Not because but as if nor or but and.
By the 1960’s scientists had revised their view of the relative capabilities of the two halves of the human brain. Both hemispheres are known to be involved in higher cognitive functions, each highly specialized for different modes of thinking, both highly complex. Each hemisphere in a sense perceives it’s own reality. The left half, which controls the right side of the body, dominates most people most of the time in our society. The left hemisphere is verbal and analytical while the lobe of the right hemisphere is non-verbal and global. The mode of processing used by the right brain is extremely rapid, complex, whole-patterned, spatial, and perceptual. But in our society there is a tendency for the left so-called ‘dominant’ hemisphere to take over and inhibit the other half. The left hemisphere analyzes, abstracts, counts, marks time, plans step-by-step procedures, verbalizes, and makes rational statements based on logic. While the denigrated right hemisphere uses intuition, which is a rapid mode of information processing, and sees how things relate to each other in space. We dream in the right brain hemisphere mode and create new combinations of ideas. Words are not required; in fact words might fail us. When we want to describe something complicated like a spiral staircase, it is clearer and easier to gesture or draw it than to talk about it.
In a test literate and illiterate people were presented with the following text: ‘All the stones on the moon are blue. A man goes to the moon and finds a stone. What color does the stone have?’ While literate people gave the so-called right answer, blue, the illiterate people often though that the stone was yellow or white, because the moon is yellow or white. They didn’t use logic; they tried to base their answer on their own experience and common sense; on what they could see. When asked if one could write ‘my mother is a man,’ the illiterate people thought this was impossible. Illiterate people make us aware that we treat things as readers.
Nerve cells make contact with other cells at points called synapses. Each nerve cell makes 1000-10,000 synapses with other nerve cells. These can give a yes or no signal; it’s a constant reworking of amazing complexity. One piece of the brain, the size of a grain of sand, holds 100,000 nerve cells, 2 million axons, and a billion synapses, which all talk to each other. Seeing these numbers and calculating the possible constellations in the brain, the number of permutations and activities which is theoretically possible supercedes the number of elementary particles in the universe. And this all takes place at the speed of approximately 200 miles an hour, depending on the diameter of the axon and other factors. Then people ask you a question with ‘or’ in the middle. Do you think this ‘or’ that? Do you like this ‘or’ that? Do you want this ‘or’ that? For a machine as sophisticated as the brain, this way of talking is offensive. Replace the ‘or’ by ‘and’; add instead of separate.
In 1877 the German philosopher Hans Vaihinger wrote, ‘The Philosophy of As If.” In it he argued to replace the obedience to the ‘because’ with the inventiveness of the ‘as if.’ By doing so, all concepts, all values, had become fictitious. For Vaihinger, these accepted concepts and values were nothing less than a temporary form of truth: an elegant detour, a kind of noble mistake. Till the end of the 20th century people were connected to God, the world, and to themselves through the inflexible ties of ‘because.’ One had to act ethically because God wanted it. Now everything had become different, one could act ethically ‘as if’ God wanted it. Which was much stronger because it was fed by inventiveness and not by obedience. It will take generations to get rid of the torments of ‘because’ and change them in to the blessings of ‘as if.’ It takes courage to change the frightened hypothetical life which keeps on looking for reality and reason, for the fictitious life that removes itself from reality and doesn’t seek for reasons, but metaphors.
In the context of a staff research and development project at the H.K.U., and as a lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, which is part of and located in the middle of the University College of London, I’m investigating the role and place of images in science.
I began my investigations by setting up a bureau: The Hovering Bureau of Investigation. I appointed students with similar interests in the scientific world surrounding them as members of the Board of Directors. Made headed paper and business cards. Bought 2 corduroy suits, a black one, and for more casual look, a brown one. Dressed like that, I started knocking on every door with an interesting nameplate. Optical Science Laboratory, Centre for Advance Spatial Analysis, Image Processing Group. And more traditional sounding names, but still abracadabra to me, like Atomic, Molecular and Positron Physics, Astronomy and Astro Physics, Condensed Matter and Material Physics. Histology and Cystology, Biological Antropology, etc.
On entering the door I introduced myself as fast and as English as I can make my Dutch tongue sound; “ Klaas Hoek, Slade School of Fine Art , Hovering Bureau of Investigation.” The suit and not being able to locate my name in the English vocabulary, the largest margins thinkable that Fine Art offers. (Art can be everything.) And then in a flash the rather officially pronounced ‘ Hovering Bureau of Investigation’ mean that I will have more than a foot in the door. I could see them think, ‘Shit, why didn’t they warn us we are being investigated, then we could have prepared ourselves better?’ In short, they are wrong footed enough to give me a rather straightforward answers and make more time for me than they would have.
Almost all of the scientists I met there were extremely generous end helpfull in answering my maybe somewhat stupid, strange questions.
Armed with the black and white picture of Pluto I knock on the door of Astronomy. What is it that you really see through the telescope and where do the Technicolor, Disney-like images from the Hubble come from? Indeed, this is what we see through the telescope (picture). Which amazed me. ‘But we know,’ the Professor told me, ‘that Pluto is round, so we enhance it, with PhotoShop. And we know that these white spots are icy lakes.’ But how do you make these Technicolor images? ‘Well we add information that we get through the spectrometer and put that together with other information. Data fusion, we call it, and then you get this colorful image.’ To me this was formerly known as Artist Impression.
