ernst’s collages cannily defy strict categorization as “Modernist.”

Cast Shadows in Wide Perspective

We investigated the apparent spatial layout of cast shadows up to very wide fields of view. We presented up to 130 degrees wide images in which two 'flat poles' were standing on a green lawn under a cloudless blue sky on a sunny day. The poles threw sharp cast shadows on the green, of which one was fixed. The observer's task was to adjust the azimuth of the shadow of the other pole such that it fitted the scene. The source elevation was kept constant. The two cast shadows are, of course, parallel in physical space, but generically not in the picture plane because of the wide perspective. We found that observers made huge systematic errors, indicating that, generically, they fail to account for these perspective effects. The systematic deviations could be well described by a weighted linear combination of the directions in the picture plane and in the physical space, with weights that depended on the positions of, and distance between, the poles.

Measuring 3D Point Configurations in Pictorial Space

We propose a novel method to probe the depth structure of the pictorial space evoked by paintings. The method involves an exocentric pointing paradigm that allows one to find the slope of the geodesic connection between any pair of points in pictorial space. Since the locations of the points in the picture plane are known, this immediately yields the depth difference between the points. A set of depth differences between all pairs of points from an N-point (N > 2) configuration then yields the configuration in depth up to an arbitrary depth offset. Since an N-point configuration implies N(N−1) (ordered) pairs, the number of observations typically far exceeds the number of inferred depths. This yields a powerful check on the geometrical consistency of the results. We report that the remaining inconsistencies are fully accounted for by the spread encountered in repeated observations. This implies that the concept of ‘pictorial space’ indeed has an empirical significance. The method is analyzed and empirically verified in considerable detail. We report large quantitative interobserver differences, though the results of all observers agree modulo a certain affine transformation that describes the basic cue ambiguities. This is expected on the basis of a formal analysis of monocular optical structure. The method will prove useful in a variety of potential applications.

Pictorial Depth Probed through Relative Sizes

In the physical environment familiar size is an effective depth cue because the distance from the eye to an object equals the ratio of its physical size to its angular extent in the visual field. Such simple geometrical relations do not apply to pictorial space, since the eye itself is not in pictorial space, and consequently the notion “distance from the eye” is meaningless. Nevertheless, relative size in the picture plane is often used by visual artists to suggest depth differences. The depth domain has no natural origin, nor a natural unit; thus only ratios of depth differences could have an invariant significance. We investigate whether the pictorial relative size cue yields coherent depth structures in pictorial spaces. Specifically, we measure the depth differences for all pairs of points in a 20-point configuration in pictorial space, and we account for these observations through 19 independent parameters (the depths of the points modulo an arbitrary offset), with no meaningful residuals. We discuss a simple formal framework that allows one to handle individual differences. We also compare the depth scale obtained by way of this method with depth scales obtained in totally different ways, finding generally good agreement.

Occlusion Issues in Early Renaissance Art

Early Renaissance painters innovatively attempted to depict realistic three-dimensional scenes. A major problem was to produce the impression of overlap for surfaces that occlude one another in the scene but are adjoined in the picture plane. Much has been written about perspective in art but little about occlusion. Here I examine some of the strategies for depicting occlusion used by early Renaissance painters in relation to ecological considerations and perceptual research. Perceived surface overlap is often achieved by implementing the principle that an occluding surface occludes anything behind it, so that occlusion perception is enhanced by a lack of relationship of occluding contour to occluded contours. Some well-known figure-ground principles are also commonly used to stratify adjoined figures. Global factors that assist this stratification include the placement of figures on a ground plane, a high viewpoint, and figure grouping. Artists of this period seem to have differed on whether to occlude faces and heads, often carefully avoiding doing so. Halos were either eliminated selectively or placed oddly to avoid such occlusions. Finally, I argue that the marked intransitivity in occlusion by architecture in the paintings of Duccio can be related to the issue of perceptual versus cognitive influences on the visual impact of paintings.

