Blindfolded Comic Artists
- Posted: 11.Jul.2007.
Where would this 1947 Life Magazine research fit in? Internal representation of images as muscle movement and their need for visual reinforcement. Like darts?
- Posted: 11.Jul.2007.
Where would this 1947 Life Magazine research fit in? Internal representation of images as muscle movement and their need for visual reinforcement. Like darts?
Scribble doodle
- Posted: 09.Jul.2007.
Rhoda Kellog wrote 'Analyzing Children’s Art' in 1969, and even though she does not have a Wikipedia page, I gather that this book has been the standard ever since. Hacked from this presentation, a list of scribble constants. What about linking them to entoptics?
- Posted: 09.Jul.2007.
Rhoda Kellog wrote 'Analyzing Children’s Art' in 1969, and even though she does not have a Wikipedia page, I gather that this book has been the standard ever since. Hacked from this presentation, a list of scribble constants. What about linking them to entoptics?
The Scientific view on Scribbling
- Posted: 08.Jul.2007.
When the web fails a good old fashioned textbook has what you are looking for. Scribbling and cognitive development.
- Posted: 08.Jul.2007.
When the web fails a good old fashioned textbook has what you are looking for. Scribbling and cognitive development.
In every culture where children are given the opportunity to draw from an early age, their drawings appears to pass through the same sequence of stages. In the beginning they scribble. Children are not “making pictures” when they scribble. What seems to matter to them is not the “look of the product”, but the joy of moving their hands and the trail of their movements.
Scribbling embodies both of the functions of art in a primitive form. It expresses a feeling – the exuberance of motion – and it leaves a trace of the movement, re-presenting it for later examination. Scribbling is considered primitive because its expression is uncontrolled and unplanned and because it represents only itself.
A major step beyond scribbling occurs about the age of 3 when children begin to recognize that lines can represent things. At about this time, children begin to draw circles and ellipses that are cleared of the whorls and lines that used to fill their scribble pictures. Their circular line bounds an inside area which seems more solid to them than the field it is on.
As children continue to gain experience with drawing, they are likely to adopt stereotyped ways of depicting objects: a house is a pentagon, a sun is a circle with lines extending from the surface, a flower is a circle surrounded by ellipses, animals appear to be tadpole figures turned on their side.
Between the ages of 7 and 11, children increasingly strive to be realistic in their drawings. At the same time they become more skilled at composition and the techniques of drawing.
M. Cole, S.R Cole, The Development of Children, Scientific America Books, 1989.
Frans de Waal on Ape Art
- Posted: 08.Jul.2007.
Frans de Waal is a great defender of the primate against any libel of them being called dimwitted by the human ape. 'Apes With an Oeuvre' is an article he wrote about art by animals that is the best I have found online so far. I should quote it in full, but here are some fragments only. The picture is a collage of drawing by bonobo's (the species De Waal has made famous) taken from the Milwaukee Zoology Society website where you can purchase them.
- Posted: 08.Jul.2007.
Frans de Waal is a great defender of the primate against any libel of them being called dimwitted by the human ape. 'Apes With an Oeuvre' is an article he wrote about art by animals that is the best I have found online so far. I should quote it in full, but here are some fragments only. The picture is a collage of drawing by bonobo's (the species De Waal has made famous) taken from the Milwaukee Zoology Society website where you can purchase them.
What apes do with brushes and crayons is far removed from unintentional animal "art," such as that produced by a donkey's tail dipped in paint, or by a rooster in a famous case in Japan in 1806. The artist Hokusai dipped the rooster's feet in red paint and made it walk across a long scroll he had unrolled on the ground and covered with big blue loops of paint. To the Japanese eye, the result looked like a painting of red maple leaves floating on a river.
Apes, however, can deliberately make what looks like art to humans. In the 1920s, Nadezhda Ladygina-Kohts studied the perception of shape and color in her young chimpanzee, Yoni, and watched him enthusiastically draw with pencils on paper. Experiments on ape art were also conducted in the 1940s at the Yerkes Laboratories, in Florida, by Paul Schiller, who pioneered a simple test: He marked pieces of paper with lines or shapes and gave them to a chimpanzee, Alpha, to see what she would do with them. Alpha didn't simply splash paint randomly, but carefully heeded the markings, incorporating them in the end product. If Schiller put marks in three of a paper's corners, for example, Alpha would invariably scribble a mark in the fourth corner.
...
One illustration of the power of ape art is how hard it is to emulate. Thierry Lenain, a Belgian philosopher of art, recounted in Monkey Painting how an Austrian painter, Arnulf Rainer, tried to copy every move and brush stroke of a chimpanzee in 1979. He squatted next to the ape, hoping to produce works of the same clarity and intensity. The human painter, however, evidently had the preconceived notion that apes are wild creatures, devoid of emotional control. As a result, instead of imitating the ape, Rainer painted the way he thought an ape would paint. But he had it all wrong: Apes can be as concentrated and controlled as people. As Lenain's account of a filmed session shows, it was the human painter who got too wild for the ape's taste:
"We see [Rainer] in the grip of a kind of trance, banging the paper, spitting on it, waving his brush nervously, throwing it down. The chimpanzee by contrast paints peacefully to start with, but is gradually influenced by the agitation of its imitator. It stops drawing, starts jumping about energetically and chases Rainer across the room. ... Painting is not a violent activity for chimpanzees."
If the ape's owner had not put an end to his chimp's pursuit of Rainer, the human painter might have learned that an ape, even a young and relatively small one, has the muscular strength of several grown men bundled into one. Hence, an ape can charge a painting with energy and rhythm with far less effort than a person can.
In addition, ape painters don't follow the rules that human artists do. Instead of worrying about the cumulative impact of an entire series of brush strokes and dabs, apes give the impression of taking a kinesthetic and visual pleasure in each separate action. We don't know the aesthetic secrets of the chimpanzee that Rainer tried to imitate, but the fact is that the human painter failed miserably in his attempt to achieve the ape's directness and sovereignty of expression. When Lenain examined 15 simultaneously produced works by ape and human, he concluded that "[t]he chimpanzee's compositions are straightforward and clear. The imitations, on the other hand, are fuzzy, tangled webs of lines, completely illegible, almost to the point of hysteria."
Doodling with Statistics
- Posted: 08.Jul.2007.
"Finger Drawing by Infant Chimpanzees (Pan trologdytes)" is a Japanese study to qualitive patterns in scibbles made by infant chimpanzees on a touch-screen. In humans children the type of scribbles drawn can be used to say something about the current phase of development, and the aim of this research is to compare humans to primates. If you wonder about what a histogram of stroke-lenghts looks like go check the article. The researcher's website features some drawings and video's. The infant chimps do seem to be 'drawing' and do seem to be contemplating each next line with care. They even seem to decide when a drawing is finished. Of course that is looking at them as if we would look at human children.
In general I tend to think that chimps in scientific laborateries are so overworked, overtested and just plain fucked up that they cannot be said to reliably represent chimphood. Animal testing is cruel anyway.
- Posted: 08.Jul.2007.
"Finger Drawing by Infant Chimpanzees (Pan trologdytes)" is a Japanese study to qualitive patterns in scibbles made by infant chimpanzees on a touch-screen. In humans children the type of scribbles drawn can be used to say something about the current phase of development, and the aim of this research is to compare humans to primates. If you wonder about what a histogram of stroke-lenghts looks like go check the article. The researcher's website features some drawings and video's. The infant chimps do seem to be 'drawing' and do seem to be contemplating each next line with care. They even seem to decide when a drawing is finished. Of course that is looking at them as if we would look at human children.
In general I tend to think that chimps in scientific laborateries are so overworked, overtested and just plain fucked up that they cannot be said to reliably represent chimphood. Animal testing is cruel anyway.
1957 [The Golden Age of Primate Art]
- Posted: 08.Jul.2007.
(Click for full size)
In 1957 Desmond Morris organized a monkey-art exhibition at the ICA. Fifty years later these paintings are still floating about. You can buy me one if you like. Some quotes (notice the birth of ape avant-garde art):
- Posted: 08.Jul.2007.
(Click for full size)
In 1957 Desmond Morris organized a monkey-art exhibition at the ICA. Fifty years later these paintings are still floating about. You can buy me one if you like. Some quotes (notice the birth of ape avant-garde art):
Eventually he [Congo] became bored by the regular painting sessions and started to obliterate the sheets of paper with large masses of paint, but before this final stage was reached, he did enjoy a period of several months during which every line or mark was placed exactly where he wanted it. There were about 70 paintings from this peak phase, and some examples were exhibited at the ICA in London in 1957. They created a sensation and examples were acquired by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Roland Penrose, Jock Whitney, William Copley, Julian Huxley, Herbert Read, Solly Zuckerman, Sidney Bernstein, Princess Zeid, Prince Philip and a number of other collectors.A book to look out for is 'Monkey Paintings' by Thierry Lenain who spoiled the fun of the Morris exhibition with his somewhat more critical approach, according to this article at Spiked-online:
A male Orang-utan called Alexander, living at the London Zoo, was also offered paints, and working in a slow and deliberate manner he produced several pictures in 1957 that showed a markedly different pattern from those of Congo. Two of these paintings are included in the present exhibition.
In 1959 a female Gorilla called Sophie was offered paints by her keeper at the Rotterdam Zoo and she, too, became fascinated by the challenge of making abstract patterns and several of her works are also on show here. Despite her great size, her use of crayon and brush was remarkably delicate and controlled.
The importance of these works by Great Apes is that they help us to understand the very ancient preoccupation with pattern making that has been demonstrated by the human species all over the globe. They may only display the germ of an aesthetic impulse, but the fact that they display one at all is frankly amazing.
Lenain's book shows that the chimpanzees had more than a little help from Morris. Isolated from other distractions, the monkey was immobilised in a kind of baby chair, with the paper fixed before him. Pencil or crayon was placed in his hand, or, if he was painting, the brush would be given to him loaded with paint, then exchanged for other brushes when the paint was used up or the gesture discontinued. Alternatively, Morris would leave Congo with one colour and rotate the sheets on which this colour was used.The Times offers some extra info.
Morris' rotations of paint and paper raise the question of who decided when a given stage was finished, or when the painting as a whole was complete. 'Nothing could interrupt him [Congo] until he was satisfied with the balance of his painting', averred Morris. But Lenain says that 'Congo enjoyed covering a shape that he had just produced with "savage" brushstrokes; the best examples of circles produced by him were saved by removing the paper before he had completely finished'.
Pirahã Doodle
- Posted: 01.Aug.2008.
The language of the Pirahã deserves a different post, here are some drawings (a cat and a tapir) made by these people freshly approaching pen and paper. The original paper I have not yet found.
- Posted: 01.Aug.2008.
The language of the Pirahã deserves a different post, here are some drawings (a cat and a tapir) made by these people freshly approaching pen and paper. The original paper I have not yet found.
The evolution of Chinese Writing
- Posted: 27.Jul.2008.
"The evolution of Chinese writing" the inaugural lecture of Prof. G. Owen, date 1910, is a handsome little book with amusing little drawings. I don't think we have covered this style of character writing before.
- Posted: 27.Jul.2008.
"The evolution of Chinese writing" the inaugural lecture of Prof. G. Owen, date 1910, is a handsome little book with amusing little drawings. I don't think we have covered this style of character writing before.
The Chauvet Doodle
- Posted: 22.Jul.2008.
The Chauvet Caves are one of the most significant palaeolithic rock art sites. It was named after its discover Jean-Marie Chauvet, who discovered it only in 1994, together with Christian Hillaire and Eliette Brunel-Deschamps. The researchers found that the cave had been untouched for 20,000-30,000 years. Below you will find them recalling the experience of disturbing the ancient peace of this cave. Shown is a cervid overlain with scratch-marks, (flutings?) These marks are far from being disposed in an arbitrary fashion. Amongst them, one can distinguish two distinct representations: a right-hand profile of a mammoth, below which is a horse's head faced in the opposite direction.
- Posted: 22.Jul.2008.
The Chauvet Caves are one of the most significant palaeolithic rock art sites. It was named after its discover Jean-Marie Chauvet, who discovered it only in 1994, together with Christian Hillaire and Eliette Brunel-Deschamps. The researchers found that the cave had been untouched for 20,000-30,000 years. Below you will find them recalling the experience of disturbing the ancient peace of this cave. Shown is a cervid overlain with scratch-marks, (flutings?) These marks are far from being disposed in an arbitrary fashion. Amongst them, one can distinguish two distinct representations: a right-hand profile of a mammoth, below which is a horse's head faced in the opposite direction.
Alone in the vastness, lit by the feeble beam of our lamps, we were seized by strange feeling. Everything was so beautiful, so fresh, almost too much so. Time was abolished, as if the tens of thousands of years that separated us from the producers of these paintings no longer existed. It seemed as if they had just created these masterpieces. Suddenly we felt like intruders. Deeply impressed, we were weighed down by the feeling that we are not alone; the artists' soul and spirit surrounded us. We thought we could feel their presence; we were disturbing them.
The Right Word [The Genius of Conley]
- Posted: 14.Jul.2008.
(Click for full size)
Craig Conley is Crystalpunk
- Posted: 14.Jul.2008.
(Click for full size)
Craig Conley is Crystalpunk
It is poetically said that when one raises a shell to the ear, one hears the ocean. Could it also be said that when one raises a shell to the eye, one reads poetry? In his masterpiece Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann holds a magnifying glass to the "indecipherable hieroglyphics on the shells of certain mussels" and conchs, questioning whether Mother Nature expresses herself in an organized, written code, and whether ornament can ultimately be distinguished from meaning. Mann describes the calligraphy on a shell that practically begs to be understood: "The characters, as if drawn with a brush, blended into purely decorative lines toward the edge, but over large sections of the curved surface their meticulous complexity gave every appearance of intending to communicate something." The shell's calligraphy bears a strong resemblance to "early Oriental scripts, much like the stroke of Old Aramaic." But how is one to get to the bottom of such symbols? Mann admits that "They elude our understanding and, it pains me to say, probably always will." Yet this elusion need not be a source of discouragement. Mann explains that ornament and meaning are like conjoined twins: "When I say they 'elude' us, that is really only the opposite of 'reveal,' for the idea that nature has painted this code, for which we lack the key, purely for ornament's sake on the shell of one of her creatures—no one can convince me of that. Ornament and meaning have always run side by side, and the ancient scripts served simultaneously for decoration and communication. Let no one tell me nothing is being communicated here! For the message to be inaccessible, and for one to immerse oneself in that contradiction—that also has its pleasure." In other words, the shell calligraphy communicates a profound mystery, pregnant with meaning and delightful to behold. Mann admits that, "were this really a written code, nature would surely have to command her own self-generated, organized language," adding that nature's fundamental illiteracy is "precisely what makes her eerie."
Mann's allusion to "early Oriental scripts" reminds us of the lost "shell" style of calligraphy discovered in Shang culture artifacts (14th - 11th centuries BCE). That ancient system of writing, more stylized than the early picture words, was brushed onto shells in vermilion ink. (For a full discussion of shell-style calligraphy, see Chinese Brushwork in Calligraphy and Painting by Kwo Da-Wei, 1990.)
In our collage above, we imagine King Triton conjuring the Platonic ideals of shell calligraphy.
Prehistoric Symbol Communication
- Posted: 03.Jul.2008.
From Marija Alseikaitë Gimbutas' The Living Goddess:
- Posted: 03.Jul.2008.
From Marija Alseikaitë Gimbutas' The Living Goddess:
Humans have been communicating by means of symbols for a very long time. Abstract signs emerge in the Lower Paleolithic Acheulian and Mousterian periods (from circa 30o.000 to 10.000 B.C.), long before the appearance of the extraordinary Upper Paleolithic art (from circa 35.000 to 10.000 B.C.). The familiar Upper Paleolithic images depict exquisite animals painted or etched on cave walls. They were also craved on stone or bone tools and made into figurines. But very few people noticed the manifold abstract signs that often accompany the animals. These marks include V's, Y's, M's P's, dots, eggs, seeds, 'arrows' ( -> ), two, three, or more lines, branching configurations, and squares divided into four or more sections. Some of the abstract signs known from the Acheulian era, such as V, M and parallel lines (engraved on the rib from Pech de L'aze, France, circa 300.000 years B.C.), continued through the Middle Paleolithic, Upper Paleolithic and Neolithic periods.
Kadiwéu Property Marks
- Posted: 02.Jul.2008.
Cochabamba Hotel left some great additional info about the Mbayá at MyMyspace page:
- Posted: 02.Jul.2008.
Cochabamba Hotel left some great additional info about the Mbayá at MyMyspace page:
The Kadiwéu (Mbayá-Guaykuru) used insignia or property marks, printed in fire or painted in their objects and animals, especially in cattle bovine and horses. some marks are still used nowadays, but most of them where substituted with the animals owners name’s initials.
At some point, these marks were combined forming a proto-alphabet incipiently used by the Kadiwéu people. Despite of it, the contact of the Kadiwéu culture with the Official Brazilian society discontinued this approach of the Kadiwéu culture, leaving space to the colonial alphabet.
(Cochabamba Hotel's english is bad english and we are proud of this...)
The Caduveo
- Posted: 01.Jul.2008.
(Click for full size)
The Caduveo (or the Mbayá) are described in Levi-Strauss' Tristes Tropique. Their great achievement in art is their bodypaint and Levi-Strauss collected a fair number of their wonderful asymmetric patterns by getting them pencilled on paper. No mean feat given that the tribesmen did not use pen and paper themselves. Levi-Strauss puts great stress on the fact that we can't assume these patterns to be ancient. In fact he clearly states that they may change all the time and might actually be partly inspired by the carvings they saw on the ships of the first European invaders. Which is not to deny the uniqueness of their art but a reminder that a culture is always in flux.
- Posted: 01.Jul.2008.
(Click for full size)
The Caduveo (or the Mbayá) are described in Levi-Strauss' Tristes Tropique. Their great achievement in art is their bodypaint and Levi-Strauss collected a fair number of their wonderful asymmetric patterns by getting them pencilled on paper. No mean feat given that the tribesmen did not use pen and paper themselves. Levi-Strauss puts great stress on the fact that we can't assume these patterns to be ancient. In fact he clearly states that they may change all the time and might actually be partly inspired by the carvings they saw on the ships of the first European invaders. Which is not to deny the uniqueness of their art but a reminder that a culture is always in flux.
Maori Signatures
- Posted: 27.Jun.2008.
Signatures inscribed by the Maori Chiefs in New Zealand on the Treaty of W/Vaita(n)gi, which was made with the English in 1840. When the English signed the Treaty with the New Zealand chiefs, they were astonished to see the chiefs draw a whole series of signs, which were clearly symbolic, instead of a signature. This document and the tablets of the Easter Islanders are the only examples of writing from all of Oceania! And so much more.
- Posted: 27.Jun.2008.
Signatures inscribed by the Maori Chiefs in New Zealand on the Treaty of W/Vaita(n)gi, which was made with the English in 1840. When the English signed the Treaty with the New Zealand chiefs, they were astonished to see the chiefs draw a whole series of signs, which were clearly symbolic, instead of a signature. This document and the tablets of the Easter Islanders are the only examples of writing from all of Oceania! And so much more.
Dighton Rock is Hard to See
- Posted: 10.Sep.2008.
(Click for full size)
The most controversial inscribed rock in New England is Dighton Rock at Berkeley, Massachusetts, on the Taunton River. As early as 1677, scholars have tried to decipher the messages chiseled into its ten foot by four foot sandstone face. Comparative imagery shows how hard it is to document what is in front of you.
- Posted: 10.Sep.2008.
(Click for full size)
The most controversial inscribed rock in New England is Dighton Rock at Berkeley, Massachusetts, on the Taunton River. As early as 1677, scholars have tried to decipher the messages chiseled into its ten foot by four foot sandstone face. Comparative imagery shows how hard it is to document what is in front of you.
Wampum are All Things to All People
- Posted: 10.Sep.2008.
