Page 126 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 126/146
“The Cubists created a system by which they could reveal visually the interlocking of phenomena. And thus they created in art the possibility of revealing processes instead of static states of being. Cubism is an art entirely concerned with interaction: the interaction between different aspects: the interaction between structure and movement: the interaction between solids and the space around them: the interaction between the unambiguous signs made on the surface of a picture and the changing reality which they stand in for....What the Cubists mean by structure, space, signs, pro- cess is quite different from what nuclear physicists mean. But the difference between the Cubist vi- sion of reality and that of a great seventeenth century Dutch painter like Vermeer is very similar to the difference between the modern physicist’s view and Newton’s: similar not only in degree but in emphasis.” John Berger: The Success and Failure of Picasso (1965) page 69.
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Success_and_Failure_of_Picasso.html?id=14k-DwAAQBAJ&redir_esc=y
Max Wertheimer + Hugo Munsterberg: The Phi Phenomenon (1912) and The Photoplay - A Psychological Study 1916.
Vague theories and speculations about how and why we perceive motion in the sequential viewing of still images seemed to settle on the idea of ‘persistence of vision’ and really this is what we’re still taught in school even today. In 1912, the gestalt psychologist Max Wertheimer proposed a the- ory: The Phi Phenomenon - that included persistence of vision as the explanation of why we don’t see the black space that separates the projection of individual frames in a movie projection. The real reason we perceive motion - the Phi-Motion phenomenon - is that the pattern-recognition fac- ulty in our brain can imply motion even in a succession of flashing lights. Wertheimer concludes that our perception of motion is an emergent product of several related neural and perceptual func- tions in the brain, and that from these, we assemble a composite (or gestalt) experience that best fits the logic and context of what we’re seeing. Munsterberg provides a summary of the Phi-Phe- nomenon in his 1916 book, making it the first popular-scientific explanation of why we see motion in projected still images and how much we work to interpret them - in other words, why the movies were interactive from the very beginning.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/15383/15383-h/15383-h.htm
There was another factor in this transition - the psychology of the moving image - examined first by Max Wertheimer and expounded later by Hugo Munsterberg in the first serious book on the aesthe- tics of Film: The Photoplay - A Psychological Study (1916). Discounting the then current and still dominant theory that our illusion of movement in watching a rapid succession of stills is simply down to persistence of vision, Wertheimer evolves a gestalt theory - a theory of the whole brain con- tributing to understanding how we see what we see, and how we solve problems...