Veronica Vossen Wood

Text of paper presented at:

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts Conference. July 5-7th 2007

Enactions & Envisions

A critical discourse on visual consciousness: how the construction and experience of lens-based and time-based work can enable a pivotal interaction between the noumena of the physical world and the phenomenological nature of individual consciousness and experience.
As an increasing number of scientists and philosophers have despaired of the ability of their own descriptive languages to capture the profoundly complex nature of consciousness, there is a compelling reason to pay close attention to artistic explorations of this theme. Art, unlike science, possesses openness to subjective experience that makes it an indispensable companion to more rational and analytical investigations. Consciousness, like other aspects of our biology, is an evolving phenomenon, .the shape and tone of our consciousness is malleable and, in part, determined by the conditions of the culture in which we live.
Laurence Rinder (1999) Searchlight: Consciousness at the Millennium

As an emergent field of enquiry Consciousness Studies is a truly transdisciplinary study, rooted in the distinct but related disciplines of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of the mind, psychology and cultural studies, generating significant concomitant activity in the visual and performing arts. As a visual artist practicing in lens and time-based work, I have been engaged in a practice based research project on aspects of perception and visual consciousness. Between 2002-5 I was engaged in a science/art partnership project at Kings College London with a neurophysiologist, Professor Mary Forsling, then a member of the Centre for Neuroscience Research. I had access to resources such as the medical library, anatomical museum, and working laboratories, providing opportunities to observe and discuss with neuroscientists their methodologies, conceptual frameworks and aspirations and to observe at first hand various imaging techniques and technology used in the process of studying the functional anatomy and activity of the brain. This formed the groundwork for the research project. The recent work of neuroscientists has radically changed our knowledge and understanding of the structure and functioning of the sensory perceptual system and its critical place in the complex construction of consciousness. The contents of

consciousness are a rich layering of sensory perceptions, of experience classified and interpreted by memory, imbued with feeling, integrated in a course of action within our intrinsic human relationship between mind and matter. Perception is both bodily and cognitively enacted. The brain is one element in a complex network involving the brain, the body and the environment. Perception is a kind of skilful activity on the part of the human animal as a whole; perceptual experience acquiring content through the perceivers proficient activity. All perceptual consciousness is a result of experience through interaction with the world and is therefore thoughtful, knowledgeable and intrinsically enactive. The business of making images never stops while we are awake and it even continues during part of our sleep, when we dream. One might argue that images are the currency of our minds
Antonio Damascio (1999) The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness

Visual sensation is the retinas sensitivity to light and shadow. The recognition of objects, the noumena of the world, is the consequence of a constructive process of active interpretation through world-derived data, which draws on the neurophysiological adaptations we make during the exploratory phase of early development. Significant recent research into consciousness has been conducted through enquiries into how visual perception contributes to the construction of a complex human consciousness. Vision scientists, such as Margaret Livingstone study the intricate parallel workings of unconscious and conscious awareness that composes our visual consciousness. This work has enabled the identification of functions of the retina and the mapping of neural pathways in the brain. It has facilitated understandings of how visual information of different types including colour, shape, spatial organisation and movement is directed to different regions of the brain and how groups of cells in those different parts are bound together by particular neuro-physiological mechanisms. However, as Bergson so cogently put it To make of the brain the condition on which the whole image depends is in truth a contradiction in terms, since the brain is by hypothesis a part of this image. Neither nerves nor nerve centres can, then, condition the image of the universe.
Henry Bergson (1912) Matter and Memory

Seeing is not a passive event but an envisioning. Vision is not only a process of the brain. The brain is an enactive participant in constructing what we see of the material world, through which it instills meaning into the many signals that it receives and thus gains knowledge about the world. A precondition of visual consciousness is a conceptual /contextual frame which is cumulative, and dependent on experience and memory, memory being the focal point around which visual consciousness is enactively constructed.

Alva No is Professor of Philosophy at Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Centre for New Media, University of California at Berkeley. Though the brain is necessary for vision, neural processes are not in themselves sufficient to produce seeing. Instead, we claim that seeing is an exploratory activity mediated by the animals mastery of sensiorimotor contingencies. That is, seeing is a skill-based activity of environmental exploration. Visual experience is not something that happens in individuals. It is something they do
Alva No (2004) Action in Perception

This distinctive approach to visual experience allows the development of a new framework for thinking about the qualitative character of experience. In examining the phenomenology of perceptual experience, neuroscience and philosophy have turned to the arts as a source of evidence of the expression of human phenomenological experience. ...art can make a needed contribution to the study of perceptual consciousness...... by furnishing us with the opportunity to have a special kind of reflective experience. In this way art can be a tool for phenomenological investigation.
Alva Noe (2001) Experience and Experiment in Art, Journal of Consciousness Studies

Can there be phenomenological reflection on experience? Can there be phenomenology? Can we make perception itself the object of our thought and awareness?..................the task of phenomenology and of experiential art, ought to be not so much to depict or represent or describe experience, but rather to catch experience in the act of making the world available.
Alva Noe (2004) Action in Perception

Images / Video - ANON 1&2.

