Musings on the Creative Process: Left-Brain / Right-Brain Blending

 "It's always seemed like

a big mystery how nature,

seemingly so effortlessly,

manages to produce so much

that seems to us so complex.

Well, I think we found its secret.

It's just sampling what's

out there in the

computational universe."

- Stephen Wolfram (1959 - )

I apologize beforehand for what might seem like a long and bizarre excursion away from photography; but please bear with me as the following musings are very much in the vein of exploring the "creative process" of photography (well, at least, a glimpse of the creative process I've recently been immersed in!). Specifically, those aspects of the creative process that lie at the cusp of traditional left/right brain functions. Leaving aside the reality of such a dichotomy (e.g., see this recent paper), let us posit that left-brain processes focus more on logic and analytic thinking, and that right-brain processes focus on art and intuition more. Of course, all of us continually engage both sides throughout our waking hours, albeit with our own unique rhythms of shifting/combining focus and modulating relative emphasis. In my case, I live in two - usually quite separate - worlds, deliberately broken up into "what I do during my work week" (employed, as I am, as a physicist at a federally funded research & development center) and "what I do during essentially all available off hours" (which, among other things, has resulted in this photography blog and more fun with my cameras, lenses, filters, and tripods than I deserve in the 45+ years I've been doing photography). Occasionally, as I'm about to do here, I combine my two sides; though not always for the better - you, kind reader, can judge whether I've strayed a bit too far in this case.

"Working with mental images activates a different mode
of consciousness which is holistic and intuitive." 
- Henri Bortoft (1938 - 2012)

So many ideas come to mind as I ponder this question: Goethe's Holistic Seeing; Bohm's Implicate Order; and Alexander's (opus on fundamental organizing principles of "life forms") Nature of Order, all come to mind. But I will leave the discussion of these approaches for a later entry. For now, these ideas will have to serve merely as backdrops of my explanation of how I've partly fused my "left-brain/right-brain" activities over the last week or so (I promise to keep it short :). 

At its core, my usual "right brain" approach to photography cannot be simpler: I pick up my camera bag and tripod, head out for a walk to a local park (or just go downstairs to a "studio" I've set up for to experiment with color abstracts), and start shooting. If something catches the eye, I shoot. That's about it. And the less ("left-brain") thinking that is involved, the better (though it sometimes leads to thinking about thinking, which I've written about before). The only important - and almost entirely unconscious - action I take is to choose the time I press the shutter (I've assuming that such minutiae as f-stops, exposure times, filters, and the like are "automatic" and add little to the story I'm trying to tell here). OK, so far, so good.

"So the relationship of each moment in the whole to all the others
is implied by its total content: the way in which it
'holds’ all the others enfolded within it." 
- David Bohm (1917 - 1992) 

This is where my several-week-old left-brain machinations come in. While looking over a portfolio of recent abstracts (including those "discovered" in marble and crystals), I ran across a number that fell into the "whole contains other wholes" pictures I described above. I was sitting at the same PC that facilitates both my left-brain (Photoshop) and right-brain (Mathematica) activities, and reflected the same basic type of question I normally reserve for my left-brain: "How can I find the 'best' image?" - meaning one that best satisfies my desire to show "interesting parts" of an image, but in such a way that the whole is still implicitly within sight, "just barely out of reach." I had earlier experimented with breaking up images into thirds and looking for "interesting juxtapositions" (e.g., exchanging the 1st and 2nd panel interchanged, but leaving the 3rd panel fixed). And, while that did lead to some interesting variations, it was also a painstakingly long process. These preliminary experiments were akin to a kind of improvisational play,  wherein I manually dissected each image and created select juxtapositions of interest. Noting that something interesting can actually be found by following this method, my left-brain finally clicked into action.

