glamour and mystery in life
The December, 1920, issue of The Strand Magazine had its cover emblazoned with the title of a sensational article, “Fairies Photographed – An Epoch Making Event Described by A. Conan Doyle.” Arthur Conan Doyle was the famous author of the Sherlock Holmes detective stories. Above is one of the photos that Doyle presented as documenting the existence of fairies. In that article, Doyle declared:
These little folk who appear to be our neighbours, with only some small difference of vibration to separate us, will become familiar. The thought of them, even when unseen, will add a charm to every brook and valley and give romantic interest to every country walk. The recognition of their existence will jolt the material twentieth-century mind out of its heavy ruts in the mud, and will make it admit that there is a glamour and a mystery to life.
The fairies came to be called the Cottingley Fairies. In 1922, Doyle wrote a book, The Coming of the Fairies, providing further evidence of their existence and a “theosophic view of fairies.”
In our age of powerful photo editing software, no one would find in the above photo any glamour and mystery. That’s not a loss to the wonder of life.
meditation on media
The truth is in the candle. And the candle still burns, and the media cannot overcome it.
The video above contains pieces from: Olafur Eliasson, Round Rainbow, at the Hirshhorn Museum; Paul Sharits, Shutter Interface, at the Hirshhorn Museum; and Nam June Paik, One Candle, Candle Projection, at the U.S. National Gallery of Art.
Tagged: art
sports rules for reviewing audio-visual evidence
In professional sports, instant replay technology typically must provide “indisputable visual evidence” of a mistaken call in order for officials to overturn the call. Understanding the “indisputable visual evidence” standard of review for audio-visual replays requires recognizing that:
- major-league professional sports are primarily entertainment
- entertainment value (excitement) increases with spectators’ immersion in the stream of on-field events
Officials’ deliberating about what is the correct call isn’t an exiting spectator sport. Such deliberations should be limited to correcting blunders, meaning calls that are obviously incorrect to most fans in the midst of their real-time experience of the competition.
An interesting recent law article argues against the “indisputable visual evidence” standard of review and in favor of de novo review. The article emphasizes a competitor’s perspective and just deserts. In the context of primarily considering major-league professional American football, the article states:
the value of error-correction gains strength from views about what those who participate in a rule-governed competition deserve, and about the justice of arranging institutions to yield outcomes that comport with desert.[1]
Major-league professional football players have more interesting work, higher pay, and greater social status than most persons, including persons arguably much more deserving of such rewards. The factual correctness of officials’ calls in professional football has little significance to all but the narrowest evaluation of justice and desert for professional football players. Major-league professional sports are a big-money entertainment business. Considering standards of review for instant replay should begin from that economic reality.
Apart from obvious officiating blunders, erroneous reversal of an official’s initial call reduces the entertainment value of sports significantly more than erroneous affirmation of a mistaken call. The excitement of sports is largely in the moment of the game. Immersed in the game, fans interpret what they see within the rules of the game. Officials support that diegetic experience. Making a call later is a poor substitute for making the call in the stream of the game’s normal competitive activity. A human psychological tendency toward loss aversion makes regret likely to weigh more heavily than pleasure across two opposing fans after a reversed call.[2] In addition, reversal of calls undermines the general experience of immersion in the game by raising the salience in consciousness of extra-diegetic activity. Lessening immersion in the game reduces the entertainment value of sports.
Officiating rules need to be considered in conjunction with game presentation technologies and practices. More cameras, higher-definition images, and more use of replays in game presentations may not make for more entertaining games. Game presentation technology that allows fans to judge the game more accurately than officials undermines officials positions as supports for fans’ immersion in the game-world. Sports officiating technology and standards of review should be chosen to support fans’ immersion in the sports game-world.
Related posts:
- synthetic media presentations in closing trial arguments
- audio-visual communication of judicial opinions
- how humans make bodily sense
* * * * *
Notes:
[1] Berman, Mitchell N., Replay (March 7, 2011). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1830403 Quote from p. 37. Berman is a pathbreaking scholar in the legal analysis of sports. A least one government bureaucrat has asserted the value of sports officiating in developing regulatory expertise.
[2] Berman (2011) pp. 37-9 considers this effect and argues that its importance increases with the extent that the relevant sport is valued as entertainment.