From a first person perspective I know the pathology of damaged visual mechanisms that can institute a particular and concentrated awareness of the momentary cognitive gap, between the visual percept of an object, before the parallel connections of memory, contextualisation, recognition and interpretation are enacted. This ambiguity, or enigma manifests an intensified awareness of a noumenal materiality finds a pivotal expression within my own art practice of lens-based, time-based art. The lens is a mechanism designed to frame and abstract the noumena of the visual world: subsequent photographic processes are formulated to capture temporal fragments of noumenal existence as enaction of memory, experience and interpretation. Jeff Wall, a renowned contemporary photographic artist says of the inception of photography:

It is possible that the fundamental shock that photography caused was to have provided a depiction which could be experienced more the way the visible world is experienced than had ever been possible previously. A photograph therefore shows its subject by means of showing what experience is like: in that it provides an experience of experience and it defines this as the significance of depiction. The metaphor of the camera has been often in the past used to elucidate the process of vision. As a lens based artist concerned with questions of visual consciousness this connection has been revealed as a dichotomy. The eye is not a camera that forms and delivers an image, nor is the retina simply a keyboard that can be struck by fingers of light. J.J. Gibson (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception There is a fundamental difference between the operation of the eye and the mechanical operation of the camera itself. We look and see as a dynamic complex cognitive, organism moving with panoramic awareness of our environment through time and space, activating perceptual mechanisms to focus and register multiple aspects and details that dynamically construct our visual consciousness. Roland Barthes speaks of the pensive spectator of the photographic image, provided with a space for visually focused reflection. Lens based images can deploy this essential dichotomy between the enactive way we perceive and the reflective way we regard a lens-based image. Lens-based images are temporal fragments constructed within a fixed spatial frame, therefore containing within this image making, an essential paradox to the act of seeing. It is within this inherent paradox that an interrogatory discourse can be conducted on the phenomenology of vision. The role of the lens-based image then, is not to replicate the actual world or to attempt to replicate the act of seeing, but is about the awareness of the experience of seeing, the act of envisioning Within this context photographing, in itself, becomes a performative act, an enaction of noumenal, spatial and temporal engagement with the world; a dynamic spatial activity, framing the material objects of the gaze, utilizing the intrinsic temporal punctuation of the shutter. (series of short, sharp images flashing on screen ANON 3 images) .to investigate visual experience that is, to do visual phenomenology we must investigate the temporarily extended pattern of exploratory activity in which seeing consists, . The study of such works of art can serve as a model of how to study experience and can also reveal how art can be not only concerned with the making of objects, but more significantly with the investigation of perceptual consciousness
Alva Noe (2001) Experience and Experiment in Art, Journal of Consciousness Studies

Contemporary photography, as a lens-based practice in the visual arts, has evolved beyond previous commonly defined genres into a far more varied and developed practice in content, methodology and presentation, moving from pictorialism to ideabased image-making; meaning shifting from narrative to metanarrative. Digital photography and its subsequent digital processes may appear to have weakened the ontological tie between the photograph and its original referent. But within a framework conscious of this increasingly tenuous but still tensile link, there can be a resultant positive perceptual tension. Within this conceptual framework, as a lens-based, time-based visual artist, I construct photographic projection sequences and series organised as spatial installations within which is enacted a dynamic dematerialized form that yields the phenomena of stillness within a temporal unfolding. If I accept the tutelage of perception, I find I am ready to understand the work of art. For it too is a totality of flesh in which meaning is not free, so to speak, but bound, a prisoner of all the signs, or details which it reveals to me. Thus the work of art resembles the object of perception; its nature is to be seen or heard and no attempt to define or analyse it, however valuable that may be afterwards as a way of taking stock of this experience, can ever stand in place of the direct perceptual experience.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty Causeries 1948

References Bergson, Henri (1910 repr 1991) Matter and Memory, Zone Books New York Damasio, Antonio (2000) The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotions and the Making of Consciousness. Vintage, London Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. (reprinted 2004), (1948, Causeries) The World of Perception. Routledge, London, New York. Rinder, Laurence (1999) Searchlight: Consciousness at the Millenium Thames and Hudson Noe, Alva & Thompson, Evan (ed) (2002) Vision and Mind The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Mass. No, Alva. (2004) Action in Perception. The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Mass.

Batchen, Geoffrey (1995) Burning With Desire: The Conception of Photography. MIT Press. (Quote of Jeff Wall)