문화콘텐츠개발을 위한 한국 전통신발의 2D데이터베이스 구축(1)

Research materials of Korean traditional shoes have so far been mainly literary explanations or plane pictures expressed on the basis of the explanations and photographs of incomplete forms of relics excavated and it makes us have difficulty in observing them visually and producing products with them by design application. This project is to establish database of literal data of Korean traditional shoes and visual data using 3D in order to make the foundation of developing culture industry contents using Korean traditional shoes. According to the initial research plan. first. it analyzed and arranged the Korean traditional shoes into period. sex and function as the research goals of the first year. categorized the form. composition. materials. patterns. and colors of traditional shoes and then database of the materials was performed with text. Second. visual image materials including forms. composition. materials. patterns. and colors of traditional shoes were established as database with scanner. digital camera and computer 2D. Results of such a database will be able to be used as important materials which can be the foundation of culture industry contents development of traditional shoes and be the materials for developing digital culture contents of traditional shoes and teaching Korean traditional culture.

Mediating Marginality: Ekphrasis and the Outsider in Christoph Geiser’s Das geheime Fieber

Mediating Marginality: Ekphrasis and the Outsider in Christoph Geiser’s Das geheime Fieber Thyra E. Knapp As a man on the margins, the first-person narrator in Christoph Geiser’s Das geheime Fieber is driven by desire: the desire to seek out and possess the sensuous young boys depicted in paintings by the Italian artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). Because his objects of desire are merely images captured in oil on canvas, the only way the narrator is able to experience and engage them is to transpose what he sees into literature. This act of intersemiotic transposition is nothing new; from ancient Greece to modern-day Berlin, from poetry to prose, art works have often served as catalysts for the production of literary language (see Boehm and Pfotenhauer; Hagstrum; Schmitz-Emans; Weisstein). Indeed, the narrative potential of the visual arts is most evident in the act of ekphrasis: the use of verbal means to evoke the visual image of an art work, either real or imagined, in the mind’s eye (see Heffernan; Mitchell; Scott). Although in recent decades ekphrasis has become “a highly codified conceptual site that hosts inquiries into logocentrism, aesthetic autonomy, and the interplay of description and narration” (Spinozzi 223), this codification has not yet been considered through the particular lens of alterity employed here. While much research in the field is devoted to the results of these ekphrastic acts, this article argues that in many cases it is the transposition itself that is of greatest interest, the means of production rather than its ends. Analyzed here in a new and specific role, ekphrasis is redefined in form and function as an act that gives voice to the marginalized first-person narrator in contemporary prose. Taking Geiser’s 1987 novel as evidence, this analysis shows that by engaging already extant paintings from his perspective on the fringes of society, the narrator creates something entirely new: literary portraits that reflect his own, individual experience as an outsider. In the act of ekphrastic narration, the man uncovers previously unexplored elements of canonical paintings while simultaneously identifying and mediating the realities of his own marginality. Geiser’s narrator is a modern-day writer obsessed with the art works and personal life of Caravaggio. The man’s fascination with the painter drives him to seek out the artist’s creations, visiting the locations in which Caravaggio lived and worked. His quest begins close to home in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, but he eventually travels to Rome, Naples, Sicily, and Malta, consciously [End Page 419] mirroring the trajectory of Caravaggio’s tumultuous life and untimely death. This convoluted text is told on three narrative levels: the narrator’s present-day experiences, the historical world of Caravaggio, and the imagined scenes represented in the artist’s paintings. These three levels are “verschränkt,” folded into one another. They complicate the structure of Geiser’s novel, allowing the author to shift temporalities without indicating these transitions. As Ruth Schori puts it, the text “kreist [...] in assoziativer Bewegung um die von der Situation evozierten Felder” (62–66), an effect that gives the reader the same feeling of disorientation experienced by the narrator and Caravaggio and most startlingly achieved through the presence of ekphrastic passages that are neither introduced nor explained. In the course of Geiser’s novel, more than twenty paintings are engaged by the narrator, resulting in ekphrases ranging from mere allusions to paintings to detailed excursions into the picture plane. Each painting provides the main character an opportunity to locate reflections of his own homoerotic desire, here awakened by Caravaggio’s seductive portrayals of young men, martyrs, and saints. By identifying with the subjects of these paintings and transposing what he sees into language, the narrator is able to give voice to his own marginalized condition. While the sufferings of a narrator positioned on the margins of society remain a recurring motif in twentieth-century literature, Geiser’s treatment of this main character, and his narrative doppelgänger in the personage of Caravaggio, deserve further investigation. Both figures, the writer and the painter, can be categorized not only as men conflicted by their homosexual desires, but also as characters who do...