The context, the place where I found the image and the text with the picture make you imagine seeing an image of Pluto. If you compare this to the image next to it one can expect it to be another planet in the context of this piece. But it is a pixilated image of Bin Laden from the MSN website. To see a difference depends completely on the text accompanying it.
At this point it might be easier to “ photograph” Pluto than Bin Laden.
I knock on another door but with another image, this time a Technicolor one from the Hubble website. It could easily been seen as a reproduction of a Ross Bleckner painting
But the text next to it reads: The Hubble Space Telescope made its ‘Deepest-Ever View of the Universe and Unveiled Myriad Galaxies Back to the Beginning of Time.’ The image was assembled from many separate exposures (342 frames total were taken, 276 have been fully processed to date and used for this picture) with the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 (WFPC2) for ten consecutive days between December 18 to 28, 1995. This picture is from one of three wide-field CCD (Charged Coupled Device) detectors on the WFPC2. What we see was projected 10 billion years ago. This ‘true color’ view was assembled from separate images taken in blue, red, and infrared light. By combining these separate images into a single color picture, astronomers will be able to infer – at least statistically - the distance, age, and composition of galaxies in the field. Bluer objects contain young stars and/or are relatively close, while redder objects contain older stellar populations and/or are farther away. Source:The Hubble Site News Center
“Professor, What I want to know is if you can make an image 10 billion years old and you assume that the Universe is 12 billion years old, can you than make an image from before the Big Bang?” The answer is, ‘No, the earliest picture we can get is 12 billion minus 300.000 because before then there was an enormous mist of ever changing elements.
The Head of a physics department in Islamabad has calculated the speed of heaven. He claims it is receding from Earth at one centimeter per second less than the speed of light. His method relies upon a verse in the Islamic holy book, which says that worship on the night on which the book was revealed is worth a thousand nights of ordinary worship. He states that this amounts to a time- dilation factor of 1000, which he puts into a formula of Einstein’s theory of special relativity.
As in Mallraux’s ‘Museum without Walls,’ where a coin could take up its place on the same page next to and at the same size as the glass stained window, in scientific publications like ‘Nature’ or ‘Science’ the smallest thing one can record can take up its place next to the biggest, largest thing one can record/photograph. Both are reduced to a couple of square centimeters on the page where they meet. A picture of DNA next to the furthest galaxies in color. One, billions of time bigger than it actually is and one, billions of times smaller than it actually is. A beautiful example of this is the vertical journey by Charles and Ray Eames in ‘Powers of Ten.’ As it says on the back of the Flipbook; “It deals with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero.”
Travel from the edge of the universe to an atom in the hand of a sleeping man at a picnic. This journey involves astronomy, biology, particle physics, and much more, but ultimately it is about scale. At one extreme is a view 10 million light years across (10 + 23 meters), the Milky Way a tiny speck towards the center. At the other extreme, the frame is filled completely by a single proton 10-15 meters.
In the eighteenth century, Lichtenberg recognized a new way to visualize electrical action in the tiny stars and rings formed by the dust that settled from the resin insulation of his electrical apparatus. Later whilst trying to repeat Lichtenberg’s work, Chladni discovered his graphic visualizations of sound in vibrational effects on the same powder. The most common term in the nineteenth century for these visual records was ‘ figures’- Lichtenberg figures, Chladni figures, Lissajous figures. Traces of the invisible forces of nature, rendered via the patient enhancement of effects only casually observed earlier, or never seen at all.
By now, imaging technologies in science have developed to Dark Field Illumination, Differential Interference Contrast Optics, Transmission Electron Microscopy, Scanning Electron Microscopy, Confocal Microscopy, High Resolution Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Spectrometes etc. etc. Photography, film, and video still corresponded to the optical wavelengths of the spectrum and to a point of view, static or mobile, located in real space.
As Jonathan Crary writes in ‘Techniques of the Observer,’ “These new techniques have relocated vision to a plane severed from a human observer. If these images can be said to refer to anything, it is to millions of bits of mathematical data. Increasingly, visuality will be situated on a cybernetic and electro-magnetic terrain where abstract visual and linguistic elements coincide and are consumed, circulated, and exchanged globally…Most of the historically important functions of the human eye are being supplanted by practices in which visual images no longer have any reference to the position of an observer in a ‘real, optically perceived world.’”
Unlike artistic usage of media where the materiality of the medium is investigated and made visible, in scientific usage media are generally still seen and treated as totally transparent. The scientist looks through the medium at the part of reality it depicts, the artist looks at the medium and at what it depicts.
The scientist uses ‘because,’ the artist ‘as if.’
Susan Hiller in Nick De Ville & Stephan Foster, eds. The Artist and the Academy (Highfield: John Hansard Gallery, 1995).
Jeanne Kurvers, Met ongeletterde ogen (With Illiterate Eyes) (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Askant, 2002).
Peter Bekkers in de Volkskrant, 14 June, 1991.
Pervez Amir Ali Hoodbhoy in Prospect 2002.
David Phillips, n01se (Cambridge: Kettel’s Yard, 2000).
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