Maria Lardi's profile

Kaleidoscopic Device for Visual Response

Observers are people, animals, or machines able to learn about their environment and impelled to reduce their uncertainty about events which occur in it…
As observers we expect the environment to change and try to describe those features that remain unchanged with the passage of time…
An ‘assembly’ is the dynamic part of an observer’s environment, a piece of the real world…
Gordon Pask, An Approach to Cybernetics, 1961
Attempting through diagrams to draw out and analyse recordable or measurable qualities from our environment – or, more specifically, one particular environment – Regent’s Park.
This task aimed to start experimenting with devices that will engage with the real world; devices that tap into the complex sophistication of physical systems; of nature and interaction.
 
Also Interface boards like Arduino would provide an ideal mechanism to process data from outside the box . The device would aim to measure or record, or to intend to enhance or change a perception. It could have been independent or prosthetic.
 
The kaleidoscope reflecting and manipulating the vision and further more minimalising the distance to what was perceived helped me to indicate how the perception is twisted and everything changes organically. It created the question of is what you see? What you believe? Or is it what you see the actual or real of what you see? Or perhaps there is no clear understanding and perhaps it needs a better organization. Is organizing perceptual experience is better that to predict and control the actions and outcomes one can get from it and how it affects them personally then what is the way of doing that?
Our eyes collect and organize information points into sets and sending them to the brain/nervous system, whatever. The brain seems to obtain patterns from the received information sets. Data sets which it receives repeatedly form stronger and stronger patterns. Over time, the brain seems to collect so much data from particular areas that it begins to shut down the invasion of new information, because it believes that it already has enough information from them to predict and control outcomes of actions. I believe that this is how the perception of the optical illusions work. The Repeated visual and more importantly manipulated information set into patterns, which eventually are relied on own logical perception of the perceived information to adapt. This might mean that that the information received is replaced with either an image or reality or our perception is replaced with conception. So are perceptions governed by conceptions and visual illusion?
Vision has an immediate response with distance. What you see is how clear you can see it and the clearer the better is the understanding. In the case of the visual illusion or visual manipulated perception due to the illusion that in this case is caused by the kaleidoscope , it may be argued that there is no distance. Objects are in false positions and the multiplied reflections through the kaleidoscope are making the distant position of those objects false. So is manipulated vision minimalizing distance? Looking at 3d perspective drawings we can see that most are drawn based on a vanishing point. That point is the end distance of what artificially the eye can see to collect the information. The vanishing point is something that all have experienced with it when we try to see or look at something in order to understand a location or to calculate the distance in which that particular something of our desire exists. This brings me to my final thought for a thesis project proposal which I will try to bring out through a question. Is visual illusion of manipulated vision minimilizing distance? and if so? Is this the end of the perspective?
Some questions for research and further investigation follow :
How does visual perception reflects central inner object relations.. Is it merely projections of content? Of form? Or is it ingrained in the whole personality, and in that respect revealing a mode of functioning which spreads out to cognitive as well as emotional areas? Are the tools for creating illusions of three dimensional space overlapping, changing size and placement, linear perspective, relative hue and value, and atmospheric perspective. Ways and opportunities of developing the issue and experimenting further with the question as in turn to come with a proof of the occurrences of how this may happen is the use of visual schematics, further investigation of visual illusion as well as physical or computational experiments and through further manipulation of the kaleidoscopic tool or effect.
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Kaleidoscopic Device for Visual Response
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Kaleidoscopic Device for Visual Response

Research Development Device as part of my thesis design development for my Masters in Architecture and Digital Media at University of Westminster Read More

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