Wampum; belt made with thousands of rare shells found on the North American coast. Wampum had many uses and no single 'category' of use can cover them. Colonists thought of it mostly as a form of currency, but it was also used as a prestige-object in many non-economical exchanges, those of war and peace, marriage and forgiveness, political pacts and more. More interesting it also served as something between writing and a communal memory system. Too bad that I have not yet found good pictures.
- Posted: 10.Sep.2008.
Wampum; belt made with thousands of rare shells found on the North American coast. Wampum had many uses and no single 'category' of use can cover them. Colonists thought of it mostly as a form of currency, but it was also used as a prestige-object in many non-economical exchanges, those of war and peace, marriage and forgiveness, political pacts and more. More interesting it also served as something between writing and a communal memory system. Too bad that I have not yet found good pictures.
An integral and intriguing aspect of wampum use was the sending and receiving of wampum as means of communication. Most Indian groups were able to hand down a rich oral tradition of poetry, oratory, and drama by means of pictographs or other mnemonic devices for recalling important events. Wampum was such a memory device. Designs woven into belts with contrasting color beads, recorded treaties, agreements, important events, and public accounts through figures or geometric patterns. Wampum recorded the words and gave them the pledge of sincerity, for without this pledge the talk was just casual. Figures lent energy to the language, conveying meaning through symbolism. A designated person would be responsible for a belt's keeping and meaning, and for passing it on to the next generation. The color white symbolized peace, while black signified war or mourning, and when a communication evoked anger, the belt was kicked around in contempt. Even after European intervention, the New England Indian tribes continued the ceremonial use of wampum when forging treaties, agreements and relationships.
Tocapu Dictionary?
- Posted: 08.Sep.2008.
(Click for full size)
In addition to the previous I believe that this is a tocapu-Incanese dictionary but I am not sure.
- Posted: 08.Sep.2008.
(Click for full size)
In addition to the previous I believe that this is a tocapu-Incanese dictionary but I am not sure.
Inca Textile as Writing (?)
- Posted: 08.Sep.2008.
(Click for full size)
Royal Inca textiles (which are stunning technically even today according to experts) are sometimes adorned with figures called topacu. These are possibly heraldic imagery but it has also been argued that they are a form of writing. The above comes from this post which also features this image to help you find patterns. Here you find a tunic partially covered with topacu but as even this small picture reveals the neat patterning seems to rule out that they are language.
- Posted: 08.Sep.2008.
(Click for full size)
Royal Inca textiles (which are stunning technically even today according to experts) are sometimes adorned with figures called topacu. These are possibly heraldic imagery but it has also been argued that they are a form of writing. The above comes from this post which also features this image to help you find patterns. Here you find a tunic partially covered with topacu but as even this small picture reveals the neat patterning seems to rule out that they are language.
Apes Luv Doodling
- Posted: 03.Sep.2008.
Drawing comes natural to the great apes friends. This is a consise overview of many things that passed here before.From "Pictorial Primates: A Search for Iconic Abilities in Great Apes" by Tomas Persson.
- Posted: 03.Sep.2008.
Drawing comes natural to the great apes friends. This is a consise overview of many things that passed here before.From "Pictorial Primates: A Search for Iconic Abilities in Great Apes" by Tomas Persson.
It is perhaps an exaggeration to say that apes spontaneously take to drawing when provided with the materials, because they also seem to benefit from seeing the acts modelled. Common for several findings is that the apes discover the joy of scribbling by observing with interest the activity of writing or drawing by their caretakers. They are then described as imitating the ability.120 For example, the human child Donald in Kellogg and Kellogg (1933/1967) scribbled spontaneously when he got hands on a pencil in a test at 14.5 months of age, while the chimpanzee Gua, 12 months old at the time, had to see the activity demonstrated before she followed suit. At a testing session one month later she scribbled spontaneously when given pen and paper. Soon scribbling becomes a rewarding activity in itself, independent of social reinforcement. In fact, some subjects often choose pen and paper at the expense of food (Schiller, 1951).
The chimpanzee Viki in Hayes (1951) also started to scribble with pencils from an early age. Already at nine months she started to imitate C. Hayes’ writing, superimposing her own scribble on her foster mother’s. Her scribble later transferred to books, floors, walls, furniture and apparently any piece of paper she could get hold off, using any pencil, crayons, screwdrivers and the sharp corner of a wooden block. Every part of her body could be recruited in the action. She also scribbled in mist produced on windows, which has likewise been reported for the gorilla Koko, who enjoyed creating her own mist by breathing on windows (Patterson & Linden, 1981).While the above accounts serves to demonstrate Viki’s power of generalisation when it comes to mark-making activities, her behaviour also hints at the fact that leaving a graphic mark was not always the function of her scribble. Wooden blocks presumably leaves behind poor graphics.
Joni in the home of Ladygina-Kohts (1935/2002) similarly imitated scribbling after observing his foster mother. Like Viki’s, Joni’s scribbling had absolutely to occur in the very same places as Ladygina-Kohts’ in the beginning, even when given paper of his own. Later he got more independent, and as soon as Ladygina-Kohts tried to interfere or help with Joni’s drawing he immediately lost interest. His scribbling went through a change with time and he started to make longer, continuous lines, as well as small crosses, or acute angles. No age is given for this transition.
Imitation is here used in the broadest sense of the term. For a review of diverse social learning abilities in apes, see e.g. Whiten et al. (2004). Ladygina-Kohts found it difficult to judge if Joni enjoyed the visual aspect or the motor aspect of drawing the most.
Apes often do not want to be disrupted when painting, and they do not like to be urged to continue once they consider themselves finished. Authors (i.e. de Waal, 2001) have imagined this to be about the painting as a finished or unfinished product, when it rather could be about the activity. Apes probably do not like to be interrupted in any activity that they enjoy, or forced to continue something against their will. It does not have to do with considering the product finished or unfinished at all.
Other apes, like the adult chimpanzee female Alpha in Schiller’s (1951) study, do not seem to care if they are interrupted, and they are not at all protective of their finished work. Schiller (1951) thus concluded that Alpha was not particular interested in the end product of her drawing, but rather enjoyed the activity. However, her interest was by no means solely in the motor activity since she did not work when given pointed sticks instead of pencils in control sessions. She also stopped working as soon she broke the pencil points, and instead made her wish for a new, sharpened, pencil known to the experimenter. The perceptual aspect was thus very much an integral part of her enjoyment. Similar conclusions can be drawn from a longitudinal study of chimpanzee infant scribbling on computer touchscreens by Tanaka et al. (2003). All subjects scribbled substantially less when there was no visible colour feedback. In addition, different colours elicited different amounts of scribble.
A most surprising account is given in Hoyt (1941). The gorilla Toto, age at the time unknown, developed a ritual with Hoyt’s mother which consisted of drawing a face in the air with the index finger. A circle for head, three dots for eyes and nose and a line for mouth. Toto seemed to have copied this action in a recognisable fashion and used it to greet the mother whenever she visited. “Later, Toto transferred this crude representation of a face to the sidewalk with soft white limestone, and while these pictures of hers would scarcely justify the hope that she might become a great portrait painter, they were definitely recognizable as representations of a human face” (Hoyt, 1941, pp. 150-51). This story gives rise to two interpretation problems. The first is exactly how recognisable these drawings were, or whether they had to be filtered through the eyes of a loving mother.121 The second is if the drawings were in fact only a generalisation of the well familiar motor patterns of the gestures in the air, or made to represent the scribble in the air and/or a (human) face. Without any discriminative actions towards the drawings, like a kiss on the mouth (which in this case would perhaps qualify as pretence and not confusion), we can make little of this information.
A bonus with language trained individuals is that they can comment on their own drawings and paintings. Fouts (1997) tells us that the sign-language trained chimpanzees in his care paint representationally and name their paintings. The favourite motif of Moja, one of the chimpanzees, was birds. Washoe on the other hand, the most famous of the inhabitants of the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute, likes to paint in fiery colours, and name her paintings accordingly. Lenain (1997) notes in regards to one of the Institute’s reports that when Moja names her productions, on only five out of the 26 occasions does she name them as if they were depicting an object. On the remaining occasions she names drawing materials or signs “scribble” or “colour,” which is her word for the activity of producing paintings.
Koko the gorilla also name her creations, her favourite subjects apparently being birds and alligators (Patterson & Linden, 1981), but besides objects she has been reported to also depict emotions, such as anger or love (Patterson & Gordon, 2001). It seems that data for the spontaneity of the naming has not been given, or whether Koko remembers her names.
From the Zoo to the Wee
- Posted: 03.Sep.2008.
From "Pictorial Primates: A Search for Iconic Abilities in Great Apes" by Tomas Persson.
- Posted: 03.Sep.2008.
From "Pictorial Primates: A Search for Iconic Abilities in Great Apes" by Tomas Persson.
The clinical psychologist Lightner Witmer tested the stage chimpanzee Peter in 1908 on a battery of tests he used with children (Candland, 1993). Peter’s age and background is unknown, but he seemed to easily learn new skills from only a few demonstrations or on his own accord. He is reported to have been good with tools, including roller skates, and could thread a needle with ease. He responded adequately to several spoken commands.
Before the writing trial started Peter seized the chalk and spontaneously scribbled in the corner of the blackboard. This production is not reserved. Witmmer made a capital ‘W’ and asked Peter to do the same. Peter made an other scribble. This shape is said to be similar to the spontaneous one. Witmer judged that Peter had not paid sufficient attention and therefore retraced his ‘W’, again asking Peter to imitate. This time the chimpanzee reproduced a ‘W’ as good as Witmmer’s. Thenn Peter scribbled a bit more. Wittmer asked him verbally to do the ‘W’ again and Peterr complied, making a near perfect ‘W’. Unfortunately Witmer settled with this demonstration, even though he himself was critical and suggested that Peter could have copied the physical movements rather than the written shape itself: a “motorminded” solution (Candlaand, 1993). Could Peter have copied the ‘W’ if he had not seen Witmer first make it? It is a pity Witmer did not test this, or other shapes than ‘W’ that would have required more attention to thee drawn form as such.
Asemic Glitches
- Posted: 01.Sep.2008.
Noology is a new book by Tim 'asemic' Gaze. It brings us 'glitch music for the eyes'. The glitch reference is to the point as these images range from the structured to the grainy just like glitch music does. My selection is perhaps not representative for the entire book which can be freely downloaded at Lulu.com.
- Posted: 01.Sep.2008.
Noology is a new book by Tim 'asemic' Gaze. It brings us 'glitch music for the eyes'. The glitch reference is to the point as these images range from the structured to the grainy just like glitch music does. My selection is perhaps not representative for the entire book which can be freely downloaded at Lulu.com.
North American Pictographs
- Posted: 31.Aug.2008.
North American Indian cultures never developed a real writing system (as opposed to the civilizations in Meso-America) They did use pictographs but these were never formalized and were essentially a personal mnemonic system not (or hardly) readable by others.
- Posted: 31.Aug.2008.
North American Indian cultures never developed a real writing system (as opposed to the civilizations in Meso-America) They did use pictographs but these were never formalized and were essentially a personal mnemonic system not (or hardly) readable by others.
'Native' is a Catchword
- Posted: 31.Aug.2008.
The colourful style of art developed by Pacific Northwest Indians (Alaska and elsewhere) developed only when British ships brought paints in the 19th century. The result was later discovered and promoted by Surrealism without realizing this. All art is organised around a ovoid shape that has no name in English.
- Posted: 31.Aug.2008.
The colourful style of art developed by Pacific Northwest Indians (Alaska and elsewhere) developed only when British ships brought paints in the 19th century. The result was later discovered and promoted by Surrealism without realizing this. All art is organised around a ovoid shape that has no name in English.
So-So Vision or Half Outsider Art
- Posted: 12.Aug.2008.
Hemineglect is is a common and disabling condition following brain damage in which patients fail to be aware of items to one side of space. The deficit may be so profound that patients are unaware of large objects, even people, towards their neglected or contralesional side - the side of space opposite brain damage. They may eat from only one side of a plate, write on one side of a page, shave or make-up only the non-neglected or ipsilesional side of their face (same side as brain damage). Their drawings may fail to include items towards the neglected side, for example when placing the numbers in a drawing of a clock (see above). Many patients are often also unaware they have a deficit.
Via the Nonist
- Posted: 12.Aug.2008.
Hemineglect is is a common and disabling condition following brain damage in which patients fail to be aware of items to one side of space. The deficit may be so profound that patients are unaware of large objects, even people, towards their neglected or contralesional side - the side of space opposite brain damage. They may eat from only one side of a plate, write on one side of a page, shave or make-up only the non-neglected or ipsilesional side of their face (same side as brain damage). Their drawings may fail to include items towards the neglected side, for example when placing the numbers in a drawing of a clock (see above). Many patients are often also unaware they have a deficit.
Via the Nonist
Elephant Art
- Posted: 11.Sep.2007.
Buy me a painting by Wanalee, Seng Wong, Jojo, Aet, Luuk Khang, Phong or Prathida. All of them are damn talented elephants.
- Posted: 11.Sep.2007.
Buy me a painting by Wanalee, Seng Wong, Jojo, Aet, Luuk Khang, Phong or Prathida. All of them are damn talented elephants.
Mescal Dream Maps
- Posted: 29.Aug.2007.
(Click for full size)
Rock carvings found in the Lewiscanyan in Texas, believed to have been made by the natives after a 24-hour mescal sleep. Each picture is a oneiric vision.
- Posted: 29.Aug.2007.
(Click for full size)
Rock carvings found in the Lewiscanyan in Texas, believed to have been made by the natives after a 24-hour mescal sleep. Each picture is a oneiric vision.
Automated Doodling
- Posted: 24.Aug.2007.
In light of Crystalpunk's research into doodling, Aaron, the self-drawing software by Harold Cohen, needs to be mentioned. Aaron is a pioneering project by a painter trying to find a workable knowledgebase (in the Good-old fashioned AI expert-system kinda way) for picture making. Even though perhaps written a bit too much in that self-styled AI tone of earlier days (to much being 'scientific' at the wrong places, not enough of it where it needs to be), Cohen's essays make an interesting read. Titles such as "What is an Image?" and "How to make a Drawing" are right on the money, doodle-knowledge wise. It all comes down to purpose, we can't really explain what we do and why we do it when we are drawing as an act, but neither can we as we are 'just doing something'.
In the 1970ties Cohen turned Aaron into a robot and had it perform at well documented gallery shows (the Stedelijk in Amsterdam included). At the time Cohen was focussing on freehand drawings like here shown, even making a direct link to form constants in rock art and the basic set of scribbles in children's drawings, especially in "The Material of Symbols", in which we find the following observation about the power of simple forms:
- Posted: 24.Aug.2007.
In light of Crystalpunk's research into doodling, Aaron, the self-drawing software by Harold Cohen, needs to be mentioned. Aaron is a pioneering project by a painter trying to find a workable knowledgebase (in the Good-old fashioned AI expert-system kinda way) for picture making. Even though perhaps written a bit too much in that self-styled AI tone of earlier days (to much being 'scientific' at the wrong places, not enough of it where it needs to be), Cohen's essays make an interesting read. Titles such as "What is an Image?" and "How to make a Drawing" are right on the money, doodle-knowledge wise. It all comes down to purpose, we can't really explain what we do and why we do it when we are drawing as an act, but neither can we as we are 'just doing something'.
In the 1970ties Cohen turned Aaron into a robot and had it perform at well documented gallery shows (the Stedelijk in Amsterdam included). At the time Cohen was focussing on freehand drawings like here shown, even making a direct link to form constants in rock art and the basic set of scribbles in children's drawings, especially in "The Material of Symbols", in which we find the following observation about the power of simple forms:
In some cases, what we find ourselves responding to comes from cultures so remote that we simply have to acknowledge that we cannot possibly know what its original significance was. I am thinking particularly of the petroglyphs which are to be found throughout Nevada and California. We know nothing to speak of concerning the people who made them or what they made them for, or even how long ago they were made. We cannot seriously pretend even to misunderstand their original significance, and what speculation exists is based upon evidence quite extrinsic to the marks themselves. Yet the generations of anthropologists who have added their speculations to an increasing but unrevealing literature bear witness to the power of the glyphs: the power, not to communicate explicit meanings within the culture within which they arose, but to trigger and direct our own innate propensities for attaching significance to events.About the reactions from the public he writes:
More to the point, while a very small number of people insisted that the drawings were nothing but a bunch of random squiggles, the majority clearly saw them in referential terms. Many would stand for long periods watching, and describing to each other what was being drawn; always in terms of objects in the real world. The drawings seem to be viewed mostly as landscapes inhabited by "creatures", which would be "recognized" as animals, fish, birds and bugs. Occasionally a viewer would "recognize" a landscape, and once the machine's home was identified as San Francisco, since it had just drawn Twin Peaks.Which says as much about he way the 'public' deals with modern art as with the any achievement of Cohen. There are many of sticky points raised by Cohen with what he says but also with what he does not say.
It might be correctly anticipated that on those other occasions when drawings have simply been framed and exhibited without any reference to their origins, the question of their origins has never arisen, and they have met with a typical cross-section of museum-goers responses.
Shamans? What Shamans? Rock Art Forensics!
- Posted: 19.Aug.2007.
Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder appear to be the most important scholars on Finger Fluting. Sharpe has his own website which he uses to (re-)publish his articles, much of them related to Theology, but, luckily for Crystalpunk, it also contains the rock art papers. The most important aspect of Scharpe's and Van Gelders's work is that they have found ways to get verifiable facts from rock-art, a field of study often filled with wild speculation. Now Crystalpunk is not afraid of speculation, but we like our facts too. Let's quote from 'Human uniqueness and upper paleolithic ‘art’' to show what these in-the-mud researchers know about the ancient artists, giving them back their individuality.
One last qoute related to nomenclature:
- Posted: 19.Aug.2007.
Kevin Sharpe and Leslie Van Gelder appear to be the most important scholars on Finger Fluting. Sharpe has his own website which he uses to (re-)publish his articles, much of them related to Theology, but, luckily for Crystalpunk, it also contains the rock art papers. The most important aspect of Scharpe's and Van Gelders's work is that they have found ways to get verifiable facts from rock-art, a field of study often filled with wild speculation. Now Crystalpunk is not afraid of speculation, but we like our facts too. Let's quote from 'Human uniqueness and upper paleolithic ‘art’' to show what these in-the-mud researchers know about the ancient artists, giving them back their individuality.
1. Whether the fluter was a young child or someone older (from the three-finger widths); studies have shown, for instance, children aged five or under probably made flutings of three-finger widths of 30 millimeters or less.Facts which they use to blow to pieces any argument for rock-art as predominantly shamanistic. It seems unlikely two-and-a-half years olds to be shamans.
2. An indication of the gender of the fluter (from the relative heights of finger 2 to finger 4); studies have shown that 2F/4F < 1 suggests a male and 2F/4F >or= 1 suggests a female.
3. The number of individuals who fluted (from the three-finger width and finger profile; experiments have shown that the widths of the three central fingers held close together vary on average 0.5 millimeters with different pressures and media).
4. Which fluter fluted which flutings, including (sometimes, depending how many fingers the fluter used) the fluted images.
5. The handedness of the fluter (if the fluter usually fluted with a particular hand).
6. The height of the fluter (arm stretch vertically or horizontally suggests this). And
7. Something about the character of the fluter (for example, from whether the flutings of this person usually show pressure and forcefulness).
One last qoute related to nomenclature:
... We use quotation marks around the word ‘art’ because, while the corpus of such artifacts contains some artistic images, not all of it obviously appears as such and its creators may not have intended it all as art.
Rock Art as Pattern Recognized [Updated]
- Posted: 15.Aug.2007.
(Click for full size)
Found in the Spanish Altamira rock art site, this picture (a Musk-ox date c. 30.000 BC), is the oldest doodle known to Crystalpunk. Or as Andreas Lommel writes about in his 'Prehistoric and Primitive Man': "The earliest works of art in the Ice Age were flowing lines drawn with fingers in the damp clay. The countours may have suggested a cheek and muzzle, and an identifiable outline soon emerged from the 'doodles' (see drawing below).
