Wolfgang H. Zangemeister and Lawrence W. Stark
What is painting, but a communication channel for the MESSAGE between artist and viewer? Artists first imagine a painting, using their “mind’s eye” image of a segment of their world. Next, using their genius, techniques, and skill, they transfer their mental representations onto the canvas. What is then the function of the externalised painting? It is to communicate a message to a viewer.
Our book is about a “neurological theory of art”, inasmuch it relates the particular perspective of cybernetics viewing art as “communication channel” with neuroscientific experimental findings, experiences and opinions of the human art world i. e. artists, critics, art historians, aesthetic philosophers and of course the viewers: this is the red line of our book.
With our new knowledge of the modular brain, many aspects of humanistic approaches to vision and art, can be clarified. This book approaches the worlds of art criticism, art history, and the philosophy of art, from the point-of-view of recent studies on the nature of brain control of human vision, and of the role that active eye movements play.
· Art as a form of communication
· What is top down (TD) and bottom up (BU) ?
· How do they affect our viewing of artful pictures ?
· Why did most artists, art historians, and art critics favour the BU approach ?
· How does the Scanpath Theory and its relation to TD work ?
· Neuroimaging and eye movement studies show how TD works in Visual Cognition when we look at art
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Lawrence W. STARK, born 1926, was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley since 1968, where he divided his teaching efforts among Departments of Engineering, Physiological Optics and Neurology. His research interests were centered in bioengineering, with an emphasis on human brain control of movement and vision, and symbiotic interactions of this knowledge with robotic vision. A former student and collegue of Warren McCullough, Norbert Wiener and Jerome Lettvin, he pioneered the application of control and information theory to neurological systems, and for physiological modeling. From his numerous books and publications "Neurological Control Systems" (1968) is still one of the finest examples of this approach.
Lawrence Stark died in 2004. The present book is his final cooperative work on the relationships between biocybernetics and art applying the scanpath theory in humans. His many former graduate students and post-doctoral fellows form a world-wide school of bioengineering and biocybernetics. The co-author of the present book is one of the few exceptions from this circle: as a neurologist –as Lawrence Stark- and art scholar he shares similar interests with Stark in the relationship of information science , art and scanpath eye movements.
Wolfgang H. ZANGEMEISTER, born in 1945, is Professor of Neurology at the University of Hamburg. He also studied painting and kinetic sculpture at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. Since 1978 he cooperated with L.W.Stark at the University of California Berkeley, Department of Physiological Optics. Books on “Attention and Visual Cognition” (1995), “Gottfried Benn´s Letters” (1987),
"Gottfried Benn´s Absolute Prose" (1997), “Robert Musil: Probability and Mathematical Mystics”(1998) and “Synaesthesia and Visual Enigmas”(2005). Studying scanpath eye - head- movements in healthy naive humans, professional artists and patients with neuro-visual deficits has been his continuous interest and effort to compare and contrast human eye movements´ influence on attention and cognition.
Down through the ages, people in and out of the art world have debated how the communication between artist and viewer occurs. The two basic theories are the so-called “Top Down” (TD), and the “Bottom up” (BU) approach.. While the first two chapters of the book will discuss these theories in detail, a brief introduction here may be helpful.
Probably the BU approach has been the most widely accepted theory in the past. It claims that people´s eyes (their “visual brains “) can be attracted and guided in a way that the creator of a picture prescribes, such that the viewer´s eye follows predetermined paths. This could involve moving to things previously not attended to, like a car suddenly appearing in the peripheral visual field. Or, in a painting, it could involve using features such as contrasts, patterns, or colours, making use of so-called pre-attentive visual functions to attract the curiosity and attention of the viewer.
This BU approach is widely used in advertising and public relations. The viewer is attracted by people or things in motion (videoclips), or by large, stationary, and often simple objects (e.g. body parts) that are depicted in specific colours and forms.
In contrast to the BU approach is the top-down (TD) approach. In the TD approach, the artists’ internal model drives the creation of their art, e. g. a painting. Then, when viewers look at a particular painting, it activates many pre-existent models or images in their brains. Viewers try to match these models (or parts of them) with the picture in front of them.
In the TD approach, both artist and viewer use their brain to generate a picture: one in the artists brain and then on canvas, and one in the viewer´s brain when looking at the painting.
The picture must awaken in their own brains a schema that approximates the painting. This schema must be stored in their modular brains in somewhat similar ways to the creative schemas of the artist. In this way, viewers try to link with the picture´s particular information— its message.
