On Psychocuspilenticularity

On Psychocuspilenticularity

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How to Look at These Images

Before you continue with this article about how to view these images to best advantage, you must first go back to the index page and read the article on the Where, Why, How, and What of the Images; in that article, I talk about the concept of "psychocuspilenticularity."

You learned from the other article that psychocuspilenticular images are images that can be seen from two advantages (not two physical positions but states of mind, for lack of a better word).

Each of the Galleries on this site contains nine small images. They are purposefully small here to give you the opportunity to view them "from a distance" - a distance from which you will not be able to distinguish much detail but will be better able to see the images as "pure form" or "significant form" only, what Bell conceives of as "lines and colours combined in a particular way, certain forms and relations of forms, (that) stir our aesthetic emotions."

As you view the Galleries, you might be drawn to a given image; that is because the significant form contained in the image is clear enough for you to distinguish. Because each of us is more or less "visually sensitive," the images to which we are drawn will vary as will the clarity of the significant form contained in the images. 

So, begin by just scanning a given Gallery. When you find yourself drawn to a certain image, click on that image.

In your first viewing of the image (on the Gallery page), your sensitivity to the significant form (as opposed to the representational content - the objects the images contain) is strongest.

After clicking on the image, you will see a larger image. Hopefully, this image will be just "far enough away" for you to still see the significant form and to recognize the entities/objects in the images as familiar.

If you right-click on this second image and "open image in new tab," you will be able to enlarge the image (+) to its original size. Here, you will NOT be able to see the significant form of the image because your brain will automatically recognize the objects in the image and your attention will be drawn to the colors and textures of the objects you see. 

You will have lost your "aesthetic distance" - your ability to dissociate yourself from the objects and to see the whole image as pure form.

So each of these images should be viewed an appreciated in three steps:

Step 1 - viewed as pure form (significant form)

Step 2 - viewed "on the cusp" between pure form and representation

Step 3 - viewed as representation of familiar entities

I would like to end here by again quoting Bell on the value of taking these kinds of trips into the world of "aesthetic emotion:"

He who goes daily into the world of aesthetic emotion returns to the world of human affairs equipped to face it courageously and even a little contemptuously. And if by comparison with aesthetic rapture he finds most human passion trivial, he need not on that account become unsympathetic or inhuman.

 

For practical purposes, even, it is possible that the religion of art will serve a man better than the religion of humanity. He may learn in another world to doubt the extreme importance of this, but if that doubt dims his enthusiasm for some things that are truly excellent it will dispel his illusions about many that are not. What he loses in philanthropy he may gain in magnanimity; and because his religion does not begin with an injunction to love all men, it will not end, perhaps, in persuading him to hate most of them.

You need not come daily to this site to experience the joy of psychocuspilenticularity; the images you experience here are not far different from those you see about you in your everyday life, if you would only slow down (and perhaps squint a bit) and see the pure form that surrounds you.