Petar Kufner: research

The Void Between Visual and Aural Perception

The starting point of this research is the fact that the representation of reality through an image is flattened and presented on a two-dimensional surface, while sound tends to move through space and therefore no dimensional loss occurs. The aim is to add an additional layer of depth to reality through sound, generated on the basis of visual elements (i.e. light and color). By doing so, the research investigates whether or not it is possible to enhance the experience of depth by translating light into sound? This study analyses the internal structure of light and sound as a wave, to find a valid model of translation. Furthermore, in order to see how our brain responds to stimuli, the phenomena of multisensory experience known as synaesthesia are examined. With the help of examples throughout history such as color organs, abstract cinema and (live) immersive installations, the connection from sound to color will be shown. We will see how neuroscience and technology have helped visually impaired persons to overcome their physical handicaps. The dossier concludes that hearing has a wider range than sight does, which is the reason why an experience of space on the basis of sound will be more intense. This conclusion introduces an experimental project dealing with transmission from one medium (visual) to another (aural), showing a kind of synthetic art. By rendering the audible from the visible (i.e. translating light input into audio output) via Pure Data software, the project's main concepts such as void, perspective and time, are exposed.

The Void Between Visual and Aural Perception
photo credit Petar Kufner

extract from The Void Between Visual and Aural Perception
(Time, perspective, void)

Light and sound are elements used, but while discussing them this project refers to image (photography) as a recorded representation of light in the case of light,[1] and depth in the case of sound. When dealing with vision, not only the image (representation of the visual) but also the human view is "framed". By "framing" it returns to Heidegger's statement mentioned in the introduction of reducing everything to an image. This framing (of reality) refers to the visual as the image to its representation. We can state that view equals representation. Additionally, by framing reality we place ourselves in a dominant position. Painters and later photographers did the same thing while trying to communicate and reflect on reality. Therefore, another element that this project deals with is the observer's point of view - “ego centered principles of single point perspective,”[2] (process similar to qualia). The idea that sound is more neutral than perspective, by being omnipresent and by giving a complete vision, is no longer satisfactory. Artists in general, but also those dealing with sound (selecting and finding the right spot, deciding on when to start, end and make a cut) could be correlated to a single point of view. Thus, working with sound includes subjectivity. Sound characteristics that reach us personally, regardless to which stimuli we are reacting, remain equally personal as a person who tries to communicate communicates subjectively (personal subjective experience, qualia). Still, we can use the characteristics of sound moving through space to add depth and to position ourselves within space. By tracing the space with the ear, as observed by Pallasmaa, we can measure it and make its scale comprehensible. "Hearing structures articulates the experience and understanding of space. We are not normally aware of the significance of hearing in spatial experience, although sound often provides the temporal continuum in which visual impressions are embedded. When the sound track is removed from a film, for instance, the scene loses its plasticity and sense of continuity and life. Silent film had to compensate for the lack of sound by a demonstrative manner of over-acting."[3] Furthermore, space, in case of an image, is flattened - presented on a two-dimensional surface, while sound tends to move through space and therefore no dimensional loss occurs. This has been observed by Michel Chion in the medium of film, “[...] if sounds are easily projected by the spectator onto the film image, it is because the image is circumscribed by a frame that can be located in space, whereas sound lacks a frame.”[4] The unity between these two domains, present in both objects and nature, could be compared to the medium of cinema, as Robert Breton observes in a poetical way: “Images and sounds, like strangers who make acquaintance on a journey and afterwards cannot separate.”[5] Cinema works with light and sound simultaneously, cinema is time. It is defined as fps (frames per second) displaying frames in quick succession, which create the illusion of motion. Each frame is a still image. If we want to record light using the medium of photography, it is possible by working in couple[6] light time. The same thing happens with sound; in order to be perceived or registered it needs a time space (medium for propagation) connection. Light, visually represented using colors and perspective, and sound, manifested through object and space, have time in common as an important parameter in the connection light to sound. Time also means movement. Movement is expressed in the change and the duration in space. "Art has become a question of movement, of what we get to rather than the abolition of this "getting to" (...). Art is only the trace of its own action".[7] According to Juahani Pallasmaa "I regard an object, but sound approaches me; the eye reaches, but the ear receives."[8] Therefore, if we treat vision - reaching, as directional and sound - receiving, as omni-directional, is it possible to perceive something merely visual as something aural by inversing reaching with receiving? The project's focus lies on the space that stands outside the frame (i.e. physical frame recalling our vision). The space that stands outside the “frame”, thus between the viewer and the observed object, is defined as void. In this case void is considered an empty space (i.e. the space between infinity and the subject) where the possible translation occurs, or rather the space where this translation takes place before it reaches us. According to Marcel Duchamp "Art is not what we see; it is in the spaces between."[9] Or as observes Anish Kapoor: "The void is not silent. I have always thought of it more and more as a transitional space, an in-between space. It's very much to do with time. I have always been interested as an artist in how one can somehow look again for that very first moment of creativity where everything is possible and nothing has actually happened. It's a space of becoming… 'something' that dwells in the presence of the work… that allows it or forces it not to be what it states it is in the first instance."[10] The void will be exposed through its presence and aura,[11] by experiencing the “authentic” with our senses. "Everything we see hides another thing, we always want to see what is hidden by what we see"[12] observes René Magritte; this will occur through time to reveal an auditory presence of the visual. Sound itself is contained within the object perceived. At the same time a light is being cast, the shadow gives depth and materiality to the object. Nonetheless, it is also a presence of something missing, not visually recognized: “it rather points toward a gap in the field of visible, toward a dimension of what eludes our gaze.”[13]