Personally I can't see an ox in it, I do see a giant frog, with the head on the bottom-left side.
PS: Daniel send me a MySpace comment with the ox penned in. And now I think: How could I not see that. And now I cannot see this picture without the Ox.
- Posted: 15.Aug.2007.
(Click for full size)
Found in the Spanish Altamira rock art site, this picture (a Musk-ox date c. 30.000 BC), is the oldest doodle known to Crystalpunk. Or as Andreas Lommel writes about in his 'Prehistoric and Primitive Man': "The earliest works of art in the Ice Age were flowing lines drawn with fingers in the damp clay. The countours may have suggested a cheek and muzzle, and an identifiable outline soon emerged from the 'doodles' (see drawing below).
Personally I can't see an ox in it, I do see a giant frog, with the head on the bottom-left side.
PS: Daniel send me a MySpace comment with the ox penned in. And now I think: How could I not see that. And now I cannot see this picture without the Ox.
Finger Fluting or Macaroni Finger Marks
- Posted: 17.Aug.2007.
(Click for full size)
Each new day one learns, was I writing about prehistoric doodles earlier, now these drawings have a name and turn out to be a lively subfield in rockart studies. These Finger Flutings have been proved to be made by all sorts of people, very small children included, and are found throughout the world. They are also called tracés digitaux, finger tracings, meanders, macaroni, and serpentines. The analysis of these moonmilk pushings is for from childish.
- Posted: 17.Aug.2007.
(Click for full size)
Each new day one learns, was I writing about prehistoric doodles earlier, now these drawings have a name and turn out to be a lively subfield in rockart studies. These Finger Flutings have been proved to be made by all sorts of people, very small children included, and are found throughout the world. They are also called tracés digitaux, finger tracings, meanders, macaroni, and serpentines. The analysis of these moonmilk pushings is for from childish.
African Art in the West
- Posted: 16.Aug.2007.
Connected with an earlier link between animal art and bushman art, I found the following quote in 'Early Art and Architecture of Africa' By Peter Garlake. It is only suitable that Roger Fry turns out to be so important in the introduction of African art to Europe. He was afterall friends with Crystalpunk writer Virginia Woolf, who wrote his biography.
- Posted: 16.Aug.2007.
Connected with an earlier link between animal art and bushman art, I found the following quote in 'Early Art and Architecture of Africa' By Peter Garlake. It is only suitable that Roger Fry turns out to be so important in the introduction of African art to Europe. He was afterall friends with Crystalpunk writer Virginia Woolf, who wrote his biography.
Africa was perhaps the main arena where debates on human evolution were fought out in the late nineteenth and twentieth century. The widely admired South-African statesman and polymath Jan Christiaan Smuts characterized the San hunter-gatherers of his homeland, heirs of the artists whose paintings are so much admired, as occupying "the lowest scale in human existence … dwarfed and shrivelled and mentally stunted … a mere human fossil … there is nothing left for them but to disappear". This stereotype could on occasion be turned into an advantage. The influential critic and art historian Roger Fry first presented southern African rock art to a European audience in 1910 by predicating its artistic value on the ‘innocent eye’. The san artists were the “lowest of savages”. This endowed them with a preternatural perfection of vision because the “retinal image passed into … a picture with scarcely any intervening mental process.”Picture. Mr Breuil at a dig.
Racial stereotyping often meant that an alien origin was sought for any art that seemed worthy of admiration. Africa has been denied any credit for the monuments on its soil so often that it can only be product of racial prejudice. Leo Frobenius, the ethnologist and archaeologist who explored many different parts of Africa between 1900 and 1935, divided southern African rock paintings in two classes: shamanic San or Bushman paintings, and intellectual, ‘classic’ paintings. He derived the latter from the ancient civilizations of south-western Asia, Egypt and Crete. Abbé Henri Breuil, the most respected prehistorian in Europe for the first half of the twentieth century, followed Frobenius closely, though he never acknowledged this in print. He too proposed that the finest paintings – distinct form the "hideous little bushman figures" – were the works of foreigners of the remote past. They were perhaps even the seeds from which Egyptian and Minoan art grew.
Some Hard to Find Observations about Elephant Art
- Posted: 09.Aug.2007.
Quotes from 'Elephant Painting in Thailand' by Mia Fineman. Comments mine
- Posted: 09.Aug.2007.
Quotes from 'Elephant Painting in Thailand' by Mia Fineman. Comments mine
Elephants, particularly Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), seem to possess an innate impulse to draw. Unprompted, an Asian elephant in captivity will often pick up a pebble or stick with the tip of her trunk and casually doodle on the floor of her enclosure. Of course, the leap from doodling in the sand to painting on canvas requires training, encouragement, and art supplies-for both elephant and human artists. We were thrilled to find that Thai elephants, conditioned by years of close collaborative work with their mahouts, were exceptionally quick learners. Not only did they swiftly master the fundamental techniques of painting, they also began to develop distinctive sensibilities and styles.Humans too need guidance to start painting like artists.
As painters, elephants are masters of the rapidly executed, spontaneous gesture. With the exception of 35-year-old Sao, most of the elephant artists we met during our travels through Thailand were relatively young, ranging from about four- to ten-years-old. Much of their work has a youthful, exuberant quality-a pleasure in the viscosity of the paint and a process-oriented sense of exploration into the endless possibilities of mark-making.Pure guesswork, we do have not a clue if an elephant is exploring endless possibilities. Do they recognize their old work?
During the learning stage, the mahouts generally select the colors and determine when a painting is finished. They teach the elephants how to hold the brush, and a number of mahouts have also customized their paintbrushes, adding bamboo handles that are easier for the elephants to grip.Can an elphant go beyond the tastes of its Mahout? Do children ever go beyond the tastes of their parents. People often choose partners who in the end turn out to be 'just like my dad'.
Although no two elephant paintings are alike, we discovered a number of formal similarities that suggest the emergence of three major regional styles.For this to be true in a way unrelated to the way of training by the mahouts, the elephants should learn from each other. The case for animal culture is well developed, but how does this work for elephants.
Elephant painting of the northern, or Lampang school tends to be lyrical and expressive, characterized by broken brushwork, curvilinear forms, and bold, clear, primary colors. In the central Thai, or Ayutthaya school, elephants and mahouts prefer darker, cooler colors such as deep violet, black, and forest green, which they apply with broad, vigorous brushstrokes that sweep across the canvas from edge to edge. Elephants of the southern, or Phuket school tend toward saturated tertiary colors like mustard, plum, and magenta, mixed on the surface of the paper with broad, gentle, curvy brushstrokes.Do elephants recogise a painting as culturally different? But, again, are they given the same materials? I am ready te believe in elephant artistic cultures but how to be not misled by poor or uncritical observations?
No Idea
- Posted: 01.Jun.2009.
(Click for full size)
From a page in Cyrillic, so no clue but it looks great.
- Posted: 01.Jun.2009.
(Click for full size)
From a page in Cyrillic, so no clue but it looks great.
The Double Rectangle
- Posted: 27.May.2009.
Some remarks about the The Bilzingsleben 'Double Rectangle' artifact (400.000 BP):
- Posted: 27.May.2009.
Some remarks about the The Bilzingsleben 'Double Rectangle' artifact (400.000 BP):
"geometric arrangement" engraved on a tarsal bone from a forest elephant. Bednarik observes of the same object that it is "a very complex arrangement" and "neither the structure of the marking nor its relationship to its support suggests a utilitarian origin. The bone is hardly suitable as a cutting board and no alternative explanation has been offered for the marks." Bednariks’ transcription of the engraving shows what appears to be one rectangle engraved inside another rectangle. The rectangular border zone created between the two rectangles is marked with many parallel and perpendicular strokes and chevron shapes that might be intended as divergent and/or convergent line motifs. The superposition of the rectangles with overlapping lines gives the appearance of a lattice design; the border area, crosshatching. To me this mark like the ‘double rectangle’ seems to be intended as a combination of two sides or half of a rectangle and half of a circle and thus also a combination of two ‘geometric shape of space’ motifs.
Magical Sand Drawings
- Posted: 22.May.2009.
"Medicine man making magic drawings in the sand", North America? Via
- Posted: 22.May.2009.
"Medicine man making magic drawings in the sand", North America? Via
Primitive Painters
- Posted: 12.May.2009.
Forty delicious plates of art by 'primitive painters' compiled and reviewed by Roger Cardinal. Cardinal is best known for his translation of art brut as outsider art but here he explores a different field of non-professional, or at least non-academic, art. In the great sphere of image-making Cardinal here carves out a space for those painters, of which Henri Rousseau is the most famous, who combine naivety of expression with a desire to represent and document:
- Posted: 12.May.2009.
Forty delicious plates of art by 'primitive painters' compiled and reviewed by Roger Cardinal. Cardinal is best known for his translation of art brut as outsider art but here he explores a different field of non-professional, or at least non-academic, art. In the great sphere of image-making Cardinal here carves out a space for those painters, of which Henri Rousseau is the most famous, who combine naivety of expression with a desire to represent and document:
It is quite simply inappropriate (and even silly) to go to naive art in expectation of competence in a language which the artist simply does not speak. The example of great classical paintings, the principle of naturalistic representation - such traditional points of reference continue to haunt us, but are strictly irrelevant to our understanding of the naive idiom. The logic of the primitive lies in his adoption of his own code, his own frame of reference. He paints what he feels, in a way that makes sense by his own lights. The result is that he does not so much trace the appearance of reality as transcribe a personal reading of reality through a system of equivalents, in a kind of flat pictorial handwriting, whereby, for instance, unmodelled frontal views of people and buildings are considered an adequate signal of their physical presence. These figures are stiff, heraldic. They are not the things themselves, nor their appearance, but they denote them.
Drawing and Sculpting during the Reindeer Period
- Posted: 04.May.2009.
"Les precurseurs de Raphaël et Michel-Ange, ou la naissance des arts du dessin et de la sculpture a l’epoque du renne’, engraving by Emile Bayard. In: L. Figuier, L’Homme primitif, Paris, Hachette, 1870, (detail). (Rafaello and Michelangelo precursors, or the birth of the art and drawing and sculpting during the Reindeer Period). (PDF-link)
- Posted: 04.May.2009.
"Les precurseurs de Raphaël et Michel-Ange, ou la naissance des arts du dessin et de la sculpture a l’epoque du renne’, engraving by Emile Bayard. In: L. Figuier, L’Homme primitif, Paris, Hachette, 1870, (detail). (Rafaello and Michelangelo precursors, or the birth of the art and drawing and sculpting during the Reindeer Period). (PDF-link)
Not Just Any Movement Will Do
- Posted: 01.May.2009.
Top image: Pre-marked squares connected by a human child.
Second image: Chimp Mano adding to a pre-marked circle
Third image: Gorilla Tadao staying on one side of the fence
Bottom image: orang-utan Nuninka marking the pre-marked fish
From Ignace Schretlen's Appenkrabbels & Kinderschrift, 1999.
- Posted: 01.May.2009.
Top image: Pre-marked squares connected by a human child.
Second image: Chimp Mano adding to a pre-marked circle
Third image: Gorilla Tadao staying on one side of the fence
Bottom image: orang-utan Nuninka marking the pre-marked fish
From Ignace Schretlen's Appenkrabbels & Kinderschrift, 1999.
A Painting by Bonobo Dzeeta
- Posted: 10.Feb.2009.
(Click for full size)
This is done bonobo Dzeeta in Brussel, taken from Thierry Lenain's Monkey Painting. It looks unlike any chimp paintings.
Ignace Schretlen notices in his booklet Apekrabbels that the chaotic appearance reveals a greater variety. In the reproduction below he identifies:
1A) pseudo-circle
1B) full-circle
2) dot
3) 'doodle-clusters'
4A and 4B) thin and fat lines
- Posted: 10.Feb.2009.
(Click for full size)
This is done bonobo Dzeeta in Brussel, taken from Thierry Lenain's Monkey Painting. It looks unlike any chimp paintings.
Ignace Schretlen notices in his booklet Apekrabbels that the chaotic appearance reveals a greater variety. In the reproduction below he identifies:
1A) pseudo-circle
1B) full-circle
2) dot
3) 'doodle-clusters'
4A and 4B) thin and fat lines
Marubo Drawings
- Posted: 28.Apr.2009.
Taken from a treatise in Portugese 'ONISKA: A poética da morte e do mundo entre os Marubo da Amazônia ocidental' (PDF-link) which looks really worthwhile if only I could read it. These drawings are probably representations of Marubo cosmology with the odd Manoca or long house thrown in for good measure.
- Posted: 28.Apr.2009.
Taken from a treatise in Portugese 'ONISKA: A poética da morte e do mundo entre os Marubo da Amazônia ocidental' (PDF-link) which looks really worthwhile if only I could read it. These drawings are probably representations of Marubo cosmology with the odd Manoca or long house thrown in for good measure.
Paranoiac Visage
- Posted: 09.Apr.2009.
Going through a stack of photographs found what he thought was an unknown Picasso. He showed the card to Breton, who thought it was a picture of the Marquis de Sade. Then he saw it was actually an African village held the wrong way.
- Posted: 09.Apr.2009.
Going through a stack of photographs found what he thought was an unknown Picasso. He showed the card to Breton, who thought it was a picture of the Marquis de Sade. Then he saw it was actually an African village held the wrong way.
Taxonomy of Drawing
- Posted: 09.Apr.2009.
(Click for full size)
From the The Psychology of Graphic images.
- Posted: 09.Apr.2009.
(Click for full size)
From the The Psychology of Graphic images.
From Void to Form in a Small Number of Years
- Posted: 01.Apr.2009.
Drawings of People by the Under-5s, by Maureen V. Cox and her daughter.
- Posted: 01.Apr.2009.
Drawings of People by the Under-5s, by Maureen V. Cox and her daughter.
Composition drawing
- Posted: 31.Mar.2009.
Two composition drawings of what is presumably the same man wanted for the stabbing of four persons in Lelystad NL.
- Posted: 31.Mar.2009.
Two composition drawings of what is presumably the same man wanted for the stabbing of four persons in Lelystad NL.
A Paragraph on First Contact Drawings
- Posted: 26.Mar.2009.
From Franz Boas' "Primitive Art", 1927.
- Posted: 26.Mar.2009.
From Franz Boas' "Primitive Art", 1927.
When primitive man is given a pencil and paper and asked to draw an object in nature, he has to use tools unfamiliar to him, and a technique that he has never tried. He must break away from his ordinary method of work and solve a new problem. The result cannot be a work of art, - except perhaps under very unusual circumstances. Just like the child, the would-be artist is confronted with a task for which he lacks technical preparation, an dmany of the difficulties that beset the child beset him also. hence the apparent similarity between children's drawings and those of primitive man. The attempts of both are made in similar situations. A most characteristic case of this kind was told to be by Mr. Birket-Smith. He asked an eskimo of Iglulik to draw with a pencil on a piece of paper a walrus hunt. The native was unable to accomplish this task and after several attempts he took a walrus tusk and carved teh whole scene in ivory, a technique with which he was familiar.
Split Brain Drawings 3D
- Posted: 24.Mar.2009.
The left hand (right hemisphere) though clumsy does better in copying the spatial arrangements. Connected with.
From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.
- Posted: 24.Mar.2009.
The left hand (right hemisphere) though clumsy does better in copying the spatial arrangements. Connected with.
From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.
Split Brain Drawing
- Posted: 24.Mar.2009.
Drawing six months after the operation. Spoken signals by the researcher left, responses drawn with both hands next to them. Both hemispheres understand the spoken words, but only the left hemisphere (right hand) was able to write. The left hand (right hemisphere) could draw simple shapes.
From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.
- Posted: 24.Mar.2009.
Drawing six months after the operation. Spoken signals by the researcher left, responses drawn with both hands next to them. Both hemispheres understand the spoken words, but only the left hemisphere (right hand) was able to write. The left hand (right hemisphere) could draw simple shapes.
From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.
Instrospective Brain Scan
- Posted: 23.Mar.2009.
In 1867 Marie-Jean-Léon, Marquis d'Hervey de Saint Denys made the above picture of his own 'hypnogogic' visions seen as he drifted off to sleep. He described them as "Bright lines that cross and interlace, that roll up and make circles, lozenges and other geometric shapes." The EEG recording are added as to show their superficial likeness.
From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.
- Posted: 23.Mar.2009.
In 1867 Marie-Jean-Léon, Marquis d'Hervey de Saint Denys made the above picture of his own 'hypnogogic' visions seen as he drifted off to sleep. He described them as "Bright lines that cross and interlace, that roll up and make circles, lozenges and other geometric shapes." The EEG recording are added as to show their superficial likeness.
From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.
Visual Agnosia
- Posted: 23.Mar.2009.
A patient with cortical atrophy was unable to recognize object by sight. He made excellent copies of a violin and a pig, mistakes (like the missing pig tail included), but he was unable to draw a car and a house from memory alone. Described by Taylor and Warrington.
From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.
- Posted: 23.Mar.2009.
A patient with cortical atrophy was unable to recognize object by sight. He made excellent copies of a violin and a pig, mistakes (like the missing pig tail included), but he was unable to draw a car and a house from memory alone. Described by Taylor and Warrington.
From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.
Blind Horror Boy
- Posted: 22.Mar.2009.
Left: sensory homunculus that shows the overrepresentation in the brain of certain parts of the skin.
Right: sculpture by a blind boy "as if the sculptor were using the scale of his sensations from his own face to determine the proportions of his sculpture."
See this previous entry.
From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.
- Posted: 22.Mar.2009.
Left: sensory homunculus that shows the overrepresentation in the brain of certain parts of the skin.
Right: sculpture by a blind boy "as if the sculptor were using the scale of his sensations from his own face to determine the proportions of his sculpture."
See this previous entry.
From Mechanics of the Mind, Colin Blakemore, 1977.
Moja Draws Signs
- Posted: 10.Mar.2009.
Moja, a chimp under linguistic care of Roger Fouts, is believed to draw representationally. Her drawings, which are unique for their control and emptiness, are believed to renderings of the moves required to make the ASL signs.
From Thierry Lenain's Monkey Painting.
- Posted: 10.Mar.2009.
Moja, a chimp under linguistic care of Roger Fouts, is believed to draw representationally. Her drawings, which are unique for their control and emptiness, are believed to renderings of the moves required to make the ASL signs.
From Thierry Lenain's Monkey Painting.
Body Paint in the Andaman Islands
- Posted: 25.Feb.2009.
Composition of images taken from Indian Folklife 14 (PDF-link).
- Posted: 25.Feb.2009.
Composition of images taken from Indian Folklife 14 (PDF-link).
Vanuatu Sand Drawings
- Posted: 18.Feb.2009.
The sand drawings of Vanuata have made it to the Unesco's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding for its status as a pidgin picture writing system of great beauty. (Earlier.)
- Posted: 18.Feb.2009.
The sand drawings of Vanuata have made it to the Unesco's List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding for its status as a pidgin picture writing system of great beauty. (Earlier.)
Sand drawings are elegant geometric patterns produced directly on the ground which serve to transmit a wealth of traditional knowledge about local history, indigenous rituals and cosmologies, kinship systems, natural phenomena or farming techniques. It is a unique means of communication among the members of the various language groups living in the north of the Vanuatu archipelago. Sand drawing must not only be seen as a graphic and artistic expression. It is also a multifunctional sign system that occurs in a wide range of ritual, contemplative and communicative contexts. Expert sand drawers must possess an intimate knowledge of the numerous graphic patterns and a deep understanding of their complex layers of meaning. This dynamic tradition is transmitted by all age groups and genders in the bearer communities, another important feature of the expression.
Despite modern development and education, sand drawing continues to be a mark of Vanuatu cultural specificity and a means of exchange between the communities. However, its content and deep sense is tending to disappear. Nowadays, only few practitioners still master sand drawing and its associated knowledge. The practice has tended to become focused on the graphic aspect, for advertising or tourism, to the detriment of its original meaning and function.