Tagged: law
communication models in portraiture
Portraiture can be used to bring a person into a painted narrative, to provide information about a person, and to generate a sense of presence of a person. Mughal portraiture indicates the importance of these different purposes.
A frontal view of a face, where the face is a large feature of the painting and the eyes of the face gaze out directly at the viewer, effectively creates a sense of presence. Some coffins in Roman-occupied Egypt about 2000 years ago included portraits of the deceased (see Fayum mummy portraits). These portraits were not intended to identify who was in the coffin. Persons concerned about the deceased undoubtedly knew who the deceased was. Nor did such portraits contribute significantly to the story. Death is a regular episode in every human life. The value of the portraits is best understood in terms of presence. The portraits brought the presence of the dead to life.
The Mughals did not design portraits to create a sense of presence of a person. Existing Mughal portraits never depict a face where it is a large feature of the painting and the eyes of the face gaze directly out at the viewer. When Jesuit missionaries brought a painting of Mary, the mother of Jesus, to the Mughal ruler Akbar’s court, it attracted great interest. That Byzantine-style painting was designed, like the mummy portraits, to create a sense of presence of Mary. For the Mughals, the effect was probably unprecedented.
Mughal portraiture used three-quarter and profile views of faces. The three-quarter view was associated with action-oriented, narrative paintings. These paintings were relatively common under Akbar. The three-quarter view of a face helps indicate the three-dimensional space of narrative action. The profile view is associated with individual, static portraits and with documenting the presence of particular individuals within scenes. These types of paintings were relatively common in the albums assembled in the reins of Akbar’s successors Jahangir and Jahan. The profile view probably provides the most economic means to identify painted persons. [1] Thus the three-quarter and profile views of faces support narrative and informative alternatives to presence as communicative models for portraiture.
Note:
[1] Wright (2008) sets out this explanation. Id. p. 166 states, “If one wishes to produce the most accurate and hence most identifiable record of a figure’s face, then it is, of course, a side view that must be used, for it is only through the profile that the exact outline of the nose, mouth, and chin can be recorded, and silhouetting the figure against a plain-colored ground, usually light or dark green, highlights the whole form but especially the profile of the figure [notes omitted].” This is an overstatement. Several decades of psychology experiments indicates that the three-quarter view best serves human identification of faces, but some recent evidence favors a frontal view. See, e.g. Stephan and Caine (2007) and Turati, Bulf, and Simion (2006). Roughly a three-quarter view of faces best serves machine-programmed recognition of faces (Liu, Rittscher and Chen (2006)). Processing of images of irises, which are best seen in the frontal view of a face, seems to have been important in the evolution of humans and is likely to dominate future machine-programmed identification systems. The advantage of the profile view needs to be understood with respect to the cost of painted identification. Even if frontal-view portraits can provide better identification of a person, a satisfactory profile view is probably easier to paint.
Images: Gayet mummy portrait; The Emperor Shah Jahan standing upon a globe (detail), 17′th century, prob. c 1627-30, Sackler Gallery; Portrait of a Youth, Filippo Lippi, c. 1485, in the collection of the U.S. National Gallery.
References:
Liu, Xiaoming, Rittscher, J.; Tsuhan Chen (2006), “Optimal Pose for Face Recognition,” Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2006 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Volume 2, Issue , 2006 Page(s): 1439 – 1446.
Stephan B C M, Caine D, 2007, “What is in a view? The role of featural information in the recognition of unfamiliar faces across viewpoint transformation” Perception 36(2) 189 – 198.
Turati, C. , Bulf, H. and Simion, F. (2006, Jun) “Newborns’ face recognition over changes in viewpoint” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the XVth Biennial International Conference on Infant Studies, Westin Miyako, Kyoto, Japan . 2008-06-11 from http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p93916_index.html
Wright, Elaine (2008), “Mughal Portraiture and Drawing,” in Wright, Elaine, Muraqqa’: Imperial Mughal Albums from the Chester Betty Library, Dublin (Alexandria, VA: Art Services Int.) pp. 165-77.
Tagged: images
puppet and puppeteer
Alone in bed, her black hair untied across her pillow, she laments the white snow piling up in it. The open-faced puppeteer moves with her, their gestures double, her loneliness is his loneliness.