While the process is still "simple" (relatively speaking), and can - and will - easily be improved upon in coming days and weeks, I wrote a Mathematica function that automatically breaks an image into thirds (i.e., my 3-word alphabet of 'panels' to be used in  constructing new triptychs); applies all possible combinations of (1) leaving the orientation of a given panel unchanged (or as 'original = O'), (2) flipping a panel in the horizontal direction ('HF'), (3) flipping a panel in the vertical direction ('VF'), and (4) rotating a panel 180 deg (i.e., perform a vertical rotation = 'VR'); and assembling the new panels into a triptych with a bit of white space between and on the outside perimeter of the whole image. (90 deg rotations are not allowed, because in order to retain the same aspect ratio, the panels would all need to be square.) The Mathematica function is constrained to not create any triptychs in which the original panel order is left unchanged, since my goal is to find combinations of individually interesting images - in this case, panels - in which the whole, or original image, is only implicit and not directly observable. A bit of counting shows that, with this constraint, there are a total of 320 possible 'panel exchange + rotation/flip' combinations. This is significantly more than I can create by hand, but is easily doable in a few seconds by feeding my Mathematica function a starting image of choice. More specifically (since it is hard to visually digest 320 images at once), I had Mathematica display a smaller array of 16 random triptychs out of the complete set that my right-brain can inspect - and select interesting variants of - "at a glance." 

"No pattern is an isolated entity. Each pattern can exist in the
world only to the extent that is supported by other patterns:
the larger patterns in which it is embedded, the patterns of the
same size that surround it, and the smaller patterns
which are embedded in it."
- Christopher Alexander (1936 - ) 

Two such arrays are displayed at the top of this post, along with - on the right hand side - one of the images I like best. By design, all of the randomly constructed triptychs share the two most important qualities I am searching for: (1) each of the panels is "interesting" (since this cannot be expected to be true of just any image, the starting image must already be specially selected), and (2) the starting image is visible only implicitly, since the viewer is allowed to see only the juxtaposed panels, not in their original order). As for what makes triptych x more/less interesting than triptych y? That's where the right brain jumps back into the process, as it subjectively selects one out of many - just because; though, because of the way my left-brain constructed the samples from which my right-brain is asked to choose (leaving out the "real" image), the right-brain is faced with - what for me, is - an intoxicating aesthetic tension between parts and an implicit whole. Indeed, the pleasure I get from finding and viewing "interesting images" of this sort are a direct analogue of the creative process by which they are spawned. In the same way as (I've just described) my left-brain helps me sort, dissect, operate-on, and create a multiverse of same-but-different sets of images that my right-brain generated the 'starting set' for (by intuitively capturing the original image) - my right-brain now delights in teasing apart the tension between the parts and wholes of images that my left-brain constructed for me (thus revealing "interesting" sets of images otherwise invisible to my own eye). 

Importantly, at least as far as photography - and aesthetics - are concerned, both sides of this creative process are fueled by search, discovery, and selection. That is, a search for a place and time to take a photograph, discovering an image, and selecting how and when to capture it. The only difference between my usual photography and the (admittedly laborious seeming) process described above is the space over which the search, discovery, and selection is conducted: i.e., a meta-space of images constructed out of images already taken vs. the physical world in which an original set of images is captured. The extra delight (I continue to have as I experiment with left-brain / right-brain blending) is that - at least temporarily - both sides of my brains are actively engaged in pursuit of an unchanging goal: to find "interesting images" :)

Here some additional "discoveries" in my left-brain constructed multiverse of meta-images (with more sure to follow)...

Experience = f(Photograph; Context, Interpretation)

In a recent blog entry ("Photography as Transcendence"), I presented what I believe is one core component of what distinguishes "fine-art" photography from a "photograph" (even an otherwise technically well executed one). I wrote that the finest photography makes you forget you are looking at a photograph and makes you experience it as if it were real; as if you were a part of it. The example I used was (indeed, the whole blog entry was based on) a nude portrait taken by one of the photographers at the photography Co-op I belong to. As such, it was obviously representational; which prompted at least one reader to ask whether I was implicitly arguing that the "finest photography" must depict something real, since how else can the viewer feel she is "one" with the work?

My answer is that photography obviously need not be restricted in any way in what it represents, or how it represents it. Even the word "photography" is needlessly restrictive. It is useful only insofar as it "points to" something someone has created (which the world calls a "photograph"). But once the physical object is created, the word "photograph" has served its purpose and can be safely discarded. It is the object we care about; or, more precisely, the affect the object has on us, as viewers. Of course, the degree to which one viewer "feels as one" with a photograph always depends on the viewer's particular predilections and aesthetics. Ardent admirers of Andy Warhol generally react markedly differently to a given image (whatever the image!) than admirers of the art of Wassily Kandinsky. But that is the whole point; a point that - upon deeper reflection - may hint at the embryonic stirrings of an experiential equation of aesthetics:

Before I explain some of the (obvious?) parts of this equation, let me quickly get the "f" (= "function") out of the way. Feel free to disregard it. It is inserted merely as a philosophical placeholder, and for completeness. It reminds us that there is "something" that binds and equates the two sides, but its precise makeup is (for our purposes here) unimportant. It is exceedingly unlikely to have a nice, mathematically well-defined definition. In fact, the best description of what it is a placeholder for is a "human observer" (of "photograph"); and no one, so far as I know (with the possible exception of Stephen Wolfram, developer of Mathematica and the soon-to-be-released Wolfram Alpha), has yet been bold enough to posit a "function" for a human being.

"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness." - Albert Einstein

So what do I mean by this equation? I mean that - ultimately - that the only experience that is of any lasting consequence to an observer viewing a photograph (or any work of art; or anything!) is the experience itself. That is to say, after all is said and done, after an observer "views" an artwork, the only thing that matters to that observer, the only thing that is of any lasting value, is how - from the observer's own inner point of view - the observer has changed as a consequence of experiencing the artwork. No one can say what that experience will be like, beforehand. The observer is able to reflect back on what the experience was like - on what the artwork means - only after experiencing it (which involves recursive feedback loops on nested experiences, meta-experiences, and the like; none of which we'll get into here). But the observer will be changed in some way. She may be happy, sad, puzzled, angry, detached, thoughtful, tearful, sardonic, ..., or (though unlikely) she may remain completely unchanged, save for the memory of having physically interacted with the artwork. And it is the way in which our ineffable inner state - our prison-like solitary experience of "I-ness" - changes as a function of our viewing of an artwork that defines what that artwork means to us, as viewers.

The left-hand-side of the equation thus represents the inner experience that a viewer has of an observed artwork. The "Photograph" is the physical photograph, and is perhaps the only part of the equation that may be described with something approaching a mathematical rigor. It represents the tangibly objective properties of an image. The paper it appears on, the color dyes and pigments it is imprinted with, its tonal range and contrast levels, and - to some degree - the "things" it depicts (either representationally or non-representationally, as "abstract" shapes and forms; defined mechanically, as by a digital scanner).

The "Context" refers to (1) the context in which the photograph itself appears (perhaps as one of a series of related images, or some other over-arching portfolio of images; is it hanging in a gallery? is it a stray remnant of a discarded box of old polaroids? a web-only image on some unknown photographer's photo-blog?); and (2) the context in which the observer finds herself in while viewing the image, which itself includes both inner and outer dimensions. Is the observer in a gallery setting? is it a private viewing with family and co-workers (the latter set including people to whom she is not as "close")? has she just had lunch with a friend and is in a good mood? has she recently had a spat with her mom and is feeling sad? has she had a long interest in photography, or is perhaps herself a photographer, or is her interest more fleeting?

Finally, "Interpretation" refers to how the viewer interprets the artwork; or the (inner) meaning she ascribes to the work. Interpretation refers to how she really "sees" the work; not necessarily how the work "really" is (objectively speaking, as defined by its physical dimension, the "Photograph"). Note that the viewer does not have to (and, in general, may not even be able to) "see" any of the objectively-hidden "subjective" dimensions of an image, if there are any. Think of the well-known "Hidden Dalmation" image which consists of black and white patches, and may be "seen" as such by some viewers; or may be "seen" as a dalmation by others. The "Photograph" dimension of this experience is the objective image; the "Interpretation" dimension is either "seeing black and white patches" or "seeing a dalmation" (and its attendant associations: does the viewer like dalmations? is she afraid of them? does it remind her of a childhood incident that, by itself, has nothing to do with dalmations or dogs of any kind?...)

"All our thoughts and concepts are called up by sense-experiences and have a meaning only in reference to these sense-experiences. On the other hand, however, they are products of the spontaneous activity of our minds; they are thus in no wise logical consequences of the contents of these sense-experiences. If, therefore, we wish to grasp the essence of a complex of abstract notions we must for the one part investigate the mutual relationships between the concepts and the assertions made about them; for the other, we must investigate how they are related to the experiences." - Albert Einstein

What the equation E=f(P:C,I) suggests is that whatever an observer experiences by viewing a photograph (or any artwork) is a (likely very complicated) function of (1) the photograph itself, as a physical object; (2) the inner emotional and outer environmental contexts in which the viewer is situated in while viewing the photograph; and (3) the interpretation that the viewer ascribes to the photograph (which, since it is also a function of multiple factors, may be but only one exemplar - true for a given context - of a possibly vast set of alternative interpretations by the same observer).