A New Pamphlet [Update]
- Posted: 31.Jan.2009.
First Contact Drawings is now modestly upgraded as surely will keep happening. Your suggestions are still welcome.
- Posted: 31.Jan.2009.
First Contact Drawings is now modestly upgraded as surely will keep happening. Your suggestions are still welcome.
Poison in your Eyes
- Posted: 15.Feb.2009.
Amusing anecdote from 'Picture-writing of the American Indians' regarding the superstitions entertained for petroglyphs like the above by the Indians:
- Posted: 15.Feb.2009.
Amusing anecdote from 'Picture-writing of the American Indians' regarding the superstitions entertained for petroglyphs like the above by the Indians:
Everytime a sculptured rock or striking mountain or stone is seen, Indians invert the ill will of the spirits of such places by rubbing red peppers (Capsicum) in his or her own eyes. Though the old practitioners inflict this self-torture with the utmost stoicism, I have again and again seen that otherwise rare sight of Indian children, even young men, sobbing under the infliction. Yet the ceremony was never omitted. Sometimes, when by a rare chance no member of the party had had the forethought to provide peppers, lime juice, was used as a substitute; and once, when neither peppers nor lime were at hand, a piece of blue indigo-dyed cloth was carefully soaked, and the dye was then rubbed into the eyes.
Three Stages of a Sculpture by a Blind Boy
- Posted: 13.Feb.2009.
(Click for full size)
Taken from Trevor-Roper's 'The World Through Blunted Vision'.
Three stages in the evolution of a sculpture by a blind boy.
Stage 1) Crude realism.
Stage 2) Structural discovery with emphasis on seemingly significant features.
Stage 3) Free expression of experiences.
- Posted: 13.Feb.2009.
(Click for full size)
Taken from Trevor-Roper's 'The World Through Blunted Vision'.
Three stages in the evolution of a sculpture by a blind boy.
Stage 1) Crude realism.
Stage 2) Structural discovery with emphasis on seemingly significant features.
Stage 3) Free expression of experiences.
Exhibition for Blind People
- Posted: 13.Feb.2009.
Taken from Trevor-Roper's 'The World Through Blunted Vision', unfortunatly more info is not given about this picture/exhibition. Who are the artists for instance?
- Posted: 13.Feb.2009.
Taken from Trevor-Roper's 'The World Through Blunted Vision', unfortunatly more info is not given about this picture/exhibition. Who are the artists for instance?
Pac Square
- Posted: 06.Feb.2009.
Technically the rectangles are called "Kanizsa-type subjective contours," because while we perceive rectangles, there aren't actually rectangles there.
- Posted: 06.Feb.2009.
Technically the rectangles are called "Kanizsa-type subjective contours," because while we perceive rectangles, there aren't actually rectangles there.
Africa and Omega
- Posted: 06.Feb.2009.
Via the always amazing Crushevil comes word of the blog 'Africa & Omega The beginning and the end' with many good images of snake worship and spirit dances. These two images make good sense in our doodle department.
- Posted: 06.Feb.2009.
Via the always amazing Crushevil comes word of the blog 'Africa & Omega The beginning and the end' with many good images of snake worship and spirit dances. These two images make good sense in our doodle department.
Xikrin Drawings
- Posted: 04.Feb.2009.
(Click for full size)
MySpace contact Cochabamba Hotel has mailed us interesting bits of Amazonian doodling before and in addition to First Contact Drawings Cochabamba left the following on my-myspace:
The Xikrin people is part of Kayapó nation, hunters-gatherers and warriors from the Jê linguistic branch, which territory nowadays is reduced to small areas in the Brazil's center-north region.
Xikrin women are responsible for body painting application to adorn men and women bodies, adults and children, with specific designs depending of sex, age group, ceremonial groups, etcetera.
When women are solicited for paint in paper sheets, they reproduce the drawings in the paper sheet, as if that were the human skin.
Xikrin men, when are asked to draw, produce a large array of spontaneous shapes, from the most figurative to most abstract.
Shaman Nhiakrekampin painting a free drawing, a nontraditional activity.
Village courtyard, with an euphoric host to the warriors that are coming back from a well suceeded incursion against an enemy village (shaman Nhiakrekampin's drawning)
Also in children's drawings, that can be observed at schools settled in Kayapó-Xikrin communities:
- Posted: 04.Feb.2009.
(Click for full size)
MySpace contact Cochabamba Hotel has mailed us interesting bits of Amazonian doodling before and in addition to First Contact Drawings Cochabamba left the following on my-myspace:
The Xikrin people is part of Kayapó nation, hunters-gatherers and warriors from the Jê linguistic branch, which territory nowadays is reduced to small areas in the Brazil's center-north region.
Xikrin women are responsible for body painting application to adorn men and women bodies, adults and children, with specific designs depending of sex, age group, ceremonial groups, etcetera.
When women are solicited for paint in paper sheets, they reproduce the drawings in the paper sheet, as if that were the human skin.
Xikrin men, when are asked to draw, produce a large array of spontaneous shapes, from the most figurative to most abstract.
Shaman Nhiakrekampin painting a free drawing, a nontraditional activity.
Village courtyard, with an euphoric host to the warriors that are coming back from a well suceeded incursion against an enemy village (shaman Nhiakrekampin's drawning)Also in children's drawings, that can be observed at schools settled in Kayapó-Xikrin communities:
MicMac Palimpsest
- Posted: 02.Feb.2009.
Two images from Picture-writing of the American Indians: palimpsests from Fairy Rock in Nova Scotia. I have yet to find photos of these petroglyphs but what I liked about these rubbings is that they turn 3 layers (new (English) , old (French) and very old (Mic Mac tribe, 2000 years)) into one flat image.
- Posted: 02.Feb.2009.
Two images from Picture-writing of the American Indians: palimpsests from Fairy Rock in Nova Scotia. I have yet to find photos of these petroglyphs but what I liked about these rubbings is that they turn 3 layers (new (English) , old (French) and very old (Mic Mac tribe, 2000 years)) into one flat image.
Picture-writing of the American Indians
- Posted: 02.Feb.2009.
Now reading: Picture-writing of the American Indians by Garrick Mallery. First published in 1893 but my edition is the 1972 Dover reprint. This is an obsessive collection of examples of mnemonic drawings and proto-writing as found in petroglyphs and rock art. The title is misleading in so far that the main focus is on North-America but Garrick adds plenty of images from the rest of the world as well. The writing is dry and iterative but the book is a joy to look at with 1290 (!) illustrations and 54 plates. I will come back to this as I plough through it. Get a taste from the Google-books preview.
- Posted: 02.Feb.2009.
Now reading: Picture-writing of the American Indians by Garrick Mallery. First published in 1893 but my edition is the 1972 Dover reprint. This is an obsessive collection of examples of mnemonic drawings and proto-writing as found in petroglyphs and rock art. The title is misleading in so far that the main focus is on North-America but Garrick adds plenty of images from the rest of the world as well. The writing is dry and iterative but the book is a joy to look at with 1290 (!) illustrations and 54 plates. I will come back to this as I plough through it. Get a taste from the Google-books preview.
Korwa Doodles UPDATE
- Posted: 22.Jan.2009.
(Click for full size)
Via the Outsider Writers forum: "Korwa drawings (contemporary tribal works on paper from Central India) - exhibited in Paris 1996, in NYC in 2000. These drawings were collected by Franck Andre Jamme who says 'The Korwa don't know how to read. Or write. You keep coming back to this with them. Given that they write nevertheless. In spite of all. That they write instantaneously. Even if the signs they make are not real letters, even if no one will ever be able to translate those lines into another language. Ever.'"
Reality Check: Rohit mailed in with the following comment which puts severe doubt on the status of these drawings as fake-language:
- Posted: 22.Jan.2009.
(Click for full size)
Via the Outsider Writers forum: "Korwa drawings (contemporary tribal works on paper from Central India) - exhibited in Paris 1996, in NYC in 2000. These drawings were collected by Franck Andre Jamme who says 'The Korwa don't know how to read. Or write. You keep coming back to this with them. Given that they write nevertheless. In spite of all. That they write instantaneously. Even if the signs they make are not real letters, even if no one will ever be able to translate those lines into another language. Ever.'"
Reality Check: Rohit mailed in with the following comment which puts severe doubt on the status of these drawings as fake-language:
The script is undoubtedly devanagri but with a very, very bad handwriting. This is the same script used all over India in Hindi, Sanskrit etc. The giveaway is the topline (the "roof") that connects all the letters. Some of the parts of the scribble are actually clearly written letters I can read. So my guess is this is someone at school learning to write the alphabet. Most definitely a toddler or illiterate at school learning Hindi. And apparently someone who is fascinated by the bow and arrow, carried by a number of Hindu deities.
Neanderthal Art - Proof of Concept
- Posted: 26.Jan.2009.
It does not mean anything but this is proof of concept for Neanderthal body-paint.
- Posted: 26.Jan.2009.
It does not mean anything but this is proof of concept for Neanderthal body-paint.
PaleoAstronomy
- Posted: 15.Jan.2009.
The engravings on the 30.000 year old Blanchard and similar bones were long believed to be "seemingly chaotic, haphazard pitting", "perfect example of non-notational random marking,", as symptoms of "man’s urge to ‘decorate,’ or to his ‘need to fill an empty space,’ or to doodle in rare moments of leisure." That was until Alexander Marshack come along in the 1960ties and claimed these markings to be a moon-calendar.
- Posted: 15.Jan.2009.
The engravings on the 30.000 year old Blanchard and similar bones were long believed to be "seemingly chaotic, haphazard pitting", "perfect example of non-notational random marking,", as symptoms of "man’s urge to ‘decorate,’ or to his ‘need to fill an empty space,’ or to doodle in rare moments of leisure." That was until Alexander Marshack come along in the 1960ties and claimed these markings to be a moon-calendar.
No Arthropods Were Hurt During the making of this Painting
- Posted: 06.Dec.2007.
Steven R. Kutcher, entomologist, smears paint on the feet of beetles, bees, crickets and cockroaches before releasing them on an even-coloured canvas. "I have made visible the hidden world of the insect footprint. When an insect walks on your hand, you may feel the legs move but nothing visible remains, only a sensation. These works of art render these insect tracks and routes visible, producing a visually pleasing piece while conveying pertinent, scientific information." WICKED!, tnx Mr. t.
- Posted: 06.Dec.2007.
Steven R. Kutcher, entomologist, smears paint on the feet of beetles, bees, crickets and cockroaches before releasing them on an even-coloured canvas. "I have made visible the hidden world of the insect footprint. When an insect walks on your hand, you may feel the legs move but nothing visible remains, only a sensation. These works of art render these insect tracks and routes visible, producing a visually pleasing piece while conveying pertinent, scientific information." WICKED!, tnx Mr. t.
The Bird Traces Language maker
- Posted: 14.Nov.2007.
Writing is a Doodle by Nature [Recognized by the Chinese]!
- Posted: 14.Nov.2007.
Writing is a Doodle by Nature [Recognized by the Chinese]!
"The origins of writing have also been associated with imaginative perception. The mythical inventor of Chinese characters, Tsang-kie (or Cangjie), was pictured with two pairs of eyes, which 'enabled him to scutinize the phenomena and object beyond mere appearances', in this way he examined the traces left by birds' claws and devised from them the first written characters." Art From "Potential Images: Ambiguity and Indeterminacy in Modern Art.
"[I]f he could capture in a drawing the special characteristics that set apart each and every thing on the earth, this would truly be the perfect kind of character for writing. From that day forward, Cangjie paid close attention to the characteristics of all things, including the sun, moon, stars, clouds, lakes, oceans, as well as all manner of bird and beast. He began to create characters according to the special characteristics he found, and before long, had compiled a long list of characters for writing." Wikipedia
BacterioPoetic Doodle
- Posted: 05.Nov.2007.
(Click for full size)
From a page encountered before comes this picture of an E. coli after Osmotic Shock. The fact that the picture is 'signed' could suggest that somebody is taking the piss but what we are seeing through the lenses of our PatternScope is a doodle!
- Posted: 05.Nov.2007.
(Click for full size)
From a page encountered before comes this picture of an E. coli after Osmotic Shock. The fact that the picture is 'signed' could suggest that somebody is taking the piss but what we are seeing through the lenses of our PatternScope is a doodle!
Ports of Entry into Doodle Land
- Posted: 04.Nov.2007.
(Click for full size)
From Here To Go, Interviews with Brion Gysin by Terry Wilson.
- Posted: 04.Nov.2007.
(Click for full size)
From Here To Go, Interviews with Brion Gysin by Terry Wilson.
Brion Gysin – How do you get in… get into these painting?
William Burroughs – Usually I get in by a port of entry, as I call it. It is often a face through whose eyes the picture opens into a landscape and I go literally right through that eye into that landscape. Sometimes it is rather like an archway… and number of little details or a special spot of colours makes the port of entry and then the entire picture wil suddenly become a three-dimensional frieze in plaster or jade or some other precious material. This picture in front of me is in four sections. The remarkable thing is the way in which the sections – when hung a few inches apart – seems literally to pull together. The substance of the paintings seems to bridge the gap. Something is going streaming right across the void itself. You can literally see the pull of one canvas on the other. Now you suddenly see all sorts of things there. Beautiful jungle landscape. And then always bicycles. The whole bicycle world… scooters. All sorts of faces… monkey faces… typical withered monkey faces. Very archetypical in this world. And you do get whole worlds. Suddenly you get a whole violet world or a whole gray world which flashes all over the picture. The worlds are as it were illuminated by each individual colour… worlds made of that colour. You think of them as the red world and then the blue world, for example. I was taking a colour walk around Paris the other day… doing something I picked up from your pictures in which the colours shoot out all through the canvas like they do on the street.
…
This is the first real space-time painting in which there’s a presentation of what is actually going on in front of the painter and the viewer in a space-time sense both through the forms and the colour because the colour makes the shifting form. And then this is related to actual time-sequences presented here. You see things in a sequence which is actually a time-sequence. I know of no other example of the way in which time is represented here. I can’t see all of these different levels at once because it is as if they existed independently only in their time sequence. Here is space-time painting. You can see way deep into all sorts of landscapes for instance, and then you flash back to what appears on the surface… the substance of painting exists with double motion in and out. When you see one layer of the picture then you suddenly see it all. The eye which I am using as a port of entry jerks me abruptly into a landscape I never saw before. It is a sort of toy world and one that is somehow alarming, populated with mechanical insects attacking each other and men in armour from other planets. Or they may be simply modern welders with bridges in the background.
Can You See Me?
- Posted: 03.Nov.2007.
(Click for full size)
One thing Crystalpunk has always been curious about is if it is really true that Western Images are not readable to Non-Western "primitive" cultures. “The Innocent Anthropologist” by Nigel Barley, a hilariously funny account of his fieldwork with the Dowayos in the Camaroons, is the first proper information ever found by us on this topic. The above image is printed on the Penguin edition. The quote goes on to explain that the inability to read pictures often makes passports ‘useless’ because nobody can see if a face is the one shown in the snapshot.
- Posted: 03.Nov.2007.
(Click for full size)
One thing Crystalpunk has always been curious about is if it is really true that Western Images are not readable to Non-Western "primitive" cultures. “The Innocent Anthropologist” by Nigel Barley, a hilariously funny account of his fieldwork with the Dowayos in the Camaroons, is the first proper information ever found by us on this topic. The above image is printed on the Penguin edition. The quote goes on to explain that the inability to read pictures often makes passports ‘useless’ because nobody can see if a face is the one shown in the snapshot.
In the end I managed to lay my hands on some postcards depicting African fauna. I had at least a lion and a leopard and showed them to people to see if they could spot the difference. Alas, they could not. The reason lay not in their classification of animals but rather in the fact that they could not identify photographs. It is a fact we tend to forget in the West that people have to learn to be able to see photographs. We are exposed to them from birth so that, for us, there is no difficulty in identifying faces or objects from all sorts of angles, in differing light and even with distorting lenses. Dowayos have no such tradition of visual art; theirs is limited to a bands of geometric designs.
Automatic Drawing Noise
- Posted: 30.Oct.2007.
Yagihashi Tsukasa is a Japanese noise performer who translates automatic drawing into real-time sounds. Wicked stuff in light of our Doodle Knowledge survey. If you were a purist you could argue that the 'automatism' driving these drawings sometimes seems replaced by motives used for their sound value, like the little spirals. But there it does not end: Tsukasa's self-styled 'Jabrec Art Music' is related to his study of sacred geometry in relation to early Hindu Mathura buddhist sculptures.
- Posted: 30.Oct.2007.
Yagihashi Tsukasa is a Japanese noise performer who translates automatic drawing into real-time sounds. Wicked stuff in light of our Doodle Knowledge survey. If you were a purist you could argue that the 'automatism' driving these drawings sometimes seems replaced by motives used for their sound value, like the little spirals. But there it does not end: Tsukasa's self-styled 'Jabrec Art Music' is related to his study of sacred geometry in relation to early Hindu Mathura buddhist sculptures.
Another Automatic Drawing by Jean/Hans Arp
- Posted: 26.Oct.2007.
1918. The man who said his creativity grew as natural on him as his toenails.
- Posted: 26.Oct.2007.
1918. The man who said his creativity grew as natural on him as his toenails.
Mash-up Calligraphy with Brion Gysin
- Posted: 25.Oct.2007.
Brion Gysin believed writing and painting related, this is why writing was 40 years behind painting, the genesis behind the Cut-Up. Here is a bit from “Here to Go”, a collection of interviews with Gysin written down by Terry Wilson. The image, “Magic Mushroom Calligraphy fits nicely with our previous dash into psychedelia:
- Posted: 25.Oct.2007.
Brion Gysin believed writing and painting related, this is why writing was 40 years behind painting, the genesis behind the Cut-Up. Here is a bit from “Here to Go”, a collection of interviews with Gysin written down by Terry Wilson. The image, “Magic Mushroom Calligraphy fits nicely with our previous dash into psychedelia:
I first became interested in calligraphy when I was being taught Japanese in the army, during the war … and in the Japanese language school had a number of Japanese instructors, and as I was a painter and interested in painting, and in paint brushes, and in ink, uh, I learned quite quickly to understand some of the depth, not just simply for the purpose of recording the language, but the philosophy behind the attack that the brush makes onto paper, so forth and so on, the running of the ink and all those rather more abstruse meanings of Oriental calligraphy… but from the pictorial point of view it didn’t satisfy me because it hangs off the page; as you know, if you see lines of Japanese writing it hangs like vines, pinned at the top of the page and sort of dangling down at different lengths across, and not to my mind at that time satisfactorily employing the Occidental picture space, which is essentially a page as a picture is a page, or even as an icon is essentially a page, and, uh, when I went to Morocco I was immediately interested in the movement of Arab writing which goes, as Japanese does, from right to left, instead of ours does, left to right… but I saw that combing the two, as if one took a page and wrote Japanese from top to bottom and Arabic across it from right to left, formed a sort of gridwork which covered and integrated the picture space…
Retro Entopic Graphomania
- Posted: 25.Oct.2007.
Daniel C. Boyer is an American retro-Surrealist experimenting with techniques like entopic graphomania. The resemblance between some of these pieces, like the above "The Young do Their Laundy" and Rob Myers' "Draw Something" is there for those who want to see it. But then Myers is using a somewhat similar scheme.
- Posted: 25.Oct.2007.
Daniel C. Boyer is an American retro-Surrealist experimenting with techniques like entopic graphomania. The resemblance between some of these pieces, like the above "The Young do Their Laundy" and Rob Myers' "Draw Something" is there for those who want to see it. But then Myers is using a somewhat similar scheme.
Entoptic Graphomania
- Posted: 25.Oct.2007.
(Click for full size)
In 1945 Romanian Surrealist Dolfi Trost invented entoptic graphomania, an automatic method of drawing in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper, and lines are then made between the dots. The name just rocks harder than Lascaux while the title of one of Trost's books "Vision dans le cristal. Oniromancie obsessionelle. Et neuf graphomanies entoptiques" needs stress on the forth word. And that is all we know... biggest question did Trost invent the word entoptic himself? And if not where did he find it. Thanks to Mr Gaze of Oz for the link(s).