In many forms of puppetry, the puppeteer isn’t visible. In Bunraku, a famous Japanese style of puppetry, three puppeteers visible on stage operate one puppet. Kuruma ningyo, a less well-known Japanese style, has only one puppeteer operating the puppet. The puppeteer sits on a cart and uses his legs to move the puppets legs, his left hand to control the puppet’s left hand, and his right hand to control the puppet’s right hand and head. The visible puppeteers are clothed in black, and often they were black masks. So, even when the puppeteer is visible, he or she is effaced as a person.
Nishikawa Koryu V performed puppetry for the song Kurokami (Black Hair) using Hachioji kuruma ningyo at the Freer Gallery yesterday. His face was exposed as he controlled the puppet and moved with the puppet. The doubling of the puppet and the puppeteer was a beautiful aspect of the performance.
rapid rise of commercial photography
Photography was the first mass-market presence technology. A British observer noted in 1857:
Portraits, as is evident to any thinking mind, and as photography now proves, belong to that class of facts wanted by numbers who know and care nothing about their value as works of art.[1]
Photography provided sense of presence like that of a painted portrait, but much cheaper and with obvious product differentiation.
The work of leading amateur photographers does not provide a good indication of the business model that drove commercial photography. The Edinburgh Calotype Club, formed in the early 1840s, was the world’s first photography club. In two albums of its members’ works, calotypes with subjects other than portraits comprise roughly 70% of the photographs.[2] An exhibition at the U.S. National Gallery of Art, British Photographs from Paper Negatives, 1840 to 1860, includes many calotypes of nature and built structures. In contrast, commercial photography at this time almost surely consisted of not much more than portraits.
Photographic portraits were an astonishingly successful good. While photographs of any type were first displayed about 1840, photographic portraits were widely offered commercially in Britain by 1857:
who can number the legion of petty dabblers, who display their trays of specimens along every great thoroughfare in London, executing for our lowest servants, for one shilling, that which no money could have commanded for the Rothschild bride of twenty years ago?[3]
At the high end of the market, drawing and painting complemented photography:
There is no photographic establishment of any note that does not employ artists at high salaries — we understand not less than 1 £ a day — in touching, and colouring, and finishing from nature those portraits for which the camera may be said to have laid the foundation. … The coloured portraits to which we have alluded are a most satisfactory coalition between the artist and the machine. Many an inferior miniature-painter who understood the mixing and applying of pleasing tints was wholly unskilled in the true drawing of the human head. With this deficiency supplied, their present productions, therefore, are far superior to anything they accomplished, single-handed, before. Photographs taken on ivory, or on substances invented in imitation of ivory, and coloured by hand from nature, such as are seen at the rooms of Messrs. Dickinson, Claudet, Mayall, Kilburn, &c., are all that can be needed to satisfy the mere portrait want, and in some instances may be called artistic productions of no common kind besides.[4]
But the main effect of photography was to greatly expand the market for non-artistic portraits. By 1857 in Britain:
[photographers] are wanted everywhere and found everywhere. The large provincial cities abound with the sun’s votaries, the smallest town is not without them; and if there be a village so poor and remote as not to maintain a regular establishment, a visit from a photographic travelling van gives it the advantages which the rest of the world are enjoying. Thus, where not half a generation ago the existence of such a vocation was not dreamt of, tens of thousands (especially if we reckon the purveyors of photographic materials) are now following a new business….[5]
Even with the rapid rise of novels in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the occupation of author developed much more slowly than that of photographer. In the U.S. in 1860, the occupational Census reported 627 authors and reporters, 2994 editors, and 3154 daguerreotypists and photographers.
Those looking to create business models for new media might think about the rapid commercial success of photographers and the long history of impecunious authors.
Notes:
[1] From Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, “Photography,” London Quarterly Review (April 1857), pp 442-68.
[2] A search for the keyword “portait” returns 89 calotypes out of 332 total in both Edinburgh Calotype Club albums. Among both these totals are 70 duplicate prints. The number of calotypes returned for keywords “castle” and “church” are 33 and 35, respectively.
[3]-[5] Lady Eastlake, “Photography,” op. cit.
Tagged: photography
dream broken
[video included above]
I saw this beautiful woman at the Japan Culture + Hyperculture festival at the Kennedy Center. She looked at me, and then…
in focus
A tourist couple asked me to take a picture of them in front of one of D.C.’s sites. Their camera was a Sony Cyber-Shot with face-detection technology. This technology ensures that their faces, which are surely quite familiar to each other, are in focus. The site, which they traveled across the ocean to see, is of less importance for photographs.
