This is the after.

Excerpt from Toward a Philosophy of Perception

Based on The Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Chance Images

“Leonardo, moreover, states more clearly than Alberti does that chance images are not objectively present but must be projected into the material by the artist’s imagination” – H. W. Janson

In the Middle Ages a particularly strong example of chance images appears in a 1493 Albert Dürer drawing. The young artist’s self-portrait is on one side of the drawing with a pillow and a sketch of his left hand. On the other side, there are six more seemingly pointless pillows. Seeing no obvious artistic purpose, Heinz Ladendorf finally recognized that the folds held hidden faces—such as of a bearded Turk wearing a large turban. From upside down, they revealed more: a male, his craggy face topped by a pointed hat. The author of this Dictionary article, Janson, concludes that Dürer could not have known of a history of images in pillows, as none existed. He doubtless made the discovery accidentally. But the basis for it must have been his “familiarity with chance images in other, more traditional materials.”

As for DaVinci:

Leonardo recommends that painters look for landscapes and figures in the accidental patterns of stained walls, varicolored stones, clouds, mud, or similar things, which he compares to “the sound of bells, in whose pealing you can find every name and word you can imagine.” The spotted walls, clouds, etc., here obviously play the same role as the tree trunks and clumps of earth in [Alberti’s] De statua (p. 347). (Dictionary, p. 347).

From earliest times, back to cave drawings, chance images were found in nature ready-made. But Dada and Surrealism “acclaimed chance as the basis of aesthetic experience. . . . What the Dadaists sought to elicit was not chance images so much as ‘chance meetings’—unexpected juxtapositions of objects which by their incongruity would have a liberating effect on the imagination’ (p. 353). Going further, more recent artists tried to create such images. The Dictionary notes that the connection between chance and inspiration was so obvious to them that “[t]he sponge-throwing Protogenes, were his story better known today, would be the ideal hero of many mid-twentieth-century artists” (p. 353). In that story, as told in Pliny’s Natural History, a famous painting by Protogenes, called Ialysus, took seven years to complete. Frustrated at trying to evoke foam from dog’s mouth, he at one point finally threw his sponge at the panel. When it accidentally hit the dog’s mouth, it created the desired effect. The “wondrous” luck, Pliny attributed to fortuna. “The inference, . . . , it would seem, is that Fortune reserves such ‘strokes of luck’ only for the greatest of artists, as if on occasion she took pity on their ambition to achieve the impossible” (p. 342).

Which begs the question of whether the cloud images are projected (at least, in part) by the imagination. Staring at the clouds seemed necessary to me. But in fact, what did that mean? And what role was played by light, the photon carriers of magnetism, acting as conduit, those miles to the eye?

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In the early 1990s I began to take cloud photographs. Soon I began to experiment with light. This is an old interest of many creative people, such as Goethe; clouds fascinated the poet Baudelaire. Light is a carrier of electromagnetic energy, a moving particle that has no mass so it cannot stop.

Gradually, I began to study what optics (Carl Bohm, etc.) had to say. I felt that starting at the 4 x 6 snapshots took me back into a trance, as if they held transmissions of an energy state locked in. Developing the film took a special process because normal development erased out the images, keeping the houses and ground.

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On Chaos and Fractals:

A cloud is made of billows upon billows upon billows that look like clouds. As you come closer to a cloud you don’t get something smooth, but irregularities at a smaller scale.

Benoit Mandelbrot

Above the cloud with its shadow is the star with its light. Above all things reverence thyself.
Pythagoras

The irregularity of the cloud first got my attention. In the original shot, the white in the center was so bright you couldn’t see the sun. Then when the negative was drum scanned, the sun became visible. But the image then got darker. When first developed, in film, unscanned, the irregularity was very bright. I’m now juggling to keep the sun visible while trying to recover some of the bright light around it without blowing out the sun itself. In experimenting with light in taking these photos, I learned a lot about perception: how when you make one thing visible, you might lose visibility in the opposite end of the spectrum. And vice versa. Nothing goes away. Just that some things become invisible.

Click on the images to enlarge them. Click again – the size changes again.

- As quoted in R. V. R.: Being an Account of the Last Years and the Death of One Rembrandt Harmenszoon Van Rijn (1930) by Hendrik Willem van Loon

I have just ordered this book and it should provide interesting reading and blogging. Coming up.

I AM

part and parcel of

the grids and bridges of me,

the optical ILLUSIONS

of me

the feeling inside the rhythms of this as truth

part and particle of the warps of me

the cascading or retaining or releasing spills and quark oceans of the implications of me

the infinity of the past of me and

the future of the many directions of those

options of me

the virtuosos of nano shapes of me, the powerful combinations, the forceful decisiveness, the

dematerializing dimension of the creative energies of me, the neutrinos that pass through en route perhaps to the

center of the Earth, or coming from there and through, AS ARE YOU

- surveying How?

Click on the image to enlarge.