Unfolding
Unfold: Hermann Lotze
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AimThe following is a small experiment to investigate the movement of the eye, and the central and the peripheral vision.
The philosopher and medical doctor Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817-1881)(1) argued that philosophy should be based on natural science, since we as humans were governed by the same laws as the objects that surround us. This argument concluded that our understanding of the world should be the result of our experience, of our own observations and experiments, as opposed to logical reasoning alone.
If we relate this to our experience of space, it would mean that how we observe and experience space is how we understand space. Since Lotze saw the human body(2) as a mechanical construction, our perception of the world was based on mechanical principles: how we walk, how we move objects and how we move the eyes to look at our surroundings. Eye movement was especially important to the understanding of space, since it formed the basis for many of our other interactions with space. It was ‘constructed’ by a series of ‘local signs’,(3) which translated memories from the mechanics of seeing into our understanding of space – fixing the eye on the horizon or remembering the position of the eye when looking straight up or down. Historian Mitchell W. Schwarzer writes about such ‘local signs’:
Local signs are memories of muscular feelings derived from the motions of the eye required to encompass the form of a visual object. For example, when we notice an object with our peripheral vision and then rotate our eyes to locate this object in the center of our vision, we are both creating new local signs (through the muscular action) and acting under the guidance of existing local signs. Our experience of qualities of the third dimension consists in our memory of the magnitude of the movement it took to bring the object into the line of clearest vision.(4)
In other words, our perception of space could be understood as the fluctuation of our eyes as our vision scans the world around us, constantly moving between peripheral and central vision.
ConstructionThe spatial model was constructed and animated in Form•Z. The animation was layered with the frames in Adobe AfterEffect and exported to video.
On the DVD with video and image material in the back of this dissertation, the white frame is fixed while the red frame moves from the center to the periphery as the vision rotates to scan and decode space.
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(1) For basic information about Rudolph Herman Lotze, see http://radicalacademy.com/philrhlotze.htm and http://www.uta.edu/psychology/faculty/ickes/social_lab/ancestry/rudolph.htm
(2) Lotze believed that man was unique in having a mind, why not all aspects of a human being could be accounted for in mechanical terms.
(3) Jammer, Max (1993 Dover Edition (1954)), Concepts of Space, The History of Theories of Space in Physics, New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., p. 138.
(4) Schwarzer, Mitchell W. (1991), “The Emergence of Architectural Space: August Schmarsow’s Theory of Raumgestaltung,” in assemblage 15 (1991), p. 51.
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