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John Jupe graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art (London University) in 1985 and has been actively painting ever since. He has taken his work to many scientific forums, gaining vital input to the emerging model of visual awareness.
His interest in visual perception comes through intuitive record and an experiential ontology, phenomenology, where vision is prior-to science. Vision occurs to us as complex biological systems and not to our instrumentation.
Artists produce ‘images’ where our current instrumentation produces ‘pictures.’ We observe where our instrumentation merely records what it was designed to interface with. As complex biological systems, our relationship to light, electromagnetic radiation, whatever, is not limited to the interface we have developed as instrumentation. We should not be surprised that our current simulations of reality are limited, as reality is a relationship we form with the real. Reality is not defined by records and the deficit (stuff not showing up in records), is not a matter to be addressed by greater resolution, accuracy or power.
By keeping faith with an experiential ontology, artists have remained consistent and concentric with the nature of reality. A painting contains ‘more than’ a picture. In contrast, for expedience, science has allowed instrumentation to stand in for observation. This expediency has enabled great technological progress to be made, but the disciplines are now pressing hard upon the outer limits of what is achievable given the inherent imitations of that approach methodology. The intellectual expediency involves a ‘sleight of hand,’ one where science claims ‘objectivity’ where in reality, this condition has not been satisfied. Science deploys the word ‘signal’ where it is interfacing with a data-potential. A situation where the limited simulations produced are declared ‘reality’. We must address and understand what’s actually involved us being objective. A painting can take us further than a particle accelerator or radio telescope.
Some aspects of visual art have also succumbed to the same sleight of hand, presenting an obvious or naive situation where so-called ‘photographic realism’ is accepted as ‘realistic’. Conceptual or ideas based art is disengaged from the coalface of the discipline. In many people’s minds the role of visual art has been supplanted by instrumentation which ‘justifies’ the disciplines suppression. Art’s relationship to science is seen by many ‘supporting’ institutions to be one where it illustrates scientific ‘breakthrough!’ Vision-Space identifies that so-called virtual reality ‘VR’ is a misleading if not dangerous misconception. It identifies the frame of reference as being a human construct that conditions all subsequent outcomes. These ‘creations’ along with our data-capture devices act as filters that we place in the way of reality for expediency.
There are no ‘pictures’ in the phenomenon of vision, no picture frames or frames per-second. There is no information structure ‘blur’ and motion blur does not occur. There is no depth-of-field. As there are no ‘pictures’ to ‘fuse’ there is no binocular fusion occurring. The entire picture paradigm is only remotely or at best only superficially related to ‘observation.’
The notion that a visual encounter is akin to a camera and its data-capture process panning a real setting is infantile. The inevitable and unavoidable corollary of this is that conceptualisation of the universe based upon the frame of reference and mechanical record is similarly, infantile.
Vision-Space is a new form of illusionary space based on what we can discern on an experiential basis as being consistent with perceptual structure as opposed to mere compliance with optical projection or the the arbitrary geometry of central perspective. In terms of technology, TRIZ analysis identifies Vision-Space as a paradigm shift for all forms of information display and the way we interact with them. We have the basis of the first perceptual technology. With the basis of Vision-Space identified we can appreciate that visual artists (17-21C) have been incrementally moving away from pictorial space to the identification of aspects of perceptual structure and by so doing, deepening our relationship with real. It is now time to formally model visual awareness, use this to instruct our investigations of the visual system and brain function. This will, in turn, allow us to reevaluate retinal function and it’s interface with environmentally conditioned light. The understandings will allow us to ‘observe’ better and more meaningfully at all scales.
Vision-Space actually articulates a new approach methodology for science. One that will take us beyond the limitations of the existing paradigm, constrained as it is by the assumptions that underpin it. We cannot be taken out of an act of observation. What is missing from scientific records is not subjective. It illuminates the path to more advanced and intuitive physics, biology and neuro/glial science. It will confirm the relevance of phenomenology. It will change, enrich if not transform all our lives. It will change, enrich if not transform all our lives.
Where once the measurement paradigm was seen as expedient, the inherent limitations that approach methodology impose, will be appreciated and surpassed. The information on this web site and links to outside on-line resources, are not trivial; they are vital.
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