- Posted: 25.Oct.2007.
(Click for full size)
In 1945 Romanian Surrealist Dolfi Trost invented entoptic graphomania, an automatic method of drawing in which dots are made at the sites of impurities in a blank sheet of paper, and lines are then made between the dots. The name just rocks harder than Lascaux while the title of one of Trost's books "Vision dans le cristal. Oniromancie obsessionelle. Et neuf graphomanies entoptiques" needs stress on the forth word. And that is all we know... biggest question did Trost invent the word entoptic himself? And if not where did he find it. Thanks to Mr Gaze of Oz for the link(s).
Down with Mimesis! Down!
- Posted: 24.Oct.2007.
Patterns are Recognized in Chance Images; this history is summed up nicely and points to one important overlooked source:
- Posted: 24.Oct.2007.
Patterns are Recognized in Chance Images; this history is summed up nicely and points to one important overlooked source:
The Renaissance phase in the history of our subject begins with the opening sentences of Leone Battista Alberti's treatise De statua, written about 1430. Here the origin of sculpture is described as follows:
Those [who were inclined to express and represent... the bodies brought forth by nature] would at times observe in tree trunks, clumps of earth, or other objects of this sort certain lineaments which through some slight changes could be made to resemble a natural shape. They thereupon took thought and tried, by adding or taking away here and there, to render the resemblance complete.
Before long, Alberti adds, the primeval sculptors learned how to make images without depending on such resemblances latent in their raw material. This passage is the earliest statement of the idea that what sets the artist apart from the layman is not his manual skill but his ability to discover images in random shapes, i.e., his visual imagination, which in turn gives rise to the desire to make these images more explicit by adding or taking away.
How did Alberti arrive at this astonishing insight? Classical art theory provides no etiology of sculpture, and its etiology of painting is purely mimetic: the first artist traced a shadow cast by the sun.
Automatic Drawing by Jean/Hans Arp
- Posted: 23.Oct.2007.
(Click for full size)
Crystalpunk is digging this with a spade the size of Utrecht!!! The Moma has it in colour.
- Posted: 23.Oct.2007.
(Click for full size)
Crystalpunk is digging this with a spade the size of Utrecht!!! The Moma has it in colour.
Bring yr Patternscope!
- Posted: 23.Oct.2007.
(Click for full size)
Crystalpunk is digging Andre Masson's "Fish drawn in the Sand" (1927) as the last question in our PQ-test.
- Posted: 23.Oct.2007.
(Click for full size)
Crystalpunk is digging Andre Masson's "Fish drawn in the Sand" (1927) as the last question in our PQ-test.
Surrealist Drawing by Tanguy
- Posted: 23.Oct.2007.
(Click for full size)
From 1926, Crystalpunk is digging it, because it looks like something by Aaron.
- Posted: 23.Oct.2007.
(Click for full size)
From 1926, Crystalpunk is digging it, because it looks like something by Aaron.
ARTism
- Posted: 30.Jan.2008.
Some Flickr shots of creativity in a child with autism: the irrepressible desire to sort.
- Posted: 30.Jan.2008.
Some Flickr shots of creativity in a child with autism: the irrepressible desire to sort.
Crystal Method
- Posted: 29.Jan.2008.
Beflix, the Dons of Glitch Art, have discovered the Crystal. Nice One!
- Posted: 29.Jan.2008.
Beflix, the Dons of Glitch Art, have discovered the Crystal. Nice One!
Trapped in Realism
- Posted: 28.Jan.2008.
(Click for full size)
Stephen Wiltshire is the most famous example of autist/artist. The detail is stunning but is he not trapped in this hi-fi memory that bars him from the pleasure of doodle-land? Compare him with Nadia.
- Posted: 28.Jan.2008.
(Click for full size)
Stephen Wiltshire is the most famous example of autist/artist. The detail is stunning but is he not trapped in this hi-fi memory that bars him from the pleasure of doodle-land? Compare him with Nadia.
Cat People
- Posted: 16.Jan.2008.
Great post over at Spacecollective about Louis Wain, the English cat-painter who went insane. His drawings show his descent into madness, like a documentary of mind in stills. Always wanted to add something about him here but now, finally, I find all the relevant images on one page.
- Posted: 16.Jan.2008.
Great post over at Spacecollective about Louis Wain, the English cat-painter who went insane. His drawings show his descent into madness, like a documentary of mind in stills. Always wanted to add something about him here but now, finally, I find all the relevant images on one page.
Retro Rock Art by a Savant
- Posted: 08.Jan.2008.
(Click for full size)
Great Rock-Art speculation find: Nicholas Humphrey's essay "Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind" Herin he compares iron age rock art with the drawings by six year old autist Nadia (surely not her real name). Here are some ofthe points worth nothing.
- Posted: 08.Jan.2008.
(Click for full size)
Great Rock-Art speculation find: Nicholas Humphrey's essay "Cave Art, Autism, and the Evolution of the Human Mind" Herin he compares iron age rock art with the drawings by six year old autist Nadia (surely not her real name). Here are some ofthe points worth nothing.
(1) Nadia, born in Nottingham in 1967, was in several respects severely retarded. By the age of six years she had still failed to develop any spoken language, was socially unresponsive and physically clumsy. But already in her third year she had begun to show an extraordinary drawing ability: suddenly starting to produce line-drawings of animals and people, mostly from memory, with quite uncanny photographic accuracy and graphic fluency.
(2)because of her undeveloped language and other impoverishments. Suppose, indeed, it were more generally the case that a person not only does not need a typical modern mind to draw like that but must not have a typical modern mind to draw like that. Then the cave paintings might actually be taken to be proof positive that the cave artists' minds were essentially pre-modern.
In Nadia's case there has in fact already been a degree of rich speculation on this score: speculation, that is, as to whether her drawing ability was indeed something that was 'released' in her only because her mind failed to develop in directions that in normal children more typically smother such ability. Selfe's hypothesis has always been that it was Nadia's language - or rather her failure to develop it - that was the key.
(3)This lack of language went along with a severe degree of literal mindedness, so that she saw things merely as they appeared at the moment and seldom if ever assigned them to higher level categories. Thus it was discovered that although Nadia could match difficult items with the same perceptual quality, she failed to match items in the same conceptual
class. For example, she could match a picture of an object to a picture of its silhouette, but she failed to match pictures of an armchair and a deck chair from an array of objects that could be classified on their conceptual basis. It was this very lack of conceptualization, Selfe believes, that permitted Nadia to register exactly how things looked to her. Whereas a normal child of her age, on seeing a horse, for example, would see it -and hence lay down a memory of it - as a token of the category 'horse', Nadia was simply left with the original visual impression it created.
(4)Was this the story of cave art too? With all the obvious caveats, I would suggest it might have been. What we know is that cave art, after Chauvet, continued to flourish with remarkably little stylistic progression for the next twenty millennia (though, interestingly, not without a change occurring about 20,000 years ago in the kinds of animals represented). But then at the end of the Ice Age, about 11,000 years ago, for whatever reason, the art stopped. And the new traditions of painting that emerged over five millennia later in Assyria and Egypt were quite different in style, being much more conventionally childish, stereotyped and stiff. Indeed nothing to equal the naturalism of cave art was seen again in Europe until the Italian Renaissance, when life-like perspective drawing was reinvented, but now as literally an 'art' that had to be learned through long professional apprenticeship.
Action Painted
- Posted: 14.Dec.2007.
well done -- pretty -- for all its delicate lines, this is one powerful image! -- incredibly beautiful -- POW!!!
Some comments to the above action painting by Bruce Grant found at Flickr. These are marvelous lines that attracted me from the zillions of other thumbnails. Why? What gives this droop its hypnotic power? That is the Crystalpunk question.
- Posted: 14.Dec.2007.
well done -- pretty -- for all its delicate lines, this is one powerful image! -- incredibly beautiful -- POW!!!
Some comments to the above action painting by Bruce Grant found at Flickr. These are marvelous lines that attracted me from the zillions of other thumbnails. Why? What gives this droop its hypnotic power? That is the Crystalpunk question.
Traceology
- Posted: 10.Dec.2007.
(Click for full size)
Zhang Qiang writes his characters while a female (no man allowed) is moving the paper he is writing on! The result is known as traceology.
From 'The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China' by Gordon S. Barrass, 2002.
- Posted: 10.Dec.2007.
(Click for full size)
Zhang Qiang writes his characters while a female (no man allowed) is moving the paper he is writing on! The result is known as traceology.
From 'The Art of Calligraphy in Modern China' by Gordon S. Barrass, 2002.
The Miserable Miracle of Mescaline
- Posted: 08.Dec.2007.
"The anopodokotolotopadnodrome was about to close." Oh Yes! Henri Michaux has crossed the Crystalpunk Yangtzee before and the online English translation of his 1956 Miserable Miracle, a prose-poetic recording of his experiences with mescaline is a sure hit.
A few bits from the foreword:
- Posted: 08.Dec.2007.
"The anopodokotolotopadnodrome was about to close." Oh Yes! Henri Michaux has crossed the Crystalpunk Yangtzee before and the online English translation of his 1956 Miserable Miracle, a prose-poetic recording of his experiences with mescaline is a sure hit.
A few bits from the foreword:
This book is an exploration. By means of words, signs, drawings. Mescaline, the subject explored.
From the thirty two autograph pages reproduced out of the hundred and fifty written while the inner perturbation was at its height, those who can read handwriting will learn more than from any description.
As for the drawings, begun immediately after the third experiment, they were done with a vibratory motion that continues in you for days and days and, though automatic and blind, reproduces exactly the visions to which you have been subjected, passes through them again.
It being impossible to reproduce the entire manuscript, which directly and simultaneously translated the subject, the rhythms, the forms, the chaos, as well as the inner defenses and their devastation, we found ourselves in difficulties, confronted by a typographical wall. Everything had to be rewritten. The original text, more tangible than legible, drawn rather than written, would not, in any case, suffice.
Sometimes words would be fused together on the spot. For example, "Martyrissibly" would recur to me time and time again, speaking volumes. I couldn't get rid of it. Another repeated untiringly, "Krakatoa !" "Krakatoa !" or sometimes a quite ordinary word like "crystal" would return twenty times in succession, giving me a great harangue all by itself, out of another world, and I could never have augmented it in the least or supplemented it with some other word. Alone, like a castaway on an island, it was everything to me, and the restless ocean out of which it had just come and of which it irresistibly reminded me, for I too was shipwrecked and alone end holding out against disaster.
In this book, the margins, filled with whet ere epitomes rather than titles, suggest very inadequately the overlappings which ere en ever-present phenomenon of mescaline. Without them it would be like talking about something else. I have not used any other "artifices." It would have required too many. The insurmountable difficulties come (1) from the incredible rapidity of the apparition, transformation, end disappearance of the visions; (2) from the multiplicity, the pullulation of each vision; (3) from the fen-like and umbellate developments through autonomous, independent, simultaneous progressions (on seven screens es it were); (4) from their unemotional character; (5) from their inept, and even more, from their mechanical appearance : gusts of images, gusts of "yes's" or of "no's," gusts of stereotype movements.
Da Vinci Seeing things
- Posted: 28.Dec.2005.
On the theme of patterns recognized, the following from Leonardo da Vinci's "Treatise On Painting":
- Posted: 28.Dec.2005.
On the theme of patterns recognized, the following from Leonardo da Vinci's "Treatise On Painting":
"I cannot refrain from mentioning among these precepts a new device for the imagination, which, although it may seem rather trivial and almost ludicrous, is nevertheless extremely useful in arousing the mind to various inventions. And, this is, when you look at any walls spotted with stains, or with stones of various patterns, if you have to invent some setting, you may be able to see therein a resemblance to various landscapes, graced with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys, and hills in varied arrangement; or, again, you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of things, which you can distill into well-drawn forms. And what happens with regard to such walls and variegated stones is just as with the sound of bells, in whose jangle you may find any name or word you choose to imagine."
Who Finds What
- Posted: 21.Dec.2005.
"When Wu Daozi first saw the painting of Zhang Sengyou, he thought that Zhang's reputation was undeserved. But after sitting beneath the painting for 3 days Wu found that he was unable to leave it!". - Inscribed on the Sengyou painting
- Posted: 21.Dec.2005.
"When Wu Daozi first saw the painting of Zhang Sengyou, he thought that Zhang's reputation was undeserved. But after sitting beneath the painting for 3 days Wu found that he was unable to leave it!". - Inscribed on the Sengyou painting
We Can Not
- Posted: 27.Nov.2009.
... We can not hope to understand the nature of visual representation if we try to derive it directly from optical projections of the physical objects that constitute our world. Pictures and sculptures of any style possess properties that cannot be explained as mere modifications of the perceptual raw material received through the senses.
Ruldof Arnheim in his chapter on Child art
- Posted: 27.Nov.2009.
... We can not hope to understand the nature of visual representation if we try to derive it directly from optical projections of the physical objects that constitute our world. Pictures and sculptures of any style possess properties that cannot be explained as mere modifications of the perceptual raw material received through the senses.
Ruldof Arnheim in his chapter on Child art
Images from the Rhoda Kellogg Archive
- Posted: 26.Nov.2009.
(Click for full size)
The online image archives of Rhoda Kellogg, pioneer in the study of children's art, are a fabulous resource!
- Posted: 26.Nov.2009.
(Click for full size)
The online image archives of Rhoda Kellogg, pioneer in the study of children's art, are a fabulous resource!
First Contact Drawings from the Amazon
- Posted: 21.Nov.2009.
Awi (2000) is a Dutch book with pictures by Michel Pellander, drawings by indians from various tribes and an accompanying text by Marion Hoekveld. It is a very well made book that I bought only to scan the drawings. There is no specific explanation for each individual drawing on page 90 you will find the following discussion which has several noteworthy observations. The English is my own translation. The original continues on the drawings collected by Levi-Strauss covered earlier.
Karhitxia Awa
Kamaratxia Awa
Dimas Yanomami
Werena Waiapi
Romario Yanomami
Txiboha Awa
Kamaratxia Awa
Baritsika Matis
Dimas Yanomami
Lucio Yanomami
Arara
- Posted: 21.Nov.2009.
Awi (2000) is a Dutch book with pictures by Michel Pellander, drawings by indians from various tribes and an accompanying text by Marion Hoekveld. It is a very well made book that I bought only to scan the drawings. There is no specific explanation for each individual drawing on page 90 you will find the following discussion which has several noteworthy observations. The English is my own translation. The original continues on the drawings collected by Levi-Strauss covered earlier.
Do indians from the Amazon, when they put pen or pencil to paper for the first time, draw like children? The intense concentration and curiosity to make something appear on paper is similar. The differences lay in experience of age and the experiences of a different environment. Indians usually have no concept of a horizontal line, nor do they have the habit of looking from left to right as you do when reading, nor do they have a concept of top and bottom.
In the first drawings of the Arara the beginning is often the centre, from which the paper is filled circling from the inside to the outside. A picture they can study with similar intent while they keep it upside down; the rotation of the image does not seem to make a difference. The straight line is the first thing they learn.
To draw is to communicate. To capture an animal on paper is to draw everything which is there in reality, to give him two eyes even when he is drawn sideways. De Arara sometimes make a kind a X-ray drawings. They draw that what can't be seen, the bones inside an animal. The Yanomami draw their spirits, the upper world, the nether world, the rain, the thunder, but also the goldminers. They also draw sky maps, stars, and the moon. Stars are actors in myths of origin and they offer clues on time, direction, seasons, on agricultural cycles. Slowly Waiwai draws his territory. In his mind he follows rivers and tracks. De leaders of the Waiapi can draw cartographic maps; they have been involved in the demarcation of their territory and know every minute detail of it.
They also draw decorative motives: butterflies, turtle shields, snakes, fishbones, They have become abstracted. Ornament always refers to nature, they always have meaning. They are turned into patterns, on the skin, on earthenware pots, on wooden benches. In this way drawing has meaning.
Slowly but concentrated Kamaratxia Awa is drawing on paper, his thoughts seem to run through his felt pen, his hand freely above the paper. When he begins to draw, only after he has examined the pens very carefully, a world starts to appear which suggests am enormous ordered and controllable space. A world which is created from scribbles and dots.
Karhitxia Awa
Kamaratxia Awa
Dimas Yanomami
Werena Waiapi
Romario Yanomami
Txiboha Awa
Kamaratxia Awa
Baritsika Matis
Dimas Yanomami
Lucio Yanomami
Arara
What an Amazing Inside
- Posted: 20.Oct.2009.
(Click for full size)
Northern Norwegian Rock art, 3000-5000BC. It reminds me of Aaron.
- Posted: 20.Oct.2009.
(Click for full size)
Northern Norwegian Rock art, 3000-5000BC. It reminds me of Aaron.
Painted Fabric in Tadpole
- Posted: 20.Oct.2009.
(Click for full size)
The tadpole in the middle suggests a child's painting? Found in Chan Chan 1200-1400AD.
- Posted: 20.Oct.2009.
(Click for full size)
The tadpole in the middle suggests a child's painting? Found in Chan Chan 1200-1400AD.
The Secret Aspirations
- Posted: 14.Oct.2009.
"The art of the mentally ill approaches modern art so closely because it corresponds to the most secret aspirations of our time" - Hans Prinzhorn (1922).
"Art does not start from abstract thought in order to arrive at forms; rather it climbs up from the formless to the formed, and in this process is found its entire meaning" - Conrad Fiedler
- Posted: 14.Oct.2009.
"The art of the mentally ill approaches modern art so closely because it corresponds to the most secret aspirations of our time" - Hans Prinzhorn (1922).
"Art does not start from abstract thought in order to arrive at forms; rather it climbs up from the formless to the formed, and in this process is found its entire meaning" - Conrad Fiedler
Çatal Höyük Mural
- Posted: 08.Oct.2009.
(Click for full size)
From the first village Çatal Höyük (7500 BCE to 5700 BCE).
- Posted: 08.Oct.2009.
(Click for full size)
From the first village Çatal Höyük (7500 BCE to 5700 BCE).
Drawings by the Mehinaku
- Posted: 28.Sep.2009.
Above fish motives for body paint. Below several spirits that are materially real to the Mehinaku from the upper Xingu in Brazil. Images from 'A walk to the river in Amazonia: ordinary reality for the Mehinaku Indians' by Carla D. Stang.
The Apapanye Yewekwikyuma
The Apapanye Ateshua
The Apapanye Arakuni
- Posted: 28.Sep.2009.
Above fish motives for body paint. Below several spirits that are materially real to the Mehinaku from the upper Xingu in Brazil. Images from 'A walk to the river in Amazonia: ordinary reality for the Mehinaku Indians' by Carla D. Stang.
The Apapanye Yewekwikyuma
The Apapanye Ateshua
The Apapanye Arakuni
Art and Psychology
- Posted: 19.Sep.2009.
Rudolf Arnheim's classic book on the psychology of art and by extension aesthetics as a product of biology and by extension evolution. It is dry as sand and thorough as a supersharp knife. It abounds in details and is rich with helicopter views. It combines the end produce and the starting doodle with clear and vivid calligraphic brushstrokes of analysis. Research has discovered much in between but the book still stands.
- Posted: 19.Sep.2009.
Rudolf Arnheim's classic book on the psychology of art and by extension aesthetics as a product of biology and by extension evolution. It is dry as sand and thorough as a supersharp knife. It abounds in details and is rich with helicopter views. It combines the end produce and the starting doodle with clear and vivid calligraphic brushstrokes of analysis. Research has discovered much in between but the book still stands.
Apes Solving Puzzles
- Posted: 05.Aug.2009.
Desribes as Sarah's more accurate attempts at to place the parts of the face in the right spot. VIA
- Posted: 05.Aug.2009.
Desribes as Sarah's more accurate attempts at to place the parts of the face in the right spot. VIA
Art and Mind
- Posted: 05.Aug.2009.