On a trivial level, we've simply decomposed a single dimension ("Experience") into three. As an academic exercise, it focuses attention on some of the basic factors that influence how we view art in general. Other writers, considerably more esteemed than I (and with deeper results), have gone through this exercise before. For example, the well-known photographer / photography theorist Stephen Shore, in his book The Nature of Photographs, introduces a similar set of factors (that he calls "levels") for interpretating an image: the physical level, the depictive level, the mental level, and mental modeling. Each depicts one of the four core elements of an image: vantage point, frame, focus and time. John Szarkowski, the late great photography historian / curator / critic, in his The Photographers Eye, suggests five dimensions: the thing itself, the detail, the frame, time, and vantage point. But however you slice the dimensions - one can always add or subtract to taste - such decompositions, if done thoughtfully, are useful because they partly disentangle the otherwise messy soup of objective and subjective factors that define our overall experience of an artwork.

But what I am after here is subtly different. Assuming that the experience of an artwork is the most meaningful dimension (though, as we've discussed, it too has an ephemeral nature, and may take on added dimensions as the same observer "views" an artwork at different times and in different contexts), what the equation leaves the door open for - at least formally - is the possibility that the same overall experience may result from many different combinations of photograph, context, and interpretation.

Think about that for a moment. Suppose the "Experience" is "feeling joyful, imagining you are in a field of Gold, without a care in the world, and being suddenly transfixed by the notion of Buddhist impermanence" (or anything else, for specificity;-). What gave you this experience? Perhaps it was looking at Ansel Adams' "Moonrise, Hernandez" at the Smithsonian (where an original print was recently on display, and which induced roughly the same "inner experience" in me as I was viewing it). Although we are conditioned to think of our experience - after the fact - as being synonymous with what we were viewing (when asked, we reply: "I was looking at the Ansel Adams exhibit"), the more personally meaningful symbolic (and literal) token of our experience is the memory of the experience itself. It is the memory of what we felt as we were viewing whatever we were viewing; the state of mind we were in, cognitively, intuitively, and emotionally. (For mathematically inclined readers, this is essentially the art-equivalent of taking a Fourier transform between, say, momentum and position space in physics. The respective spaces represent two views of the same system; and do so in a way that preserves information. In our case, "information" is equivalent to "experience," and the function "f" hints at a Fourier-transform-like "experience preserving" sloshing back-and-forth among three dimensions.)

Now imagine - perhaps in some distant time, when evolution has worked its magic on our cognitive / emotional / aesthetic processing abilities - we are able to recall experiences as readily as we now recall things and events. Were we such creatures, we would not care whether the "thing" was the "Moonrise, Hernandez" by Ansel Adams (or the "event" a showing at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC in 2008); we would care - and remember - only that there was a moment in our lives when we felt "joyful, imagined we were in a field of Gold, were without a care in the world, and were suddenly transfixed by the notion of Buddhist impermanence." But so many other combinations of photograph, context, and interpretation could have put us into the same state! Depending on the person, perhaps Minor White's "Capitol Reef, Utah (1962)," viewed on a computer monitor late at night could induce essentially the same experience. Generalizing further, perhaps the same experience may also be had by listening to, say, Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata with a group of close friends at a local country concert hall.

Getting back to - and expanding upon - the main thesis of the earlier blog entry, I now state the main conjecture of this blog entry: the finest photography consists of those images that - for the broadest possible set of contexts and interpretations - yield the most meaningful experiences in the broadest class of observers. Note that the class of "finest photographs" is emphatically not defined solely by the physical dimension of any one photograph; and - critically - includes the observer. "Moonrise, Hernandez" - arguably a fine example of "fine photograph" in the Western world ;-) may rank somewhat lower among the Aka People of Africa (whose collective "aesthetics" are probably quite different from ours). Photograph and viewer are - must be - inextricably interwoven and coupled. A "photograph" has no more a single interpretation, and entails no more of a single experience, than a human is defined by a single inner state and experiences life as a single event (though some mystics claim that is precisely what life is). What a photograph "is" (to an observer) depends on - and is, in turn, shaped by - how the observer experiences the photograph; which henceforth becomes part of the observer, and helps shape what other photographs "will be" and the manner in which they, too, will shape the observer.