Think about that the next time you are pondering the features or capabilities of a communication service.
Tagged: photography
presence doesn't require personalized narrative
A person known as K.C. has contributed significantly to understanding narrative and sense of presence of another. In 1981, at age 30, K.C. received a major head injury in a motorcycle accident. Despite his injury, K.C. retained normal human adult language skills. He also retained common knowledge about the world and knowledge about causal relations between actions and events. K.C.’s well-functioning memory of objective facts and procedural skills allowed him to continue, post-injury, with “effortless functioning in his everyday environment” in a way that is “comparable to most of his age mates.”[1]
K.C., however, lost the ability to remember and construct personalized narratives. Persons who knew K.C. observed that he no longer remembered his personal interactions with them. K.C. has no first-person, emotional memory of his own experiences:
K.C.’s younger brother from whom he was once inseparable met accidental death a few years prior to his own head injury. K.C. remembers nothing of the circumstances in which he had learned of this shocking news, including where he was at the time, who told him of the event, and how he reacted emotionally. Likewise, the events of a potentially lethal chemical spill from a train derailment that forced him and his family to evacuate their home for over a week have been reduced to a dry fact of the world.[2]
For K.C., “details of personal occurrences continue to exist only in the present, vanishing from K.C.’s reality the moment his thoughts are directed elsewhere.”[3] While K.C. understands objective causal reasoning, he cannot imagine himself in the future. In the language of biological science, K.C. lost the functioning of his episodic memory. In terms better understood within the humanities and within study of communication, K.C. lost the ability to remember and construct personalized narratives
K.C. shows that the world really isn’t just constructed from narratives. In an influential 1983 law review article entitled “Nomos and Narrative,” a prominent legal scholar declared:
No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning. … Once understood in the context of the narratives that give it meaning, law becomes not merely a system of rules to be observed, but a world in which we live.[4]
K.C. understands much about the world that others recognize. Persons who interact with him would not conclude that he is living in a different world from them. Narrative might be understood as causal reasoning, as recognizing that this leads to that, as understanding that this law implies that behavior or else that punishment. Personalized narrative is not necessary for understanding such a system of rules or for living in a common world. One also might suspect that eloquently telling an attractive tale, or endless repeating silly ones, doesn’t make true, bountiful reality.
More significantly, at least for those not confined under non-scientific disciplines, K.C shows that making sense of presence of others doesn’t required remembering and constructing personalized narratives. In laboratory tests, K.C. is not distinguishable from ordinary persons in ability to infer another person’s mental state (known as Theory of Mind tests).[5] With respect to lower-level, more tightly synchronized processes for making sense of presence of another, K.C. also appears to be similar to ordinary persons. K.C. retains the ability to attune sensitively to others in real-time interaction. He’s characterized as “always agreeable, courteous, and attentive,” with an appreciation for sarcasm and humor. Although he has no personal emotional memory, his real-time experience of emotions is appropriate for someone with his memory: “Each time he is told of September 11, he expresses the same horror and disbelief as someone hearing of the news for the very first time.”[6]
K.C.’s interactions with others suggests the importance of sub-conscious attunement to others. A psychologist who did research with K.C. observed that K.C.:
guesses that he has never met one of the authors (R.S.R.) who has, in fact, visited him at his home approximately eight times a year for the past 5 years, though there is a certain level of familiarity and comfort that he demonstrates, particularly in a greater willingness to initiate conversation and to ask questions.[7]
Familiarity and comfort suggest ease in diffuse, sub-conscious patterns of interaction. Just like teammates on a sporting team acquire skills of tacit knowing by playing together, so too do persons in communication.
Notes:
[1] Rosenbaum et. al. (2005) p. 994. This source provided the the quoted phrases and facts included in the paragraph.
[2] Id. p. 993-4.
[3] Id. p. 994.