[1] "Photography has never actually been anything more than the first of these 'arts of light' that have little by little contaminated the perceptible through a 'photosensitivity' [...]." In Paul Virilio, Art as Far as the Eye Can See, (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 2007), 117.
[2] Christian Metz, cit., in Paula Carabell, "Photography, Phonography, and the Lost Object," Perspectives of New Music, 40, no. 1 (2002): 179, http://www.jstor.org/stable/833552 (accessed March 19, 2012).
[3] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, Architecture and the Senses, (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2005), 49.
[4] Michel Chion. In Patricia Kruth and Henry Stobar, Sound, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 204.
[5] Michel Chion, Audio-Vision, Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), xvii.
[6] tr. it.,"coppia tempo diaframma" The term used to express the connection t-f (time-blend aperture). Even though it means exposure, for this purpose the Italian term suits better on discussed topic.
[7] Alain Badiou, "THE SYMPTOM 9," Some Remarks on Marcel Duchamp, June 10, 2008. http://www.lacan.com/symptom/?p=39 (accessed April 06, 2013).
[8] Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, Architecture and the Senses, (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2005), 49.
[9] Marcel Duchamp quoted in Hugo Heyrman, "Art and Synesthesia: in search of the synesthetic experience," First International Conference on Art and Synesthesia, July25-28, 2005. http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/art/ (accessed April 06, 2013).
[10] Anish Kapoor, quoted in Homi K. Bhabha and Pier Luigi Tazzi, "Anish Kapoor: Making Emptiness," Anish Kapoor (London: Hayward Gallery, 1998), 17.
[11] Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, (Prisme Key Pres, 2010), 14.
[12] Harry Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977), 172.
[13] Slavoj Zizek, "I Hear you with My Eyes, or, The Invisible Master," Gaze and Voiceas Love Objects, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 93.

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petar kufner, research

Communication Within Architectural Projects – Questions of Utopia

This study analyses the communication processes of architectural projects – that is, image as a key element and direct expression of thought as form. Buildings are the synthesis and product of thought represented through symbolic forms, which in most cases recall images, thus they materialize what lives in the imagination. This research questions the aesthetic concepts that often treat the communication aspect of the project as merely a kind of beautification, decoration or packaging of the final constructed product.
The first part will study the rules of representation and its crisis. Here, the planning process will be analyzed, where the artifact - intended as image and produced form - is conditioned by technology. The research will focus on the significant role of tecnoscienza and how this influences invention and creation, often neglecting aspects of the mental process of the planning stage.
The second part of the paper deals with the discourse of reality, which nowadays could be considered digital, simplifying virtual reality, or as Deleuze states – an extension of everything that is real. Even though it is hard to imagine a virtual architecture in terms of construction, architects use virtual technology as a tool for the creation of projects, and hence virtuality becomes a sort of extension through which architects view atrophic reality.
The final part of the research attempts to illustrate an experimental scene, where the image of architecture and architecture of image are confronted through a process of analysis and elaboration using different tools of representation - digital, traditional and hybrid – in order to demonstrate that whoever deals with the communication aspect of an architectural project is the“director” of a complex process. The project will show examples of architecture, in particular Yona Friedman’s project for the Ville spatiale, which only exist in the virtual realm of imagination.

project description

The idea of realizing a utopia, in other terms, of trying to locate utopia and give it life, from Friedman’s book Utopies réalisables, 1974, according to which utopia is a place where it is possible to fully offer the distance between the project of one desired reality and its production, between desire and satisfaction. Yona Friedman, courtesy the artist

The elaboration of Ville spatiale applied onto the city of Venice, which Friedman have been working on for over fifty years, and which proposed as the theme of a workshop held in Venice in 2009, form the basis of this research project developed from Friedman’s sketches, images and models.

The research aim is to rebuild and animate the virtual model using 3D software. At this moment, the initial sketch will be compared with the virtual model in an attempt to represent the passage from idea to realization, via animation.

