Visual Learning begins by seeing and interpreting the unseen and the imposed visions we share.

Visual Learning

From 1850-1945 the introduction, refinement, & reproduction of photographs altered the arts and sciences.

The painting and the photograph: two opposed or complementary art forms?

"The 'objective eye' of the photographic camera and impersonal traces of light on photographic emulsion were, virtually from the public announcements of the new medium in France and England in 1839, hailed as powerful tools in scientific recording." Newer technique of representation.
photographs

Photographs can capture changes.	The photographs of tracks in a vacuum tube revealed subatomic particles.

Older means of representing people, objects, and settings.
Paintings of what the artist conceives.

Vermeer, 1500s	Sheeler, 1940s

Scale is a related set of measures of a things' dimensions and use of scale implies the appreciation of how volume & surface area change in proportion to one another as a standard system used to measure something in comparison to another thing.

Human scale of buildings from the 19th century in Martha's Vineyard.

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Good Earth Keeping

Describe what you see here:

What do you see, when?

The long human era of either, or is coming to an end; we are in the slow death-throws of the Manichaean perspective that insists good versus evil is the only way to interpret reality. As Reinhold Niebuhr recognized nearly sixty years ago we are not one or the other but a complex intertwining of both and more.

"The final wisdom of life requires not the annulment of incongruity but the achievement of serenity within and above it." Reinhold Niebuhr

Human experience is far more richly textured than the biased framework we apply to our perceptions. One might say that the nuances of the world give rise to variety. Without this diversified comprehension, our human perception is robbed of its value by looking at the world as either good, or evil; either right, or wrong.

The value in our humanity is our power to create the sense out of senselessness as Octavio Paz recommended in that same generation as Niebuhr's. There are always more than two choices in any life, but we justify our own flawed-self when we pretend otherwise, even if only to go from this place to the next we always have more choices than we articulate. Identifying opposition in two, then, is merely the start of a longer process allowing us to see three, four, eight, sixteen or more diverse ways to configure our experiences.

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"How do we know" is called epistemology and what we do know is a body of related concepts.

How do we describe what we know?

scientific recording

"Not the least of the achievements of the of the artificial eye has been the capturing of motions too rapid for human sight, most famously as in the revelations of a horse's gait by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878. And as already notices the stilled splashes . . .provide supreme examples of the revelations of instantaneous photography. No one has explored the the potentialities of the snapshot' more potently than the American photographer Bernice Abbott."

Kemp, Visualizations, . p. 106.

"In the 1930s Abbott was associated with a group of 'objectivist' photographers who looked to Alfred North Whitehead's Science in the Modern World (1925). . . in their attempt to define a remorselessness form of impersonal realism which revealed the 'absolute' as manifested in the appearance of things. The idea was that the constant gaze of the camera would inexorably disclose the underlying pattern of the physical world."

pp. 106-107.

"Abbot's most innovatory work involved the reform of the techniques, communicative values and aesthetics of photography of scientific phenomena."

p. 107.

Pyramid of Knowing

Understanding nature or nurture as the force shaping our lives?

Knowledge of the landscape's features.

perception

Impacts on the land.

Bateson's questions.

Visual illusions and cognition.

Nature

Nurture

Maslow's hierarchy of needs

Pyramid of security

Seeing beyond the surface scale.

One important question for the application of visual learning is not what we are seeing, but how the things we see function and are worth preserving?

Are there visual features that without words to stand for them will disappear from our capacity to identify and preserve their character?

As Richard Wilbur, the poet, asks,

"But shall we not soon be forced to recoup, and recover a view of nature which is not purely exploitative?" *

( * Alan Gussow, A Sense of Place, "Introduction," (1971), p. 26.)

He asks this question and examines a deep sense of loss that he detects in an erosion of our language.

"The common language of rural topography --that vocabulary of dell, swale, coppice and coomb which Hardy used so well-- has fallen into disuse , so that we are relatively speechless before the landscape."

Richard Wilbur's warning about our loss of words for natural features.

Dales, dells, and swales seen here within a patchwork of coppice, hillocks, and fields provide viewers with merely the surface impressions of what landscape demands if in dwelling here people are to thrive.

Deforestation


African savanna landscape in the Kalahari desert of Botswana.	Forested corridors in Bolivia, South America.

