What is seen depends on how the observer allocates his attention on the anticipations he develops and the perceptual explorations he carries out.
The Selective Focus
IV the Economy if Vision p.96
"We tends to turn our eyes automatically in the direction of something to which we want consciously to attend. Perhaps it is only detectives who have trained themselves to observe 'from the corner of their eyes' without looking"
It is interesting to discover that unconsciously when we look at things, we usually prefer to look at things we are interested in and we will fix our eye long enough for the pixels to come together as an image. Not only seeing it but we also remember it. The writer gave a more extreme and interesting case of how people (detectives) need to trained so that they can observe and see things with just the corner of their eyes, so I guess that if we have enough selfawareness and control of what we want to observe, we can see things without looking at that object directly.
"In discussing 'decoration', this distinction between seeing and attending is certainly not an idle one; we know that we rarely attend to the details of design, but if we did not see them at all, decoration would fail in its purpose."
I discovered that the writer is describing how even decorations needs a purpose and i really like his view on the distinction between seeing and attending. From a dictionary, Decoration means 'an addition that renders something more attractive or ornate'. If it does not do its job then it can fail
Loss of Definition
IV the Economy if Vision p.97
"Perceptual generalization, this process of perceptual generalization is also used by typographers who wants to demonstrate the appearance of a print page without distracting the customer by meaningful letters. The artist who covers the pages of an open book in his painting with abbreviated dots and dashes does so largely for the same reason, that he does not want to distract our attention. But visually he can also use real letters just as a muttering crowed might also use real conversation if they could think of anything to say and could be sure they would not be understood."
We can make an atmosphere or the overall quality of the atmosphere to be unknown from the well known. I found this very interesting and could be useful in creating an atmospheric feeling of 'undistracted' because seems to know what is happening but actually we cant understand it.
IV the Economy if Vision p.98
"Leonado Da Vinci's primary concern was very properly with the question of what we cannot see at a distance. He spoke of the perspective of disappearances." and took great pains to investigate the exact sequence of these disappearances with increasing distance. First we lose the shape, then the color and finally the mass of the body so that 'when you see a man close to you you will discern all these three elements, with increasing distance you will first fail to recognize who it is, from further away you cannot tell his coloring but see him simply as a dark body, and in the end he will appear as a tiny dark round spot."
Our eyes has are limited with amount of resolution if you are in a distance but what interests me is what will things look like when we are so so so far away from that object. Are they all circle? Which part with disappear first?
"Looking at a crowd or a troop of horses we will be less aware of the exact loss of detail because we tend to expect that the members of this mass will be identical and read them accordingly."
I learned that every object put in a space doesn't have to be a perfect individuals IF they are in groups or in mass numbers. This is very interesting if we could experiment more on how similar types of object can be considered same by the overwhelming amount seen by our eyes.
Visual Information
IV the Economy if Vision p.103
"They arose in the scientific study of the transmission of message in which electrical engineers investigated the most economical way of sending and receiving information by signals. The purpose of any message in this idealized model is to reduce the state of doubt in which the recipient had found himself, and it is this state of doubt first of all that can be expressed in terms of uncertainties and probabilities. Imagine the situation of the anxious father waiting for the message whether it is a boy or a girl. Before its arrival his bet would be fifty-fifty or more exactly dependent on the statistics of live births. All that would be needed to remove his doubt would be one of two signals if a prior code had been arranged. Strictly speaking all the economical engineer would have to transmit to a speaker of English in this situation would be a 'b' or a 'g', which would resolve this particular doubt."
I really found this excerpt useful to my project and can be applied when we want to convey messages economically. Doubt can be expressed in terms of uncertainties of feelings and probabilities of outcome, so what should we consider the signal and what should we consider as excessive. After we know that we can use those elements in vary and intrigue curiosity.
