Cinnabar / Phthalo Blue

Litmus, magnuscanis, 2009

Just across the river stands the Rosneath transmitter and on clear days the Black Hill transmitter between Glasgow and Edinburgh can be also be discerned. I remember when I first moved into my current house looking out over the river and imagined seeing rolling longwave signals being relayed across the land. That's of course a misconception of how vision works (perpendicular light does not intersect an observer's eye), but it did make me wonder what the world looks like beyond our three-colour perception.

Colour is a problematic property of our environment. Whilst numbers can easily be understood in abstract (five as the sixth natural number counting from zero) and also concrete (five blades of grass), colour is only expressed as a physical property (blades of grass re-emit light in the wavelengths 520–570nm). There is no way to discuss greenness, nor redness or blueness. Any attempt to do so relies on common references - red roses, blue sky, green grass, etc. Colour is as much a psychological phenomena as it is the wavelength of emission spectra. It's difficult to discuss precisely because we lack a means to explain it. Consider, even if we could directly image another's colour vision via brain scan we would still observe the output with our own vision - the subject may see a red rose on a green stalk, but you'll still see the printout of a green rose on a red stem. It's difficult enough to understand what we can perceive without wondering about animals that see more colours in other spectra. Images have been extracted from the brain in experiments but they present their own issues.

The signal we resolve from our eyes is often not what we see. Most of what passes in front of us completely bypasses consciousness - the visual equivalent of 'in one ear and out the other'. In the case of this experiment, the image captuRed is that hitting the fovea - the region of the eye where direct line of sight falls. Outside that small area is peripheral vision with poorly definition and largely constructed via memory and supposition, if not completely ignored. Whilst the text that you are reading is rich in form and composition, note the roundness of <o> and the sharp angles of <W>, can you describe the italic capital <r> three sentences ago and just above without looking back up? Sometimes we can't see what is directly in front of us (anecdotally, I once couldn't find my glasses because I was already wearing them).

Viewing the raw signal from the optic nerve does not equal vision. What was known as 'hysterical blindness' (conversion disorder) demonstrates that quite succinctly. There are a host of psychological processes that act together to present the seamless sensation of our environment, not just the physical interaction of the eye with incoming light. Seeing is not necessarily believing, rather believing often leads to seeing. Interestingly, the above cited researchers also aim to capture internally-generated images - hallucinations and dreams. In my own exploration of dreaming I've noticed that objects that usually lie in peripheral vision, primarily buildings, are poorly reconstructed. When under scrutiny, it becomes apparent I have only a vague idea what they really look like. I await the images captured from a dream because the test subjects will have to have photographic memories to produce anything greater than poorly-defined, fuzzy, blurry psuedo-images.

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