The loss of wood in the form of timber harvesting, fire, or charcoal making is an international problems that has so many side-effects that the loss of soil, water and fertility as forests are replaced leaves a countryside perpetually in need of restoration. Wooded areas are required for adequate springs, stream flow, and water table renourishment. Without water the land is unproductive, life atrophies and settlements decline.

Discussion

Discussion:

In this course we ask the same question really in many guises. And, I think, that to get really serious about the matter of what is or is not exploitative you need to ask if visual clues are involved in what you think is exploitative with respect to our surroundings, your experiences and our common landscape.

Richard Wilbur , as an important American poet, comments that:

"we are now obliged to make choices which will reconcile us with a natural system of which we are only a part, and I do not doubt that the process will bring not only a fresh sense of how nature may be used, but also of what it is."
expletive is derived from the word (verb) to exploit, meaning:

to make use of or use productively to make unethical use of for one's own advantage or gain
to profit from the labor of another

Place he defines as:
"a place being a fusion of human and natural order, and a peculiar window on the whole."

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The impact of private farming in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains and the Andes mountains:

Steep hillsides generate erosion and soil loss when cleared.

Himalayan deforestation, Nepal.

Andean deforestation, Ecuador.

Only at a distance is one able to see the several impacts of each individual clearing of the land for farming as this agricultural practice affects the entire terrain. The terrain depicted here forms part of a watershed that is the source of water falling across the ridge lines and valleys that flows in a single direction from the highest elevation to the lowest area of relief.

The river pictures above comes from below the cleared hillsides in the Andes near Banos, Ecuador and runs grey with the silt and mud washed from the soils cleared for agriculture in addition to boulders and sand.

watersheds | landscape | facts about H2O| water conservation | water

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Now consider this set of questions:

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Did you see this?

With these intersections in mind, do you see any shapes in the above design?

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What geometrical shapes did you see?

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Land as a palimpsest of remnants from previous occupation and earlier uses overlain by current uses based on contemporary land-use needs such as electric power from wind, or corn growing for ethanol production.

Land and land-use patterns create visual clues to understand the effects of settlement patterns.


America's Natural Heritage	Landscape Patterns?

In these samples describe what you see as a pattern on the land.

Colorado River Valley.

Ground Plan for Versailles.

Bandolier site of an Anasazi ruin.

Southern England's countryside.

Patterns spread across the landscape

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Unseen qualities of physical experience:

Waves and radiation

What are dimensions?

"staircase" of the material world

Electromagnetic spectrum

Answers

A        a small right triangle pointing down the page

B        a large right triangle resting on its short base

X        a hexagon, or six even-sided figure

Distinguishing between core and peripheral facts can become difficult when the core focus is overwhelmed or obscured by peripheral details.

Terms used

Manichaean perspective, dualism, seeing the world as having only two sides or a dualistic contrast, a view that purports the world is a struggle between conflicting opposites.

incongruity, not in harmony with, out of step with, disharmony, anomaly, or disagreement with something.

annulment, denial, to return to the previous condition without recognizing an effect ever transpired, invalid, or void.

Reinhold Niebuhr was an American Theologian after World War Two, he influenced a generation of critical thinkers. A taste of his thought reveals his wisdom transcended the rather juvenile society he lived in that was vehemently anti-communist and commercially materialistic.

"The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery."

"The sad duty of politics is to establish justice in a sinful world."

"The tendency to claim God as an ally for our partisan value and ends is the source of all religious fanaticism."

Reinhold Niebuhr, faculty, Union Theological Seminary, 1928-1971.

Historian, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. said of him:

"Niebuhr was a critic of national innocence, which he regarded as a delusion. After all, whites coming to these shores were reared in the Calvinist doctrine of sinful humanity, and they killed red men, enslaved black men and later on imported yellow men for peon labor - not much of a background for national innocence. "Nations, as individuals, who are completely innocent in their own esteem," Niebuhr wrote, "are insufferable in their human contacts." The self-righteous delusion of innocence encouraged a kind of Manichaeism dividing the world between good (us) and evil (our critics)."

"Forgetting Reinhold Niebuhr," By ARTHUR SCHLESINGER Jr.
Published: September 18, 2005. New York Times 2005.

Epistemology the theory of knowledge, especially with regard the methods, validity, and scope of that knowing. Epistemology is the investigation of what distinguishes justified belief from opinion. From the Greek episteme, from epistasthai ‘know, know how to do.’