When we view images, whether it’s the photographs posted to our social media feed, pieces of art hanging on the walls at doctor’s offices, or murals painted on the sides of buildings, our brain starts making perceptions about the images, at least that’s what neuroscientist, Dr. Eric Kandel’s book “Reductionism in Art and Brain Science: Bridging Two Cultures,” tells us.
Our brain allows us two strategies to help perceive what we’re seeing, “Bottom-up and top-down processing,” Professor at Colombia University, Kandel says. Bottom-up processing is based on what we know from basic facts, like if we see a source of light in the image, we assume it’s coming from above, because we know the sun is above. Top-down processing taps into how our personal experience shapes our perceptions. Our relationships, life stories and unique interests make for an independent viewing lens. Local San Antonio Artist, Gregory Alan is utilizing this philosophy in the way he captures photographs and the perception unravelling he intends his viewers to go through. “We can’t truly unlearn the knowledge we’ve attained, but we can reinterpret it, we can’t un-see things that we have seen, but we can reshape the context in which we remember,” Alan stated in his philosophy. When I first met him, he told me he was working on a series about discrimination through individual photographs of people. My immediate question was how? How can you cover this broad theme through photographing individual people? “That’s what everyone says,” Alan replied. He pulled out his phone, and pulled up a black and white photograph of a dark-skinned person with short, black hair, a black mustache, and piercing dark eyes staring at the camera as thin, exposed arms wrapped around bare legs in a sitting position, covering the rest of what appeared to be a naked body. From the image, it was uncertain what the gender of the individual in the picture was, there were signs of male features, and signs of female features. I had to ask, “Is this a woman or a man?” “That’s up to you,” he said. Turns out, the series was called, “Boy/Girl: Perception Prisoner.” “Usually people will see this image, ask me the gender once, I won’t answer, ask me a little more passionately again, I won’t answer, by the end they will demand the answer,” Alan said, “It pains them not to know." I guess I was a “Perception Prisoner,” fixated on the bottom-up processing, making a connection to a fact in the picture, and when that wasn’t available, I took the top-down approach, pulling associations from life-experiences characterizing male and female features, that didn’t reveal specific answers either. That’s the tension Alan wants his audience to be stuck in. His artistic approach encourages the viewer to go further than the bottom-up and top-down process, it asks them to look deeper than familiar associations, or in his words, “to wrestle until they see that the discrimination is actually within themselves.”
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AuthorKatie Elizabeth: Writer, Wonderer, Wanderer. Archives
August 2020
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