"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive." - Joseph Campbell

Taking a cue from Campbell, we can rephrase the main conjecture of this blog entry as follows: the finest photography consists of those images that - for the broadest possible set of contexts and interpretations - induce the richest, deepest feelings of being alive in the broadest class of observers.

Thought Experiment #1: What would an artwork that depicts all of the possible artworks, in all of the possible contexts and interpretations that a given observer might ascribe to them, look like, starting with - as an example - Adams' "Moonrise, Hernandez"? How would an observer of Adams' "Moonrise, Hernandez" experience this meta artwork? Is there a Borgesian Aleph of art?

Thought Experiment #2: This blog entry has introduced a formal destinction between a "fine art photograph" and a (run of the mill?) "photograph" as defined for a group of observers. An obvious question is, what does this distinction entail for the individual observer? Folloing our formulation, we speculate that an observer - say the artist herself? - seeks that combination of artwork, context and interpretation (as any other observer does, of course) that induces the richest, deepest feeling of being alive. Here's a thought experiment: thinking only of yourself as observer (no collective "averaging" is being done here!...this is you we're talking about!), what would you imagine that artwork to look like that - out of all possible artworks that you can possibly create in this lifetime, and that you can observe in all conceivable contexts so as to form all imaginable interpretations - is the one that makes you feel most alive? Now go out and create it....

Postscript: the image posted at the top of this blog entry is a triptych of photographs of moonlight, reflected in Lake Saranac, in the Adirondacks NY. The images were taken from a series captured during a single, exceptionally clear night in August, 2008.

Local fused w/Global via Video Feedback

Talysis (a 9 min DVD, made for the Crystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture held in Utrecht, Holland in Autumn 2005) navigates the "possibility of a sentient geometry to produce a stream of geometric archetypes, a collective unconscious for emergent dynamical systems, a video feedback language system for scrying and pattern recognition."

This is not "new age" silliness;-), but rather a very serious attempt to, essentially, blur the distinction between local behaviors and rules, and global patterns. As Paul Prudence (the scientist/artist behind Talysis) describes on his site, the program combines aspects of symmetry with digital video feedback, resulting in highly recursive geometric structures, including ones that are eerily reminiscent of cellular automata patterns. Cellular automata (CA) are simple discrete dynamical systems whose agents (typically endowed with a discrete set of states, such as ON and OFF) evolve according to strictly local rules. Some CA (such as the well known two-dimensional Life rule, introduced by mathematician John Conway) are known to be universal computers, and so harbor a fundamentally irreducible level of complexity (see Wolfram's New Kind of Science).

What Prudence's Talysis shows is that video feedback can mimic the calculations of recursive algorithms; which begs the question whether it can also behave as a universal computer? (Prudence claims on his site that some patterns reproduce those of the Life rule, and conjectures that video feedback therefore can act as a computer).

Prudence says..."Many of the forms generated in Talysis appear to model biological morphogenesis and suggests that at the heart of all biological growth lies some degree of feedback of information to the system. At first glance many of the stills from Talysis might have been taken from an atlas of biology. There are neural networks, synapses, biological tissues, capillaries, plant structures, and embryonic forms. All of these images were arrived at from pointing a DV camera at its own output, they are entirely self-generative."

A quote from a classic paper on the space-time dynamics of video feedback (by James Crutchfield, published in Physica, 1984): "One goal in studying video feedback is to see whether it could be used as a simulator for dynamics in other fields. Turing’s original proposal of reaction-diffusion equations for biological morphogenesis comes to mind, as well as the image processing and hallucinogenic dynamics of the visual cortex."

I have always suspected that life-like "complexity" (true nested systems-of-systems autopoietic self-organized systems) lies at the Godelian-like cusp where local and global fuse; the Godelian-loop reaching into itself and pulling itself up to higher dimensions by its own bootstraps. Video feedback may just prove to be the practical/conceptual tool with which to visualize a bit of this fundmanetal bootstrapping. Absolutely fascinating!

Additional resources can be found at this link.