In 1958 Friedman stated that the Spatial City (Ville spatiale) is not a frozen form, but rather, in his drawings and models, is an instant image, which extends from a long and indeterminate process. Impressed by his discovery of the enormous potentiality of presenting the idea of Spatial City through video, the final part of the project will be presented in the form of a video. A montage of the virtual model and the video representing reality will create what Deleuze calls crystal-image, that is, the indivisible unity of the virtual image and the actual image.

The video explaining the project is divided in two parts. The first section shows the evolution of an idea toward an in situ project (footage along Ponte della Libertà), where the video is slowed down, thus images are captured in slow motion.

framing study

If imagination is something unperceived by the human eye, something that exists solely in our minds, a reproduction in slow motion shows us things that are hidden. The same thing occurs while looking at the visual spectrum in which our eyes are limited between infrared and ultraviolet. According to Ammar Eloueini, who considers this space as a sort of virtual space - a kind of prosthesis - which once applied may permit us to see what was previously unperceived. By seeing images again in slow motion, where one second can be extended over ten or fifteen minutes, the missing frames (skipped by the human eye) may also be considered as virtual spaces. In the second part of video, two different types of framing - one panoramic and another static – show the object inserted into the real situation, accompanied with the actual background sound and surroundings. Thus, hypothetically, utopia may take form and come to life.

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research

Food for People with Chromatic Deficit

This plan was born within the course of Theories of the color held by professor Roberto Casati at the University IUAV of Venice, a.a. 2007/08, by students Petar Kufner and Annalaura Tezzon. It grows from the curiosity to study and to understand how the people with chromatic deficit perceive the color in the food. (remain part of the plan is in italian language)

Elaborato presentato al corso di Teorie del Colore, Università IUAV di Venezia, docente Roberto Casati.

Questo progetto è nato nell’ambito del corso di Teorie del colore tenuto dal professor Roberto Casati all’Università IUAV di Venezia, a.a. 2007/08, da studenti Annalaura Tezzon e Petar Kufner. Nasce dalla curiosità di studiare e capire come le persone aventi deficit cromatici percepiscono il colore nel cibo.

INTRODUZIONE SUL TEMA DEL DALTONISMO

Come si legge nel libro di Stephen E. Palmer “Vision science. Photons to phenomenology” (The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachussetts, 1999), il daltonismo è il difetto per cui le persone non hanno la capacità di distinzione tra tutti i colori del “solido dei colori”. Con questo termine intendiamo il sottoinsieme dello spazio del colore visibile da una persona con capacità normali di percepirlo. Queste persone sono chiamate tricromati: questo significa che “dato un qualsiasi colore, possono eguagliarlo, ossia trovarlo uguale, ad una qualche mescolanza di altri tre.” Esistono invece diversi tipi di daltonismo. Una prima grande differenziazione può essere fatta tra dicromati e monocromati: i primi, dato un colore, possono trovarlo uguale ad una qualche mescolanza di altri due, i secondi possono eguagliare qualsiasi colore a qualche livello di intensità di un solo altro colore. All’interno della classe dei dicromati si possono distinguere tre diversi tipi di deficit. I primi due hanno caratteristiche molto simili. Si tratta dei protanopi e dei deuteranopi, cioè di persone non in grado di percepire le tinte rosse e quelle verdi, che secondo un’opinione largamente diffusa tra gli studiosi, vengono probabilmente viste come scale di grigi. Di conseguenza la loro visione del colore è limitata a diverse tonalità di blu, gialli e grigi. La differenza tra questi due tipi di dicromati sta nel punto neutro monocromatico dell’osservatore: “la specifica lunghezza d’onda in cui una luce monocromatica appare incolore, ossia grigia.” Tutti i dicromati traducono le lunghezze d’onde brevi come diverse tonalità di blu e quelle lunghe come diverse tonalità di giallo. In un punto esistente tra questi due estremi si trova una lunghezza d’onda che non è percepita né come tonalità di blu, né di giallo bensì come un grigio neutro. Per i protanopi questo punto neutro corrisponde ai 492 nanometri e per i deuteranopi ai 498 nanometri.

L’ultimo tipo di dicromatismo prende nome di tritanopia. A differenza degli altri due tipi, i tritanopi non sono in grado di esperire le tonalità blu e quelle gialle. Il risultato è che la loro gamma cromatica è composta da diverse tonalità di rosso, verde e grigio.

IL PROGETTO

L’idea di questo progetto è nata da una riflessione fatta in classe, sul fatto che alcuni particolari tipi di cibo risultano essere particolarmente sgradevoli se visti con gli occhi di una persona daltonica. Naturalmente il problema sussiste solo per persone che hanno perso la capacità tricromatica di vedere i colori nel corso della loro vita, non per persone che sono nate con questo deficit.
Per studiare la percezione dei colori nei daltonici esistono diversi software, il più accreditato dei quali sembra essere Vischeck.

