Reflection No. 1: Thoughts on the Perception of the Human Eye
The most striking feature of the human eye and its perception are the Gestalt principles involving grouping. The reason this stands out is because, when I was in high school taking a printmaking course, I found M.C. Escher’s works of art to be incredible.I realized, from his artwork, the seemingly limitless potential that the brain and eyes hadin working together to be able to perceive, as both the perceiver and creator, ways to seamlessly sequence groupings such as birds into fishes to manipulate both our personal and general perspective of what is called the figure and ground. As the birds come forward into the foreground as the figure, the fishes dissipate into the background as the ground and vice versa. In doing this, Escher would also sometimes utilize some concepts of ambiguity where you arelooking at his artwork one way, but from another perspective you are able to look at it from an alternative viewpoint. In this manner, he is playing with the viewers’ visual acuity.
He is manipulating the spatial frequency of both our vision from the viewer’s viewpoint and the artwork from the creator’s viewpoint through his vision. Higher spatial frequency utilizessharp features and fine details to bring certain objects to the forefront, the figure, and less detailsand blurry features to push certain objects into the background, the ground. Higher and lowerspatial frequency is achieved by increasing the number of cycles of gratings per unit of what iscalled a sine wave, or sinusoidal grating, through the number of times a pattern of, say, linesrepeat per unit area or where the bars of light and dark lines gradually change their intensitywithin that area (R. Blake & R. Sekular, 2001). The number of lines repeating per unit area cangive us either a higher or lower spatial frequency depending on the angle and distance we are viewing from (R. Blake & R. Sekular, 2001).
Reference
R. Blake & R, Sekular (2001). Tutorial on spatial frequency analysis. Perception, 3rd Ed., http://www.psy.vanderbilt.edu/courses/hon185/SpatialFrequency/SpatialFrequency.html