Click here for audio of Episode 1677.
Today, we trick the eye. The University of Houston's
College of Engineering presents this series about the
machines that make our civilization run, and the people
whose ingenuity created them.
I recently visited Fort Worth's
Modern Art Museum, where I discovered a perfectly
remarkable installation. You walk into a large white
solarium and see black paint splashed on the walls and
ceiling. It looks like nothing at all until you stand in
just the right position. Then it all morphs into a huge
picture by artist Jonathan Borofsky entitled
Self-Portrait with Big Ears.
This visual tour de force catches the viewer up into a
contagious sort of delight. It offers a lesson on
perspective and the workings of the human eye. As you
leave, you realize that the artist must've projected the
image from that single position, then painted in the
walls, window wells, and ceiling, and finally left you to
reverse that projection and take the image into your own
eye.
Now I read Frances Tarpak's descriptions of optical
devices based on holdings at the Getty Museum. She quotes
Descartes, who noted that you could cut the back off a
human or animal eyeball. Its lens would then cast an
inverted image of the view before it onto the wall behind
it -- just like a camera
obscura.
Descartes caught the mood of the seventeenth century's
new obsession with seeing. The camera obscura
was nothing more than a large camera without film -- a
box with a lens in one side, casting an upside-down image
of the outside on the far wall. You and I flinch when we
hear that. The idea of an eye replicating a machine seems
very odd. But the same determinist Descartes argued that
animals are no more than robotic machines.
Machines thus joined hands with art, and the results were
strange. Painters invented trompe-l'oeil -- a painting meant
to trick the eye: A viewer sees a picture of a window and
thinks he's looking out a real window. A long narrow
painting of Saint Margaret and the Dragon,
tapered from left to right, looks like meaningless
streaks until you view it from the far right. Suddenly,
like that picture in Fort Worth, it becomes a realistic
image. And, like the image in Fort Worth, this one could
only have been created with aid of a mechanical eye.
The seventeenth century was the age of mathematical instruments. Modern
science was being erected about microscopes, telescopes, elementary
calculating machines, and much more. But the chasm
between seeing in the mind and seeing in the world caught
people in a web of philosophical complexity.
The early eighteenth century found a Swiss doctor, Jakob
Scheuchzer, struggling with this issue. He wrote:
[The eye] is like a small world in another small
world: a dark chamber of infinite art, and without which
all the beauties of the world would be as nothing. By the
use of light [it] distinguishes the living from the
dead.
The glorious weavings of shadow and light by computer and
TV lull us into complacency. We accept the image and
forget the mystery that still divides the lens from the
mind. Perhaps that is what I felt as I left that room in
Fort Worth -- the shiver of an old mystery walking across
my mind.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where
we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
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