(Click for full size)
Quotes and images from 'Art as therapy' by Edith Krämer and Lani Alaine Gerity.
Elephant sculpted by Karin, a blind child.
John had Down Syndrome, did not speak but understood a great deal of spoken language, he loved basketball. In his drawings he could not stand empty spaces. One good day he suddenly drew a basket ball (above). This remained the only object he drew representationally but afterwards his drawing changed (below). It is unknown what caused this change.
- Posted: 05.Aug.2009.
(Click for full size)
Quotes and images from 'Art as therapy' by Edith Krämer and Lani Alaine Gerity.
"Carl, a middle-aged man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia of long duration, was given to the depiction of secretive, formulistic images of a religious nature. [This above is] an image dominated by two suns with superimposed faces presiding over idiosyncratically arranged geometric structures, impressed us as an attempt to impose some private order on a fragmented world."
Elephant sculpted by Karin, a blind child.
John had Down Syndrome, did not speak but understood a great deal of spoken language, he loved basketball. In his drawings he could not stand empty spaces. One good day he suddenly drew a basket ball (above). This remained the only object he drew representationally but afterwards his drawing changed (below). It is unknown what caused this change.
Internet Note
- Posted: 09.May.2008.
Found on Flickr.
- Posted: 09.May.2008.
Found on Flickr.
I have a guy in my computer lab who is autistic. He's nonverbal but he makes these drawings on paper that serve as his notes for when he gets on the internet; they also help me figure out what is running through his mind.
From the obvious center image, you can tell that his main interests are muscles and body building. He is very interested and admiring of the male physical body. He has a few other interests as well. See how many you can find in this rich drawing.
I've inverted the drawing for easier viewing.
Graphic Codes by Dennis Tedlock
- Posted: 30.Apr.2008.
(Click for full size)
I assume 'Graphic Codes photographs and text by Dennis Tedlock' to be by the Dennis Tedlock who is famed for his translations from Maya, his very scholarly books about these and his early involvement with Ethnopoetics. Who ever this Dennis is, this is a very interesting (visual) essay about marks, doodles, divination and languages in deep history. The stuff reader of this blog enjoy.
- Posted: 30.Apr.2008.
(Click for full size)
I assume 'Graphic Codes photographs and text by Dennis Tedlock' to be by the Dennis Tedlock who is famed for his translations from Maya, his very scholarly books about these and his early involvement with Ethnopoetics. Who ever this Dennis is, this is a very interesting (visual) essay about marks, doodles, divination and languages in deep history. The stuff reader of this blog enjoy.
One line makes a worm track.
Two lines make an X.
Three lines make a bird track.
Five lines make the fingers of one hand or the claws of a bear paw.
Four or five lines are enough to figure a bird, a face, a monster.
Four or five attributes are enough to tell one god, one saint from another.
Four or five lines mark the vectors of unseen forces.
Four or five colors of yarn are enough to weave the image of an atomic explosion.
Nadia Once More
- Posted: 18.Apr.2008.
(Click for full size)
Nadia, the rock-artist with autism, has been covered before, here is another great picture by her.
- Posted: 18.Apr.2008.
(Click for full size)
Nadia, the rock-artist with autism, has been covered before, here is another great picture by her.
What is a Manuport?
- Posted: 20.Sep.2007.
Manuports are unmodified objects transported and deposited by hominids, and they are distinguished by being of a usually striking material clearly foreign to the sediment containing the occupation deposit they occur in. Indeed, there is one singular instance of a manuport suggested to have been deposited by a pre-human, the Makapansgat cobble (see above, older than 3 millions years).
[I]n 1997 detailed microscopic analysis established that its various markings are all entirely natural (Bednarik 1998b, 1999a). Nevertheless, it was carried into the cave either by Australopithecus africanus, or by an as yet unknown hominid. Almost certainly this was because of its conspicuous colour, shape and markings — most especially the ‘staring eyes motif’ formed by two equal-sized, symmetrically located depressions iconographically related to a mouth-like marking.
While this find does not necessarily imply iconographic comprehension (the ‘staring eyes’ motif can be detected even by birds and insects) it does demonstrate that such an object has attracted sufficient curiosity to have been carried around for some time. This manuport qualifies as palaeoart in the sense that it conveyed non-inherent properties to its collectors that were imposed by neural processes and involved an incipient form of consciousness.
- Posted: 20.Sep.2007.
Manuports are unmodified objects transported and deposited by hominids, and they are distinguished by being of a usually striking material clearly foreign to the sediment containing the occupation deposit they occur in. Indeed, there is one singular instance of a manuport suggested to have been deposited by a pre-human, the Makapansgat cobble (see above, older than 3 millions years).
[I]n 1997 detailed microscopic analysis established that its various markings are all entirely natural (Bednarik 1998b, 1999a). Nevertheless, it was carried into the cave either by Australopithecus africanus, or by an as yet unknown hominid. Almost certainly this was because of its conspicuous colour, shape and markings — most especially the ‘staring eyes motif’ formed by two equal-sized, symmetrically located depressions iconographically related to a mouth-like marking.
While this find does not necessarily imply iconographic comprehension (the ‘staring eyes’ motif can be detected even by birds and insects) it does demonstrate that such an object has attracted sufficient curiosity to have been carried around for some time. This manuport qualifies as palaeoart in the sense that it conveyed non-inherent properties to its collectors that were imposed by neural processes and involved an incipient form of consciousness.
A Doodle Evolution Timeline
- Posted: 19.Sep.2007.
(Click for full size)
A gradualist exponential account of art as information processing.
So Big and so Cool.
- Posted: 19.Sep.2007.
(Click for full size)
A gradualist exponential account of art as information processing.
So Big and so Cool.
Doodle Taxonomy
- Posted: 19.Sep.2007.
(Click for full size)
Comparison of early human mark-making with phosphene motifs and early mark-making of infants.
Combining forms constants from different sources seen here before.
- Posted: 19.Sep.2007.
(Click for full size)
Comparison of early human mark-making with phosphene motifs and early mark-making of infants.
Combining forms constants from different sources seen here before.
Cognitive Archaeology
- Posted: 19.Sep.2007.
The above quartzite figurine from Tan-Tan in Morocco, the earliest evidence of its kind, is estimated to be about 400 000 years old.
Cognitive archaeology is the branch of archaeology that investigates the development of human cognition. It therefore deals with a great variety of evidence, ranging from early rock art to other forms of palaeoart, from animal cognition to palaeoanthropology to psychology and ontogenic cognitive development, and it also needs to concern itself with evidence of early human technology and the ability of domesticating natural systems of energy.
- Posted: 19.Sep.2007.
The above quartzite figurine from Tan-Tan in Morocco, the earliest evidence of its kind, is estimated to be about 400 000 years old.
Cognitive archaeology is the branch of archaeology that investigates the development of human cognition. It therefore deals with a great variety of evidence, ranging from early rock art to other forms of palaeoart, from animal cognition to palaeoanthropology to psychology and ontogenic cognitive development, and it also needs to concern itself with evidence of early human technology and the ability of domesticating natural systems of energy.
Doodle Something
- Posted: 19.Sep.2007.
In light of Crystalpunk's effort to advance Doodle Knowledge, in which Aaron has surfaced already, it was with a smile of recognition that 'Draw Something' by Rob Myers came to our attention. 'Draw Something' is a software-project aiming to produce a software-program that will make free-hand drawings guided by an inate sense of aestetics. It is very much inspired by Cohen's Aaron but open source, which means we can actually check what it is doing rather than trust the artist on his word. This Online Flash version is an earlier installment which uses a neat trick (toggle the sceen using the 'a' key) while the newer version 'knows' about colour and, more importantly, is guided by "ae, a toy aesthetic evaluator. It generates simple descriptions of aesthetics, basically just a list of valenced criteria. It also generates descriptions of artworks consisting of a number of figures, each described by a list of valenced properties. It then evaluates artwork against aesthetic and gives the artwork a numeric score, a measure of its value under that aesthetic." Which is to say that 'Draw Something' tries to create software that evaluates its own output, moving up from doodle to image in each single run. It is interesting to see that the coloured images do remind one of the later Aaron, even though they are also clearly different; perhaps we are seeing the formation of a school? Crystalpunk likes the spirit of this drawing machine the fact that Myers quotes Hofstadter and Mitchell's "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" adds to its karma even more.
- Posted: 19.Sep.2007.
In light of Crystalpunk's effort to advance Doodle Knowledge, in which Aaron has surfaced already, it was with a smile of recognition that 'Draw Something' by Rob Myers came to our attention. 'Draw Something' is a software-project aiming to produce a software-program that will make free-hand drawings guided by an inate sense of aestetics. It is very much inspired by Cohen's Aaron but open source, which means we can actually check what it is doing rather than trust the artist on his word. This Online Flash version is an earlier installment which uses a neat trick (toggle the sceen using the 'a' key) while the newer version 'knows' about colour and, more importantly, is guided by "ae, a toy aesthetic evaluator. It generates simple descriptions of aesthetics, basically just a list of valenced criteria. It also generates descriptions of artworks consisting of a number of figures, each described by a list of valenced properties. It then evaluates artwork against aesthetic and gives the artwork a numeric score, a measure of its value under that aesthetic." Which is to say that 'Draw Something' tries to create software that evaluates its own output, moving up from doodle to image in each single run. It is interesting to see that the coloured images do remind one of the later Aaron, even though they are also clearly different; perhaps we are seeing the formation of a school? Crystalpunk likes the spirit of this drawing machine the fact that Myers quotes Hofstadter and Mitchell's "Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies" adds to its karma even more.
Blot Comics
- Posted: 05.Mar.2008.
Andrei Molotiu's Blotcomics is a must see! Asemic Doodles for the Crystalpunk.
Andrei mentions in response that the above images were made in radically different ways. He also suggested that the source image for 'bends' might appeal to our sensibilities (and rightly so).
- Posted: 05.Mar.2008.
Andrei Molotiu's Blotcomics is a must see! Asemic Doodles for the Crystalpunk.
Andrei mentions in response that the above images were made in radically different ways. He also suggested that the source image for 'bends' might appeal to our sensibilities (and rightly so).
Like Klee With an Unfirm hand
- Posted: 04.Mar.2008.
At art-enables we find the work of Jamila Rahimi. Her favorite colors are pink, red, purple, green, blue, orange and black.
- Posted: 04.Mar.2008.
At art-enables we find the work of Jamila Rahimi. Her favorite colors are pink, red, purple, green, blue, orange and black.
Cy Twombly, the High Mind of Low Lines
- Posted: 20.Feb.2008.
Cy Twombly (b 1928) had a background in cryptography and belonged to the first wave of abstract expressionism. What strikes us in these paintings is that they clearly stand out between the great flush of doodles and scribbles regularly added here: most doodling is about the joy of movement and the natural flow of the pen. The lines and circles of Twombly are much too large and single-minded to be automatic. These scribbles are ultrascribbled at great pains.
- Posted: 20.Feb.2008.
Cy Twombly (b 1928) had a background in cryptography and belonged to the first wave of abstract expressionism. What strikes us in these paintings is that they clearly stand out between the great flush of doodles and scribbles regularly added here: most doodling is about the joy of movement and the natural flow of the pen. The lines and circles of Twombly are much too large and single-minded to be automatic. These scribbles are ultrascribbled at great pains.
Seriously Obsessive
- Posted: 19.Feb.2008.
Apart from figurative stuff (nudes! bleuh!!), there is much obsessive asemica to be found at Richard Lazzara's Flickrpages.
- Posted: 19.Feb.2008.
Apart from figurative stuff (nudes! bleuh!!), there is much obsessive asemica to be found at Richard Lazzara's Flickrpages.
Lacee King Visually Impaired Art Prize Winner
- Posted: 14.Feb.2008.
Untitled Linocut Print by Lacee King. Created for the sheer joy of using your hands.
- Posted: 14.Feb.2008.
Untitled Linocut Print by Lacee King. Created for the sheer joy of using your hands.
Paintings by Legally Blind Mikey
- Posted: 14.Feb.2008.
The website of the californian NIAD (National Institute of Art and Disabilities) hosts many things, including art by Michael Sutton who is legally blind but not to color.
- Posted: 14.Feb.2008.
The website of the californian NIAD (National Institute of Art and Disabilities) hosts many things, including art by Michael Sutton who is legally blind but not to color.
The Stream of Consciousness
- Posted: 13.Mar.2006.
A diagram may help to accentuate this indifference of the mental means where the end is the same. Let A be some ex-experience [sic] from which a number of thinkers start. Let Z be the practical conclusion rationally inferrible [sic] from it. One gets to this conclusion by one line, another by another; one follows a course of English, another of German, verbal imagery. With one, visual images predominate; with another, tactile. Some trains are tinged with emotions, others not; some are very abridged, synthetic and rapid; others, hesitating and broken into many steps. But when the penultimate terms of all the trains, however differing inter se, finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say, and rightly say, that all the thinkers have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
William James
- Posted: 13.Mar.2006.
A diagram may help to accentuate this indifference of the mental means where the end is the same. Let A be some ex-experience [sic] from which a number of thinkers start. Let Z be the practical conclusion rationally inferrible [sic] from it. One gets to this conclusion by one line, another by another; one follows a course of English, another of German, verbal imagery. With one, visual images predominate; with another, tactile. Some trains are tinged with emotions, others not; some are very abridged, synthetic and rapid; others, hesitating and broken into many steps. But when the penultimate terms of all the trains, however differing inter se, finally shoot into the same conclusion, we say, and rightly say, that all the thinkers have had substantially the same thought. It would probably astound each of them beyond measure to be let into his neighbor's mind and to find how different the scenery there was from that in his own.
William James
When the Hostile Invader offers a New Art!
- Posted: 18.Jun.2008.
(Click for full size)
What would happen when a technically advanced civilization gave us their drawing tools and materials? What what happen to our visual culture, how would it adopt. Plains Indian Ledger Art gives us some clues. How do the above horses compare with these horses? To quote the introduction:
- Posted: 18.Jun.2008.
(Click for full size)
What would happen when a technically advanced civilization gave us their drawing tools and materials? What what happen to our visual culture, how would it adopt. Plains Indian Ledger Art gives us some clues. How do the above horses compare with these horses? To quote the introduction:
This genre, often called Ledger Art, represents a transitional form of Plains Indian artistry corresponding to the forced reduction of Plains tribes to government reservations, roughly between 1860 and 1900. Due to the destruction of the buffalo herds and other game animals of the Great Plains by Anglo-Americans during and after the Civil War, painting on buffalo hide gave way to works on paper, muslin, canvas, and occasionally commercially prepared cow or buffalo hides.
Changes in the content of pictographic art, the rapid adjustment of Plains artists to the relatively small size of a sheet of ledger paper, and the wealth of detail possible with new coloring materials, marks Plains ledger drawings as a new form of Native American art. As such, ledger painting portrays a transitional expression of art and material culture that links traditional (pre-reservation) Plains painting to the Plains and Pueblo Indian painting styles that emerged during the 1920s in Indian schools in Oklahoma and New Mexico.
Beginning in the early 1860s, Plains Indian men adapted their representational style of painting to paper in the form of accountants ledger books. Traditional paints and bone and stick brushes used to paint on hide gave way to new implements such as colored pencils, crayon, and occasionally water color paints. Plains artists acquired paper and new drawing materials in trade, or as booty after a military engagement, or from a raid. Initially, the content of ledger drawings continued the tradition of depicting of military exploits and important acts of personal heroism already established in representational painting on buffalo hides and animal skins. As the US government implemented the forced relocation of the Plains peoples to reservations, for all practical purposes completed by the end of the 1870s, Plains artists added scenes of ceremony and daily life from before the reservation to the repertoire of their artwork, reflecting the social and cultural changes brought by life on the reservation within the larger context of forced assimilation.
To Imagine a Form of Language is to Imagine a Form of Life
- Posted: 08.Jun.2008.
"To Imagine a Form of Language is to Imagine a Form of Life" - Cy Twombly
Straight to my PrimatePoetic and BacterioPoetic and EthnoPoetic heart this one, found at the excellent 83Russel
- Posted: 08.Jun.2008.
"To Imagine a Form of Language is to Imagine a Form of Life" - Cy Twombly
Straight to my PrimatePoetic and BacterioPoetic and EthnoPoetic heart this one, found at the excellent 83Russel
Primitive Doodling!
- Posted: 26.May.2008.
Great find over at MySpace, residue offers a nice selections of doodles and primitivism-inspired 3D artpieces.
- Posted: 26.May.2008.
Great find over at MySpace, residue offers a nice selections of doodles and primitivism-inspired 3D artpieces.
Progressive Neuro-Structucal Damage and Art
- Posted: 21.May.2008.
(Click for full size)
Image of a migraine by Anne Adams, who was drawn to structure and repetition. She had a rare disease that changes connections between parts of the brain. The most amazing thing is to see how her art changes as her conditions worsens.
- Posted: 21.May.2008.
(Click for full size)
Image of a migraine by Anne Adams, who was drawn to structure and repetition. She had a rare disease that changes connections between parts of the brain. The most amazing thing is to see how her art changes as her conditions worsens.
Doodle of a Mind
- Posted: 19.May.2008.
Flickr is the Ego-boost for every Doodle-King and Queen. A psychogeography of neuronic pathways.
- Posted: 19.May.2008.
Flickr is the Ego-boost for every Doodle-King and Queen. A psychogeography of neuronic pathways.
I imagined this doodle was just pathways in my mind - I tried to create this subconsciously allowing some tiny decision-making neurons to decide whether a line should go left, right, straight ahead, or end. So far, the drawing kind of looks like a brain - funny how that worked out.
Calligraphy by Simon Vinkenoog
- Posted: 19.May.2008.
(Click for full size)
Tim Gaze of Asemic was friedly enough to email 4 scans of calligrahy by Dutch new-age-sixties posterboy Simon Vinkenoog. Enriching material for our Doodle tag.
Sources are:
"And the eye became a rainbow" a selection of poetry & a few visual
poems, translated into english by Cornelis Vleeskens. published by
Cornelis's imprint Fling Poetry, Melbourne, 1990.
"Vreugdevuur" a book of poetry & brutal calligraphy, published by
Uitgeverij Passage, Groningen, 1998.
How strange to learn this from some dude in Oz!!
- Posted: 19.May.2008.
(Click for full size)
Tim Gaze of Asemic was friedly enough to email 4 scans of calligrahy by Dutch new-age-sixties posterboy Simon Vinkenoog. Enriching material for our Doodle tag.
Sources are:
"And the eye became a rainbow" a selection of poetry & a few visual
poems, translated into english by Cornelis Vleeskens. published by
Cornelis's imprint Fling Poetry, Melbourne, 1990.
"Vreugdevuur" a book of poetry & brutal calligraphy, published by
Uitgeverij Passage, Groningen, 1998.
How strange to learn this from some dude in Oz!!
Undoing the Doodle
- Posted: 13.May.2008.
Given the fact that Sumerian cuneiform is 5000 years old it is rather remarkable that we know how it developed. Can we look at this drift away from the image (how Pound) as a moving away from the doodle into logic?
- Posted: 13.May.2008.
Given the fact that Sumerian cuneiform is 5000 years old it is rather remarkable that we know how it developed. Can we look at this drift away from the image (how Pound) as a moving away from the doodle into logic?
The cuneiform script began as pictographic writing; each sign was a picture of one or more concrete objects and represented a word whose meaning was identical with, or closely related to, the object pictured. The defects of a system of this type are obvious; the complicated form of the signs and the huge number of signs required, render it too unwieldy for practical use. The Sumerian scribes overcame the first difficulty by gradually simplifying and conventionalizing the form of the signs until their pictographic origin was no longer apparent. As for the second difficulty, they reduced the number of signs and kept it within effective limits by resorting to various helpful devices. The most significant of these consisted of Substituting phonetic for ideographic values.