Dopo aver composto un serie di immagini, rappresentanti diversi tipi di cibo abbiamo utilizzato questo software che si installa come un plug-in di Photoshop. Questo programma è un simulatore che ipotizza la visione dei colori per i dicromati alterando i canali cromatici di interesse di ciascun tipo di daltonismo.

Nelle immagini sottostanti in alto a sinistra si trova l’immagine come percepita dai tricromati. Nella prima colonna di immagini abbiamo applicato il filtro rispettivamente dei protanopi, deuteranopi e tritanopi. Nell’ultima colonna abbiamo applicato una sfocatura del 50% per verificare la scala dei colori delle singole immagini.

Dopo questo primo step ci siamo resi conto che l’applicazione del filtro a tutta l’immagine portava ad un risultato fittizio. Con questo intendiamo dire che non avendo di riferimento l’immagine dei tricromati normali, probabilmente le foto dei dicromati ci sembrerebbero plausibili. Senza il riferimento all’immagine normale, potremmo essere portati a pensare che le immagini filtrate abbiano delle dominanti cromatiche dovute allo scatto fotografico o alla composizione del piatto. Per ovviare a questo problema abbiamo fatto un secondo passaggio in cui, come si può vedere nelle immagini sottostanti abbiamo affiancato all’immagine filtrata completamente, l’immagine filtrata su due livelli: il livello di sfondo è stato lasciato come da originale mentre il cibo è stato filtrato. In questo modo ci sembra che sia più evidente l’effetto della visione dicromatica sul cibo.

L’ultimo passaggio effettuato è stato quello di selezionare i colori dominanti di alcune immagini mettendoli a confronto nei diversi tipi di daltonismo. In questa fase è importante considerare il limite dei software utilizzati: in primo luogo essendo l’immagine digitale composta da pixel, è importante tenere in considerazione che il “conta gocce” di Photoshop con cui è stato effettuato questo passaggio seleziona solo un pixel alla volta. Di conseguenza l’isolamento del colore va considerato come rappresentativo di un’area di colore della foto in questione. In secondo luogo, non vanno dimenticati i passaggi a cui l’immagine digitale è sottoposta: sensore CCD della macchina fotografica, taratura dello schermo del computer e eventualmente stampa dell’immagine.

CONSIDERAZIONI FINALI

Ci sembra di poter concludere che l’utilizzo di questi software ha un senso soprattutto per capire, da tricromati, come i dicromati percepiscono i colori. Tuttavia si tratta di un apprendimento abbastanza generico, dati i limiti delle tecnologie che comportano questi passaggi. Per verificare la correttezza di questo software bisognerebbe forse sottoporre le immagini trattate a persone che soffrono di questi deficit cromatici. A livello teorico, infatti, posto che il programma funzioni correttamente, una persona per esempio dicromatica deuteranope, dovrebbe vedere nella stessa maniera, cioè senza differenze, l’immagine non trattata e quella trattata con il filtro.

Oltretutto va considerato che l’immagine digitale vista a schermo passa per una matrice di colori RGB che è pur sempre una “rappresentazione” di un’immagine reale. Quindi, come conclude anche Palmer, un’esperienza “reale” di come i dicromati percepiscono i colori, non si potrà mai avere. Ci si può solo accontentare di fare delle ipotesi in questo senso e di studiare questo fenomeno in via generale, senza mai perdere di vista i limiti tecnologici a cui siamo sottoposti.

Più interessante a nostro parere è l’applicazione di questi software all’ambito web. In effetti, alcuni di questi software vengono utilizzati proprio con questo fine. E’ il caso, per esempio, di CodeBlind, programma che serve per selezionare delle aree di pixel nello schermo per tradurle nei vari tipi di daltonismo. In questo contesto sembra più proficua un’azione del genere, perché rimanendo sempre in una dimensione “digitale” (è una selezione da schermo, per una traduzione finalizzata ad una visione ancora nello schermo), è possibile creare interfacce e siti web che tengano conto di questi deficit cromatici. Questa eventualità ha una finalità relativa, se si pensa che, secondo alcune indagini, solo l’8% degli uomini e l’1% delle donne soffrono di una qualche forma di daltonismo (e per la tritanopia la percentuale è ancora più bassa: 0,2% degli uomini e 0,1% delle donne). Ciononostante, ci sembra molto democratico pensare di sviluppare interfacce e siti che ne tengano conto, senza contare, che per alcuni ambiti specializzati, costruire siti in questa maniera non è solo corretto ma anche utile.