[4] Cover (1982) p. 4. This work is at the sophisticated end of discourse about discourse, narrative analysis of narrative, the social construction of reality, pre-post-post-modernism, and (para)-en/thesis. Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007) suggests that 6-month-old, preverbal infants engage in normative “social evaluation,” evaluating other purposive, animate agents as appealing or aversive. “Social evaluation” suggests evaluation of peers. However, 12-month-old infants show relatively little interest in other infants. Infants, for good instrumental reasons, are mainly interested in adults. An alternate interpretation of Hamlin, Wynn, and Bloom (2007) is that infants as young as 6-months-old engage in rudimentary, positive instrumental reasoning.
[5] Rosenbaum et. al. (2007). This article also documents that another test subject who also lost episodic memory from an injury also could not be statistically distinguished from control subjects on Theory of Mind tests. Descriptions of the Theory of Mind tests are available in online supporting material.
[6] Rosenbaum et. al. (2005) p. 993, 994.
[7] Id. p. 993.
References:
Cover, Robert M. (1983), “Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review v. 97, pp. 4-68.
Hamlin, J. Kiley, Karen Wynn, and Paul Bloom (2007), “Social evaluation by preverbal infants,” Nature v. 450 (22 November 2007).
Rosenbaum, R. Shayna, Stefan Köhler, Daniel L. Schacter, Morris Moscovitch,
Robyn Westmacott, Sandra E. Black, Fuqiang Gao, Endel Tulving (2005), “The case of K.C.: contributions of a memory-impaired person to memory theory,” Neuropsychologia v. 43, n. 7. pp. 989-1021.
Rosenbaum, R. Shayna, Donald T. Stuss, Brian Levine, Endel Tulving (2007), “Theory of Mind is Independent of Episodic Memory,” Science v. 318 (23 November 2007) p. 1257.
Tagged: biology
losing theories of mind
Theory of mind has organized much research into social behavior:
The ability to interpret others’ mental states and intentions, called “Theory of Mind,” has been a key area of interest for those studying the evolution of primate and human social behavior. Often, people have imagined that Theory of Mind emerges as a correlate of self-awareness — the ability to reflect on one’s own mental states. As the model goes, a focal individual interprets another’s mental state by imagining herself “in the shoes of” the other individual.
Theory of mind pushes into the background agents’ social and ecological circumstances and their embodied nature. Hence theory of mind does not provide a propitious conceptual framework for understanding social behavior.
Theory of mind doesn’t provide much insight into how persons can appreciate and sympathize with the pain they each feel. How do I know the feel of pain that you feel when your finger touches a hot stove or when someone breaks your heart? How do you know that I know how you feel? It seems to me that mutual recognition of common human nature, including social nature, is crucial for understanding how these feelings exist. Theory of mind is both too specific (mind, rather than fully embodied person) and too abstract (questions not closely related to problems of ordinary behavior) to provide much insight into others’ pain.
Theory of mind doesn’t provide a good description of an agent’s understanding. Consider an ordinary human interpretation of the behavior of a robot. The robot is programmed to store the location of a ball as either one specific location A or another specific location B. Starting with a random ball location state variable, the robot enters the room and goes to that location. The robot’s sensors then detect the presence or absence of the ball. If the ball is present, the robot bounces the ball (plays with it), sets its location state variable to this position, and then leaves the room. If the ball is absent, the robot goes to the other location, and behaves likewise.
Suppose an unprimed human observer watches the robot enter the room and play with the ball many times. Occasionally the observer, while the robot is out of the room, shifts the ball between locations. In those cases the robot first looks in the wrong location, then goes to the right location. If the ball isn’t moved, then the robot goes directly to the location containing the ball. Humans readily anthropomorphize technology, even while they almost surely would not confuse it with a real human being. The observer would typically describe the robot’s behavior as looking for the ball. In instances where the observer shifted the ball, the observer would typically describe the robot as not knowing the true location of the ball. Thus, a researcher might describe the observer as having a theory of mind (for the robot).
Theory of mind associated with mutual recognition of common human nature requires many orders of magnitude greater processing power. A simple digital machine could readily learn and predict the state and behavior of the ball-seeking robot. Describing and interpreting a person’s thoughts and emotions by looking at a representation of that person’s eyes or at her patterns of movement is a much more complex problem. More importantly, interpreting another’s mental states and intentions in historical ecologies has been predominately a highly interactive task. How one person responds physically to another both reveals emotions and intentions and changes them. A theory of mind apart from human being seems to me to be like a theory of time addressing what happened before the beginning of time.
Tagged: biology