No. 11 is a picture of a water stream; it represents the word a, "water." This sign furnishes an excellent illustration of the process by which the Sumerian script gradually lost its unwieldy pictographic character and became a phonetic system of writing. As just said, the sign no. 11 was used primarily to represent the Sumerian word a, "water." However, the Sumerians had another word a which was identical in pronunciation with the word a, "water," but which had the entirely different meaning "in." Now this word "in" is a word denoting relationship and stands for a concept which is very difficult to express pictographically. To the originators of the Sumerian script then came the ingenious idea that instead of trying to invent a necessarily highly complicated picture-sign to represent the word "in," they could use the sign for a, "water," since both words sounded exactly alike. In other words, the early Sumerian scribes came to realize that a sign originally belonging to a given word could be used for another word with an altogether unrelated meaning, if the sound of the two words were identical. With the gradual spreading of this practice, the Sumerian script lost its pictographic character and tended more and more to become a purely phonetic script.
Human Faces are Racist Caricatures
- Posted: 12.May.2008.
Oh my... the hatred of man. From Magin Berenguer's 'Prehistoric Man and His Art'. Notice the great non-human looking pictures, are these Walt Disney's?
- Posted: 12.May.2008.
Oh my... the hatred of man. From Magin Berenguer's 'Prehistoric Man and His Art'. Notice the great non-human looking pictures, are these Walt Disney's?
This series of portraits of bestial individuals cannot represent Cromagnon man. Nevertheless, the portraits are his work. In my opinion, Cromagnon man created these contemptuous and cruelly satirical representations to allude to individuals of another race with which he shared the lands of ancient Europe. [The Neanderthal!]
Transylvanian Doodles
- Posted: 06.Jan.2009.
(Click for full size)
If I am right the above is an overview of incised script-like signs [now referred to as the "Old European (OE) script"] found on artefacts dating to the middle Neolithic Vinèa-Tordos culture of Yugoslavia and western Romania.
These signs were first discovered the late 19th century excavation at the site of Tordos in Transylvania. There is even a speculative link to proto-writing found in China.
- Posted: 06.Jan.2009.
(Click for full size)
If I am right the above is an overview of incised script-like signs [now referred to as the "Old European (OE) script"] found on artefacts dating to the middle Neolithic Vinèa-Tordos culture of Yugoslavia and western Romania.
These signs were first discovered the late 19th century excavation at the site of Tordos in Transylvania. There is even a speculative link to proto-writing found in China.
The Engraved Cortex from Qafzeh: The Berekhat Ram Figurine
- Posted: 24.Dec.2008.
From "Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music—An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective" (PDF-link):
- Posted: 24.Dec.2008.
From "Archaeological Evidence for the Emergence of Language, Symbolism, and Music—An Alternative Multidisciplinary Perspective" (PDF-link):
Dated to approximately 233,000 B.P., this “figurine” would be the oldest known example of representational art and thus symbolism.
Volcanic materials, however, can take on a variety of forms during the processes of eruption and cooling, thus calling the object’s anthropogenic nature into question. A recent study based on optical and scanning electron microscopy and experimental reproduction of the object’s grooves and abrasions demonstrates that this artifact was purposely modified by hominids. Whether or not it is truly a figurine, however, remains an open question, although arguments have been made for its having a non-utilitarian purpose. Other artifacts from Israel include an engraved cortex, and perforated and ocher marine shells from the site of Qafzeh, associated with burials of AMH. They date to between 90,000 and 100,000 B.P. The Qafzeh piece is a broken Levallois core measuring 6.2 cm in maximum length, with its cortical face marked with incised lines. While the lack of patterning in these lines makes it difficult to determine whether it can be taken as evidence of symbolic use, the lines are inconsistent with trampling and gnawing. Furthermore, many of the lines are shorter than one would expect. Cutmarks produced through experimental butchering and experimental work on cortices suggest that changes in the direction of tool incisions and the presence of curves are not typical of cutmarks. These observations suggest that this “artifact” may be non-utilitarian.
Aboriginal Sand Talk
- Posted: 04.Dec.2008.
EthnoDoodling :
"In Central Australia, you often see Aboriginal people sitting on the ground, talking, and simultaneously drawing on the sand, smoothing it over when they've finished a point, and starting again. They might be recounting places along a journey, listing family members, drawing maps, or describing the movement of characters in a story. I'll call this 'sand talk'."
- Posted: 04.Dec.2008.
EthnoDoodling :
"In Central Australia, you often see Aboriginal people sitting on the ground, talking, and simultaneously drawing on the sand, smoothing it over when they've finished a point, and starting again. They might be recounting places along a journey, listing family members, drawing maps, or describing the movement of characters in a story. I'll call this 'sand talk'."
Yamaoka Tesshū's Changing Signature
- Posted: 21.Nov.2008.
Yamaoka Tesshū (Edo, 1836–1888) believed that swordsmanship, Zen and calligraphy are identical in their aspiration to the state of ‘no-mind’.In the reproductions of Tesshū's signatures from the age of 37 to 52, it is possible to observe this further. Examples (c) and (d) are especially interesting as they show the remarkable change in stability and depth in his signature that came about as a result of his enlightenment. The line of the signature becomes increasingly refined and elegant towards the end of his life, as seen in examples (g) and (h).
- Posted: 21.Nov.2008.
Yamaoka Tesshū (Edo, 1836–1888) believed that swordsmanship, Zen and calligraphy are identical in their aspiration to the state of ‘no-mind’.In the reproductions of Tesshū's signatures from the age of 37 to 52, it is possible to observe this further. Examples (c) and (d) are especially interesting as they show the remarkable change in stability and depth in his signature that came about as a result of his enlightenment. The line of the signature becomes increasingly refined and elegant towards the end of his life, as seen in examples (g) and (h).
Gods on a Stick
- Posted: 19.Nov.2008.
Carved sticks representing the Mâori gods Tûmatauenga (god of war), Tâhirimâtea (storm god), Tâne (god of forests), Tangaroa (sea god), Rongo (god of cultivated plants and peace), and Haumia (god of wild food plants), New Zealand, 19th century.
- Posted: 19.Nov.2008.
Carved sticks representing the Mâori gods Tûmatauenga (god of war), Tâhirimâtea (storm god), Tâne (god of forests), Tangaroa (sea god), Rongo (god of cultivated plants and peace), and Haumia (god of wild food plants), New Zealand, 19th century.
The Falling Stars as Recorded in the Winter Counts
- Posted: 16.Nov.2008.
(Click for full size)
The winter counts of 1832-34 all mention falling stars:
Winter of the falling stars - Shooting stars - Stars fell - Shower of stars - Many stars fell - The stars fell - Dakotas saw magnificent meteor showers; they were much afraid - Pictograph of stars - The stars move - Shifting stars - The stars changed positions
etc etc. At this website these pictographs and others EthnoAstronomy related images are to be found.
- Posted: 16.Nov.2008.
(Click for full size)
The winter counts of 1832-34 all mention falling stars:
Winter of the falling stars - Shooting stars - Stars fell - Shower of stars - Many stars fell - The stars fell - Dakotas saw magnificent meteor showers; they were much afraid - Pictograph of stars - The stars move - Shifting stars - The stars changed positions
etc etc. At this website these pictographs and others EthnoAstronomy related images are to be found.
Lo! I can See!!
- Posted: 12.Nov.2008.
S.D. is a man born in 1906 who lost effective sight in both eyes at about ten months of age, and after fifty years as a blind person received corneal grafts to restore his sight. 'Recovery from Early Blindness' is a case-study by R L Gregory and J G Wallace about the predicament of this man. There are two quotes from history:
Images:
The Patient’s First Drawing: This drawing of a cobbler’s chipping hammer was made in our presence on the 48th day after the first operation.
Drawing of a Bus (48 days after the first operation).
Patient’s Drawing of his Own House.
Drawing of a Man. (48 days after the first operation).
Before he saw the animals, we asked S.B. to draw an elephant as he imagined it would look.
- Posted: 12.Nov.2008.
S.D. is a man born in 1906 who lost effective sight in both eyes at about ten months of age, and after fifty years as a blind person received corneal grafts to restore his sight. 'Recovery from Early Blindness' is a case-study by R L Gregory and J G Wallace about the predicament of this man. There are two quotes from history:
René Descartes (1596 - 1650) in a famous passage in his Dioptrics (1637), considers how a blind man might build up a perceptual world by tapping objects round him with a stick. He first considers a sighted person using a stick in darkness, and says "... without long practice this kind of sensation is rather confused and dim; but if you take men born blind, who have made use of such sensations all their life, you will find they feel things with perfect exactness that one might almost say that they see with their hands ..." Descartes goes on to argue that normal vision resembles a blind man exploring and building up his sense world by successive probes with his stick.
John Locke (1632 - 1704) once received a letter from Molyneux in which was posed the now celebrated question: "Suppose a man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a cube and a sphere of the same metal. Suppose then the cube and sphere were placed on a table, and the blind man made to see: query, whether by his sight, before he touched them, could he distinguish and tell which was the globe and which the cube? . . . . The acute and judicious proposer answers: not. For though he has obtained the experience of how the globe, how the cube, affects his touch, yet he has not yet attained the experience that what affects his touch so or so, must affect his sight, so or so. . . ." In the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1690, Locke comments as follows: - " I agree with this thinking gentleman, whom I am proud to call my friend, in his answer to this his problem; and am of the opinion that the blind man, at first, would not be able with certainty to say which was the globe, which the cube. . . ."
Images:
The Patient’s First Drawing: This drawing of a cobbler’s chipping hammer was made in our presence on the 48th day after the first operation.
Drawing of a Bus (48 days after the first operation).
Patient’s Drawing of his Own House.
Drawing of a Man. (48 days after the first operation).
Before he saw the animals, we asked S.B. to draw an elephant as he imagined it would look.
First Contact Eskimo Drawing
- Posted: 12.Nov.2008.
Tim Gaze found something on his harddisk, can we all agree on calling these things 'first contact drawings'?:
It’s a scan from the book The Art of Greenland, by Bodil Kaalund (Uni of California, 1983), which is a translation of Grønlands kunst.
A Danish explorer introduced a hunter & shaman named Ajukutoq to pencil & paper.
Ajukutoq immediately drew the lines in the image attached. he said they were a woman’s thoughts & a dog’s thoughts.
I’m not sure if the writing is by the explorer, but the oscillating lines were definitely drawn by Ajukutoq.
- Posted: 12.Nov.2008.
Tim Gaze found something on his harddisk, can we all agree on calling these things 'first contact drawings'?:
It’s a scan from the book The Art of Greenland, by Bodil Kaalund (Uni of California, 1983), which is a translation of Grønlands kunst.
A Danish explorer introduced a hunter & shaman named Ajukutoq to pencil & paper.
Ajukutoq immediately drew the lines in the image attached. he said they were a woman’s thoughts & a dog’s thoughts.
I’m not sure if the writing is by the explorer, but the oscillating lines were definitely drawn by Ajukutoq.
A Mountain Village In Clearing Mist
- Posted: 05.Nov.2008.
(Click for full size)
From Aspen Magazine a fragment on the little minds by Ying Yu-chien’s:
- Posted: 05.Nov.2008.
(Click for full size)
From Aspen Magazine a fragment on the little minds by Ying Yu-chien’s:
This "spilled-ink" painting, is done in the free-spontaneous style of the Ch'an monks of the 11th-century China (southern Sung), which later developed into the Sumiye painting of Japan.
Here the philosophy of sudden enlightenment is pictorialized. Just as the sage might see the truth in a flash, so the artist, seized by inspiration, could paint his picture in a matter of minutes.
...
The painting on the scroll is only a projection of the one which exists in the master's mind, a record of the thing that flashed across the mirror of his soul. It may have been provoked by an incident or an object, but it is no longer the event or the shape that counts, but its repercussion, the indelible traces that it left on the mind. The thing itself becomes a vibration of life; how much it conveys or expresses will depend on the sensitiveness of the receiver and the immediate response of the transmitting instruments. No painter who did not possess a full command of the technical means could ever transmit such fleeting glimpses or momentary reflections from a realm beyond sensual perception.
Some Drawings
- Posted: 09.Oct.2008.
Rare book auctions sometimes offer images otherwise unavailable. Above Raoul Hausmann (an image that reminds me of ape-art) and below a linocut by hans Arp published in 1951.
- Posted: 09.Oct.2008.
Rare book auctions sometimes offer images otherwise unavailable. Above Raoul Hausmann (an image that reminds me of ape-art) and below a linocut by hans Arp published in 1951.
Savage Holiday Snapshots
- Posted: 06.Oct.2008.
Ambrym is an island in the archipelago of Vanuatu in Oceanie. Clearly you can go there on a ethno-cruise and be given the Bruce Parry treatment of atavistic tribalism. Apart from these sand-drawings you can find images of raves, masks and statues.
- Posted: 06.Oct.2008.
Ambrym is an island in the archipelago of Vanuatu in Oceanie. Clearly you can go there on a ethno-cruise and be given the Bruce Parry treatment of atavistic tribalism. Apart from these sand-drawings you can find images of raves, masks and statues.
Victor Hugo's Drawing/Drifting into his own Psyche
- Posted: 03.Oct.2008.
For his proto-surrealist 'spirit drawings' Victor Hugo was heralded by Breton as a precursor. These drawings I have never seen but it now appears that Hugo was a very accomplished visual artist who did not shun 'modern' experiment. "He would not hesitate to use his children's stencils, ink blots, puddles and stains, lace impressions, "pliage" or folding (i.e. Rorschach blots), "grattage" or rubbing, often using the charcoal from match sticks or his fingers instead of pen or brush. Sometimes he would even toss in coffee or soot to get the effects he wanted. It is reported that Hugo often drew with his left hand or without looking at the page, or during Spiritualist séances, in order to access his unconscious mind."
- Posted: 03.Oct.2008.
For his proto-surrealist 'spirit drawings' Victor Hugo was heralded by Breton as a precursor. These drawings I have never seen but it now appears that Hugo was a very accomplished visual artist who did not shun 'modern' experiment. "He would not hesitate to use his children's stencils, ink blots, puddles and stains, lace impressions, "pliage" or folding (i.e. Rorschach blots), "grattage" or rubbing, often using the charcoal from match sticks or his fingers instead of pen or brush. Sometimes he would even toss in coffee or soot to get the effects he wanted. It is reported that Hugo often drew with his left hand or without looking at the page, or during Spiritualist séances, in order to access his unconscious mind."
Yage Visions on Paper
- Posted: 02.Oct.2008.
Above: Golden spheres revolve about the shaman; to his left is a giant butterfly demon. The swirling field of spheres is the "spirit of natema".
Below: A "trip." The forked lines represent the two different routes the shaman took to two white men's towns (indicated by crosses). He found one
of the trails beautifully decorated with beads (shown as pendant circles).
Text inlude the first known Western Description of yage.
- Posted: 02.Oct.2008.
Above: Golden spheres revolve about the shaman; to his left is a giant butterfly demon. The swirling field of spheres is the "spirit of natema".
Below: A "trip." The forked lines represent the two different routes the shaman took to two white men's towns (indicated by crosses). He found one
of the trails beautifully decorated with beads (shown as pendant circles).
Text inlude the first known Western Description of yage.
The Evolution of Decorative Motives of North American Indians
- Posted: 26.Sep.2008.
Amongst Frans Boas' many works we find a little publication about the art of the North American Indians. As you can find in his major works on the subject his opinions about the 'primitive mind' are .... outdated (?).
- Posted: 26.Sep.2008.
Amongst Frans Boas' many works we find a little publication about the art of the North American Indians. As you can find in his major works on the subject his opinions about the 'primitive mind' are .... outdated (?).
We may express this fact also by saying that the history of the artistic development of a people, and the style that they have developed at any given time, predetermine the method by which they express their ideas in decorative art; and that the type of ideas that a people is accustomed to express by means of decorative art predetermines the explanation that will be given to a new design. It would therefore seem that there are certain typical associations between ideas and forms which become established, and which are used for artistic expression. The idea which a design expresses at the present time is not necessarily a clew to its history. It seems probable that idea and style exist independently, and influence each other constantly.
For the present it remains an open question, why the tendency to form associations between certain ideas and decorative motives is so strong among all primitive people. The tendency is evidently similar to that observed among children who enjoy interpreting simple forms as objects to which the form has a slight resemblance; and this, in turn, may bear some relation to the peculiar character of realism in primitive art, to which I believe Von den Steinen was the first to draw attention. The primitive artist does not attempt to draw what he sees, but merely combines what are to his mind the characteristic features of an object, without regard to their actual space relation in the visual image. For this reason he may also be more ready than we are to consider some characteristic feature as symbolic of an object, and thus associate forms and objects in ways that seem to us unexpected.
We do not see
- Posted: 19.Sep.2008.
We do not see things as they are,
we see them as we are.
Anais Nin
- Posted: 19.Sep.2008.
We do not see things as they are,
we see them as we are.
Anais Nin
Figures Pressed as Plants are Pressed in a Herbarium
- Posted: 30.Jul.2009.
Excerpt from Ernst Mach's 'Why Has Man Two Eyes' (1897) on the art of perspective in the art of the 'childlike people'of ancient egypt. Pic
- Posted: 30.Jul.2009.
Excerpt from Ernst Mach's 'Why Has Man Two Eyes' (1897) on the art of perspective in the art of the 'childlike people'of ancient egypt. Pic
Let us look at a few historical facts. I shall not take you as far back as the stone age, although we possess sketches from this epoch which show very original ideas of perspective. But let us begin our sightseeing in the tombs and ruined temples of ancient Egypt, where the numberless reliefs and gorgeous colorings have defied the ravages of thousands of years.
A rich and motley life is here opened to us. We find the Egyptians represented in all conditions of life. What at once strikes our attention in these pictures is the delicacy of their technical execution. The contours are extremely exact and distinct. But on the other hand only a few bright colors are found, unblended and without trace of transition. Shadows are totally wanting. The paint is laid on the surfaces in equal thicknesses.
Shocking for the modern eye is the perspective. All the figures are equally large, with the exception of the king, whose form is unduly exaggerated. Near and far appear equally large. Perspective contraction is nowhere employed. A pond with waterfowl is represented flat, as if its surface were vertical. Human figures are portrayed as they are never seen, the legs from the side, the face in profile. The breast lies in its full breadth across the plane of representation. The heads of cattle appear in profile, while the horns lie in the plane of the drawing. The principle which the Egyptians followed might be best expressed by saying that their figures are pressed in the plane of the drawing as plants are pressed in a herbarium.
The matter is simply explained. If the Egyptians were accustomed to looking at things ingenuously with both eyes at once, the construction of perspective pictures in space could not be familiar to them. They saw all arms, all legs on real men in their natural lengths. The figures pressed into the planes resembled more closely, of course, in their eyes the originals than perspective pictures could.
This will be better understood if we reflect that painting was developed from relief. The minor dissimilarities between the pressed figures and the originals must gradually have compelled men to the adoption of perspective drawing. But physiologically the painting of the Egyptions is just as much justified as the drawings of our children are.
Patterns in the Sun
- Posted: 29.Jul.2009.
Reread 'Six Records of a Floating Life' by Shen Fu and found this rather brilliant quote, a Chinese phrasing of the old and famous Da Vinci statement:
- Posted: 29.Jul.2009.
Reread 'Six Records of a Floating Life' by Shen Fu and found this rather brilliant quote, a Chinese phrasing of the old and famous Da Vinci statement:
When I was small I could stare directly in the sun with my eyes wide open. I could see the smallest things clearly and often took an almost mystic pleasure in making out the patterns on them.
During the summer, whenever I heard the sound of mosquitoes swarming, I would pretend they were a flock of cranes dancing across the open sky, and in my imagination they actually would become hundreds of cranes. I would look at them so long my neck became stiff. At night I would let mosquitoes inside my mosquito netting, blew smoke at them, and imagine that what I saw were white cranes soaring through blue clouds. It really did look like cranes flying among the clouds, and it was a sight that delighted me.
