Art and Imagination

Art and Imagination My description of how we see, think and make art depends on the fact that we do not see the world directly from our eyes. We see a picture of the physical world that your brain makes in your head which I call the visual world. You are not aware of this fact because your brain makes you think you see the world directly from your eyes. This illusion is essential because you depends on your visual world to get around in the real world that does not diminish in scale. Using light waves projected by the lenses of your eyes onto the cells of your retinas your brain produces your visual world in the form of a lens projected picture including lines, shapes, surfaces, forms, space and colors. You can tell your visual world is a lens projected picture by its diminishing scale. (Ironically the existence of this illusionary visual world proves the existence of the underlying real world.) I use term vision for the neural process that produce your visual world contrast with the external physical process that projects light waves onto your retinas which I call eyesight. Your brain’s amazing ability to make a visual world seems rooted in an underlying neural process modeled after the linear geometry of eyesight. Your experience of the visual world includes your visual self. Your presence in relation to the visual world includes the parts of yourself you can see and feel. You can tell they are lens projected by your hand growing smaller when you move it away. You see your visual world and experience your other senses in relation to your visual self. Your awareness of your visual world relative to your visual self constitute consciousness making vision a primary function of your brain. It stands to reason that a visual center of being came into existence through evolution some six hundred million years ago with the development of eyes and eyesight. Eyes would have not been of use if this were not so. You have two ways of seeing your visual world which I call automatic vision an imagined vision. Automatic vision is how you see the visual world when you open your eyes. With Automatic Kinetic vision the perceived location your eyes, your visual self, constantly moves along with your view of your visual world with the constant movement of your physical eyes. However, the position your visual self relative to your visual world remains the same at the bottom center edge of a plane that marks the forward boundary of your visual world. Thus with automatic vision your visual self is a fixed place in relation to your visual world and not an independent entity. You achieve imagined fixed vision by holding your eyes still and so your visual world. When you do this something amazing happens. Your brain replaces your automatic visual self with and I call your visual ego which you can align with distal points in the visual world. The steeper the angle of the visual ego to a distal point the greater the apparent distance of visual ego form the distal point and the larger the area of the visual world you see directly in front of you. In this way the automatic kinetic view of forms in the visual world of your free will. The visual ego described here differs from what Ernest Mach calls the phenomenal ego and James J. Gibson the visual ego. In both cases the visual ego described as a sort of external visual world seen in one eye that includes part of the viewer (See James J. Gibson, The Perception of the Visual World, 1950, 27 and 225). You can place your visual ego inside or outside the contour of a form and you can place the distal point before, after, or on a form. To keep your imagined fixed vision continuous when you keep your visual ego still when you move the distal point you revert to automatic vision and you see forms as what I call disconnected. As stated, varying the angle of your visual ego to a distal point varies the apparent distance of the visual ego from the distal point. This duplicates the change in how an object in the visual world looks when you physically approach or move away which brings us back to where we began, compensating for the diminishing scale of the visual world in order to use your vision, the visual ego and the visual world to get around in the real world that does not diminish in scale. Your ability to create an imaginary geometrically regularized memorable visual world seems derived from an underlying neural process your brain derives from the geometry.