I would often squat down by unkempt grassy places in flower bed or by niches in walls, low enough so that my head was level with them, and concentrate so carefully that to me the grass became a forest and the insects became animals. Imagining that small mounds of earth were hills and that shallow holes were valleys, I let my spirit wonder there in happiness and contentment.
Californian Scraper
- Posted: 08.Jul.2009.
I'm NOT making this up: "Based on the images of this object, I tentatively suggest it is a decorated scraper, with zoomorphic shape; figuration resembles a 'bison', an image of a bison placed below for sake of comparison. The piece has a section of remaining cortex that is remarkably analogous to the molt pattern on the bison. Note the image appears to show fine tiny flake removals at area of 'bison's eye'. Also note natural or intentionally flaked 'hump' of 'spine at shoulders' that almost preciesly matches that of actual bison."
- Posted: 08.Jul.2009.
I'm NOT making this up: "Based on the images of this object, I tentatively suggest it is a decorated scraper, with zoomorphic shape; figuration resembles a 'bison', an image of a bison placed below for sake of comparison. The piece has a section of remaining cortex that is remarkably analogous to the molt pattern on the bison. Note the image appears to show fine tiny flake removals at area of 'bison's eye'. Also note natural or intentionally flaked 'hump' of 'spine at shoulders' that almost preciesly matches that of actual bison."
Caduveo Face by a Caduveon Woman
- Posted: 07.Jul.2009.
Drawing by a 30 year old Caduveo woman of face tatoo and face. From.
- Posted: 07.Jul.2009.
Drawing by a 30 year old Caduveo woman of face tatoo and face. From.
My Face Tattoo is My Signature
- Posted: 06.Jul.2009.
(Click for full size)
A Maori chief, according to Ebin Maori Face tattoos are so typical that chiefs used them to sign treatises with the English. Such as below
- Posted: 06.Jul.2009.
(Click for full size)
A Maori chief, according to Ebin Maori Face tattoos are so typical that chiefs used them to sign treatises with the English. Such as below
Asymetrical Caduveo Designs
- Posted: 05.Jul.2009.
(Click for full size)
Of all Caduveo facepaint this one might be the most spectacular for its radical asymetrical pattern.
- Posted: 05.Jul.2009.
(Click for full size)
Of all Caduveo facepaint this one might be the most spectacular for its radical asymetrical pattern.
Dream Machine Technician Sees Bigger Picture
- Posted: 17.Jun.2009.
Ian Sommerville in 1962, (See Previous.):
The elements of pattern which have been recorded by subjects under flicker show a clear affinity with the designs found in prehistoric rock-carving, painting, and idols of world-wide distribution: India, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Mexico, Norway and Ireland. They are found also in the arts of many primitive peoples of Australia, Melanesia, West Africa, South Africa, Central America and the Amazon. Children's drawings often spontaneously depict them and in modern art (Klee, Miro, etc) they are to be recognized in profusion
- Posted: 17.Jun.2009.
Ian Sommerville in 1962, (See Previous.):
The elements of pattern which have been recorded by subjects under flicker show a clear affinity with the designs found in prehistoric rock-carving, painting, and idols of world-wide distribution: India, Czechoslovakia, Spain, Mexico, Norway and Ireland. They are found also in the arts of many primitive peoples of Australia, Melanesia, West Africa, South Africa, Central America and the Amazon. Children's drawings often spontaneously depict them and in modern art (Klee, Miro, etc) they are to be recognized in profusion
A Many Million-To-One-Chance
- Posted: 17.Jun.2009.
Here is a 1962 piece by Brion Gysin which appeared in Olympia Magazine along with a text by Ian Sommerville. Copied from "Back in No Time", the Brion Gysin Reader. The primate bit at the end is ... noteworthy. The picture shows Gysin and Sommerville together.
- Posted: 17.Jun.2009.
Here is a 1962 piece by Brion Gysin which appeared in Olympia Magazine along with a text by Ian Sommerville. Copied from "Back in No Time", the Brion Gysin Reader. The primate bit at the end is ... noteworthy. The picture shows Gysin and Sommerville together.
Dream Machine, by Brion Gysin
Had a transcendental storm of colour visions today in the bus going to Marseille. We ran through a long avenue of trees and I closed my eyes against the setting sun. An overwhelming flood of intensely bright patterns in supernatural colours exploded behind my eyelids: a multidimensional kaleidoscope whirling out through space. I was swept out of time. I was in a world of infinite number. The vision stopped abruptly as we left the trees. Was that a vision? What happened to me?
This is an entry in my journal, dated December 21, 1958.
I found out exactly what had happened to me when, in 1960, William Burroughs gave me to read ‘The Living Brain’ by William Grey Walter. I learned that I had been subjected to flicker, not by a stroboscope, but by the sun whose light had been at a precise rate per second by the evenly spaced trees as I raced by. A many million-to-one-chance. My experience utterly changed the subject and style of my painting. Walter in this connection makes the magnificent surmise: “… Perhaps, in a similar way,, our arboreal cousins, struck by the setting sun in the midst of a jungle caper, may have fallen from perch to plain, sadder but wiser apes.”
Ian Sommerville, who had also read Walter, wrote me from Cambridge on Februari 15, 1960: "I have made a simple flicker machine. You look at it with your eyes shut and the flicker plays over your eyelids. Visions start with a kaleidescope of colours on a plane in front of the eyes and gradually become more complex and beautiful, breaking like surf on a shore until whole patterns of colour are pounding to get in. After a while the visions were permanently behind my eyes and I was in the middle of the whole scene with limitless patterns being generated around me. There was an almost unbearable feeling of spatial movement for a while but it was well worth getting through, for I found that when it stopped I was high above the Earth in a universal blaze of glory. Afterwards I found that my perception of the world around me had increased very notably. All conceptions of being drugged or tired had dropped away..."
I made a “machine” from his ensuing description and added to it an interior cylinder covered with a type of painting I have invented in the three years since my first flickr experience.
Flicker may prove to be a valid instrument of practical psychology: some people see and others do not. The Dream Machine, with its patterns visible to the open eye, induces people to see. The fluctuating elements of flickered design support the development of autonomous “movies”, intensely pleasurable and, possibly, instructive to the viewer.
What is art? What is color? What is vision? These old questions demand new answers when, in the light of the Dream Machine one sees all of ancient and modern abstract art with eyes closed.
In the Dream Machine nothing would seem to be unique. Rather the elements seen in endless repetition, looping out through numbers beyond number and back, show themselves to a thereby a part of the whole. This, surely approaches the visions of which the mystics have spoken; suggesting as they did that it was a unique experience.
Art has been confounded with the art object – the stone, the canvas, the paint – and has been valued because, like the mystic experience, it was supposed to be unique. Marcel Duchamp was, no doubt, the first to recognize an element of the infinite in the Ready-Made – our industrial objects manufactured in “infinite” series. The Dream Machine may very well show you an eternal series of gas jets burning with an unearthly flame, but to dub an individual gas jet a “unique art object” by adding the artist’s signature, is to make the elementary mistake of taking the tangible world for the visible world.
My first experience of natural flicker through the trees made me realize that one and only thing which cannot be taken from the picture is light – everything else can be utterly transmuted or can go. The Dream Machine may bring about a chance of consciousness inasmuch as it throws back the limits of visible world and may, indeed, prove that there are no limits.
When I had seen some hundred hours of flicker, I thought of William Grey Walter and his vision of the first mutated ape being knocked out of the trees in the primeval forest by the flicker of the sun through the branches, and I wrote:
“One ready ape hit the ground and the impact knocked a word out of him. Maybe he had an infect throat. He spoke. In the Word was his beginning. He looked and saw the world differently. He was one changed ape. I look about now and see the world differently. Colors are brighter and more intense – traffic nights at night glow like immense jewels. The ape became a man. It must be possible to become something more than a man.”
Lumpy Venus
- Posted: 17.Jun.2009.
A clay venus figurine 8000-9000 years old in the archaeological site of Jarmo, Iraq. Found in 'Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart'. The Goddess as anti-Icarus, anti-astronaut??
- Posted: 17.Jun.2009.
A clay venus figurine 8000-9000 years old in the archaeological site of Jarmo, Iraq. Found in 'Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart'. The Goddess as anti-Icarus, anti-astronaut??
Archaeologists found thousands of clay figurines at Jarmo, both animal and human. Many of the small, crudely sculpted female figurines from 6750 B.C.E. sit on heavy thighs. This goddess is immense, slow moving, and weighs down the earth's surface. Her bulk is reminiscent of the earlier thirty thousand year-old female figurines found from Spain to Russia. The continuity of this tradition seems to be an expression of the believe in the immanence of the divine. The ample goddess can represent the sheer weight of matter that binds humanity to earth.
Abstract Neanderthal Art
- Posted: 16.Jun.2009.
This rare stone tool was fashioned by Neanderthals over 40,000 years ago out of gem-grade jasper, it has been up for sale (sold for an unknown price (would you buy it if you could afford it?)) and the website claims that in the yellow rectangle there is an "ABSTRACT IMAGE OF REINDEER HEAD LOOKING RIGHT WITH TALL ANTLER RACK AND BLOOD SPEWING DOWN FROM MOUTH". I don't see it yet but that is just me. To quote from the website:
- Posted: 16.Jun.2009.
This rare stone tool was fashioned by Neanderthals over 40,000 years ago out of gem-grade jasper, it has been up for sale (sold for an unknown price (would you buy it if you could afford it?)) and the website claims that in the yellow rectangle there is an "ABSTRACT IMAGE OF REINDEER HEAD LOOKING RIGHT WITH TALL ANTLER RACK AND BLOOD SPEWING DOWN FROM MOUTH". I don't see it yet but that is just me. To quote from the website:
There is a unique image in the pattern on one side that some may find "a stretch" to suppose until one studies the abstract renditions of large prehistoric beasts in the famous cave paintings of the region from later periods. A beautiful, naturally-occurring pattern in the jasper depicts the head of a large reindeer with a full antler rack and blood spewing from its mouth. Reindeer were as important to Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons as much as the bison were to the North American Indian. These beasts roamed in large herds and were the key to human survival during the Ice Age. Everything from bone, fur, meat and sinew would have been utilized from the Ice Age reindeer. Scientific discoveries in the recent decades have proven that Neanderthals had a mind more advanced than we originally thought. Furthermore, several rare abstract zoomorphic knapped objects of animals made by Neanderthals in this jasper have been found at Fontmaure. It is highly feasible to suppose that what can be readily seen as a reindeer head in this knife by you and me would have also been easily recognized by Neanderthals that relied on these animals for their very existence! The debate as to the extent of Neanderthal art is still an open topic but evidence suggests it was more extensive than we originally gave the Neanderthaler credit for.
70.000 Year Old Art
- Posted: 04.Jul.2007.
A scratched Ochre plate recovered from Middle Stone Age layers at Blombos Cave, 290 kilometres (180 miles) east of Cape Town. "There is a system to the patterns.". The BBC covered it, while this is the (popular-)academic page:
- Posted: 04.Jul.2007.
A scratched Ochre plate recovered from Middle Stone Age layers at Blombos Cave, 290 kilometres (180 miles) east of Cape Town. "There is a system to the patterns.". The BBC covered it, while this is the (popular-)academic page:
The criss-cross patterns formed are almost certainly symbolic and the meaning behind the designs made by the maker(s) must surely have been understood by community members.
We are unable to precisely determine what these designs mean as the thought processes of people who lived that long ago are not easily accessible through only their material culture. There is considerable debate as to whether these designs can be called 'art' but the jury is still out. Perhaps, if similar artefacts are recovered at Blombos or other MSA sites in the future we may better understand the reasons for the production of such artefacts.
A Chinese Collision [I Ching, Writing, Doodle]
- Posted: 04.Jul.2007.
The Wilhelm translation of the I Ching begins with a few pages of introduction by Carl Jung. In all its sinoidiocy this is a classic text in the Crystalpunk-Cathay library:
This is the source of the picture; a page about the five original writing systems of ancient China. Shown above are incised marks on pottery from Banbo site, Xi’an, Yang-shao culture (4800-4200 BC), which is DOODLE CULTURE!!!
- Posted: 04.Jul.2007.
The Wilhelm translation of the I Ching begins with a few pages of introduction by Carl Jung. In all its sinoidiocy this is a classic text in the Crystalpunk-Cathay library:
The Chinese mind, as I see it at work in the I Ching, seems to be exclusively preoccupied with the chance aspect of events. What we call coincidence seems to be the chief concern of this peculiar mind, and what we worship as causality passes almost unnoticed. We must admit that there is something to be said for the immense importance of chance. An incalculable amount of human effort is directed to combating and restricting the nuisance or danger represented by chance. Theoretical considerations of cause and effect often look pale and dusty in comparison to the practical results of chance. It is all very well to say that the crystal of quartz is a hexagonal prism. The statement is quite true in so far as an ideal crystal is envisaged. But in nature one finds no two crystals exactly alike, although all are unmistakably hexagonal. The actual form, however, seems to appeal more to the Chinese sage than the ideal one. The jumble of natural laws constituting empirical reality holds more significance for him than a causal explanation of events that, moreover, must usually be separated from one another in order to be properly dealt with.Read the entire text.
This is the source of the picture; a page about the five original writing systems of ancient China. Shown above are incised marks on pottery from Banbo site, Xi’an, Yang-shao culture (4800-4200 BC), which is DOODLE CULTURE!!!
Bouba / Kiki
- Posted: 03.Jul.2007.
Real hardcore Crystalpunks know all about 'maluma' and 'takete'. But the world is a big place and the same Wolfgang Kohler produced a similar test called the Bouba/Kiki Effect. The meaning of this? Language is not arbitary.
- Posted: 03.Jul.2007.
Real hardcore Crystalpunks know all about 'maluma' and 'takete'. But the world is a big place and the same Wolfgang Kohler produced a similar test called the Bouba/Kiki Effect. The meaning of this? Language is not arbitary.
Bill enjoys Himself
- Posted: 24.May.2007.
Bill a 59-year-old Eureka Sequoia Park Zoo chimpanzee has been actively creating art since the early 1990s. has been actively creating art since the early 1990s.
- Posted: 24.May.2007.
Bill a 59-year-old Eureka Sequoia Park Zoo chimpanzee has been actively creating art since the early 1990s. has been actively creating art since the early 1990s.
Art is one of the enrichments offered to Bill.
“We just found that Bill has enjoyed having the canvas and the paint … and he really likes the feel of the brushes,” Roletto said. “Sometimes he prefers to paint his (canvas), sometimes his hands.”
The zoo supplies Bill with nontoxic tempura paints and nontoxic pens.
“He likes to draw as well,” Roletto said.
She said that with enrichments it’s important not to provide them too often, so they stay fresh and engaging.
Roletto said Bill favors the color blue.
“He will have more of it spread out on the canvas than the other colors,” she said.
On a recent Wednesday, Bill did something he generally does not like to do as he has become older. After accepting the canvas and brushes from Roletto, he stayed outside to paint.
He usually takes his materials and goes into his “night house.”
After she applied some colors to the first canvas and handed it to him, along with brushes, Bill put it aside momentarily to eat a banana and some lettuce. Then he pulled the canvas underneath his ladder and began to paint. His brush strokes were tentative at first and then they became quicker and more rhythmic.
“On the whole, animals want to be curious and want to explore and don’t want to sit and do nothing all day,” Roletto said. “We want to come up with as many things … to stimulate his mind and his body.”
Let me draw it for you on this piece of scrap paper laying next the the printer, it will help explain to you what I mean but is very abstract by nature. Thank you very much.
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
From
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
From
Scribbling Stage
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
Children go through a Scribbling stage that is part of their drawing development, a process that goes to clear stages towards larger representational correctness.
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
Children go through a Scribbling stage that is part of their drawing development, a process that goes to clear stages towards larger representational correctness.
Library Crimes!
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
Hilarious collection of pictures: books eaten by mice and dogs, comments and comments on comments, child scriblings.
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
Hilarious collection of pictures: books eaten by mice and dogs, comments and comments on comments, child scriblings.
The Influence of Pesticide on Child Doodles
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
(Click for full size)
The context of this page is a bit unsure but the image speaks volumes. This is a representative drawings of a person by 4-year-old Yaqui children from the valley and foothills of Sonora, Mexico. One has been exposed to pesticide.You do not need to guess which.
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
(Click for full size)
The context of this page is a bit unsure but the image speaks volumes. This is a representative drawings of a person by 4-year-old Yaqui children from the valley and foothills of Sonora, Mexico. One has been exposed to pesticide.You do not need to guess which.
Elephant Scribble?
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
No, it's done by a one-year old child. Seeveral images but some hard needed bits of sense about scriblling'n'doodling
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
No, it's done by a one-year old child. Seeveral images but some hard needed bits of sense about scriblling'n'doodling
Not only is scribbling a motorically pleasurable activity, but children are also interested in the traces that their motor activity leaves on a surface.
- Ellen Winner
Just as the babbling child makes the sounds that will, in combination, becomes words, the scribbling child makes the lines and shapes that will, in combination, become recognizable objects.
- Marjorie Wilson
Presedential Doodling
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
HaHa! Here is a doodle from the hand of Nixon who said of himself that he was “probably a square doodler.” And there are a few more at this pretty little site.
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
HaHa! Here is a doodle from the hand of Nixon who said of himself that he was “probably a square doodler.” And there are a few more at this pretty little site.
Doodling
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
'Doodle' has a Wikipedia page. "A doodle is a type of sketch, an unfocused drawing made while a person's attention is otherwise occupied." There even are famous doodlers: Keats, Emerson, Erasmus. However loooking at original manuscripts of Keats, as they are published online does not show any doodle. But this is not that strange as this is mostly 'official' writing: letters and final draft. He did have a lovely hand of writing.
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
'Doodle' has a Wikipedia page. "A doodle is a type of sketch, an unfocused drawing made while a person's attention is otherwise occupied." There even are famous doodlers: Keats, Emerson, Erasmus. However loooking at original manuscripts of Keats, as they are published online does not show any doodle. But this is not that strange as this is mostly 'official' writing: letters and final draft. He did have a lovely hand of writing.
Does the Chimp's Doodle Look Like Entoptics?
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
In Thomas Wynn's paper 'Archaeology and cognitive evolution' we find the following:
- Posted: 23.May.2007.
In Thomas Wynn's paper 'Archaeology and cognitive evolution' we find the following:
Work with ape art has been of two kinds. In the first, researchers present an ape with appropriate media (finger paints, brushes and paint, etc.) and encourage it to create. In the second, researchers control the productions by supplying paper with pre-dawn patterns. The former is the more "archaeological", in that researchers have not tried to coax particular pattern productions. Perhaps not surprisingly, these spontaneous productions are patterned primarily by motor patterns. Fan shapes are common, as are zig-zags produced by back and forth arm motion.
Desmond Morris(Morris 1962), the most well-known researcher in ape art, thought that these productions may demonstrate a sense of balance, and tried to coax it out with a series of experiments using sheets with stimulus figures already printed on, following the earlier lead of Schiller(Schiller 1951). Morris’s work led to a number of subsequent experiments by others using similar techniques. The results have been enigmatic at best. Most chimpanzees presented with a figure that is offset from the center of the paper will mark on the opposite side, or on the figure itself . Morris suggested, cautiously, that this confirmed a notion of balance. Later Smith(Smith 1973) and Boysen(Boysen, Berntson et al. 1987) confirmed these results, but argued that the pattern resulted from the chimpanzee’s placing marks toward the center of the vacant space; balance was an accident.
It is hard to know what to make of this evidence. First, even with the few experimental subjects, there was a lot of individual variability. Indeed, each chimpanzee had an idiosyncratic approach to both the controlled and uncontrolled drawing. Second, most repetitive patterns resulted from repetitive motor actions. Nevertheless, the individuals did appear to place their marks non-randomly, and did attend to features of the visual field. Other, non-graphic, experiments have indicated that chimpanzees can be taught to select the central element of a linear array(Rohles and Devine 1967), so chimpanzees can clearly perceive patterns in which balance is a component. But they do not appear able to produce symmetrical patterns.
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