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Posts tagged "vision"
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln is hosting an online collection of U.S. government-produced comic books, with full PDF downloads. Tucked away between the weirder, more off-beat stuff you’ll find some unique work from the likes of Walt Kelly, Hank Ketchum, Dr. Seuss, Charles Schulz, and more. Like this special run of Peanuts where Charlie Brown has Sally tested for amblyopia ex anopsia.
(Via Cartoon Brew)
Related: Art Spiegelan’s amblyopia
What makes a building beautiful if you can’t see it, and how can you create beautiful structures if you’re blind?
The tools the blind architect uses:
He began drawing with Wikki Stix, strands of wax-covered yarn that adhere to paper with just a little pressure. His most useful tool became a large-format embossing printer, which turns blueprints into raised line drawings that he can read with his fingertips.
A blind stroke victim can still navigate rooms and recognize emotions on faces:
TN’s rare condition is known as blindsight. Because his stroke damaged only his visual cortex, his eyes remain functional and as a result can still gather information from his environment. He simply lacks the visual cortex to process and interpret it. Sight has changed for TN from a conscious to a largely subconscious experience. He no longer has a definitive picture of his surroundings, but he has retained an innate awareness of his position in the world. He is, to some degree, able to see without being aware that he is seeing.(via @sunnibrown)
Sacks, fascinating as ever:
I was very conscious of stereo as a wonderful part of the visual world….So it’s an irony that someone like myself has now lost stereo. And having been, I think, in an exceptionally deep world with a rich relief, I now feel myself in a rather flat world. I mean, I infer depth and I know depth and I can manipulate myself perfectly well in a three-dimensional world — walking or driving — but it’s a sort of flatland….Originally when this happened, and this happened very suddenly, I would go to shake hands with people and miss their hand. Or I would go to pour a glass of wine and miss the glass. The first time I did this, I poured all the wine in someone’s lap. He wasn’t very appreciative of that. I find steps and curves particularly challenging. Unless there are other visual cues, they’re just lines on the ground.He goes on to talk about the poet Virginia Adair:
She published a lot as a young woman but then became a teacher of English. But then she lost her vision and started hallucinating in her 80s and this started up her poetic voice again. And she published her first book of poems when she was 83. So she was able to use her Charles Bonnet hallucinations very creatively…. Quite a lot of her poems are about the amazing cascade of images which would rush through her mind.I’ve been fascinated with stereoscopic vision, especially when I read about Art Spiegelman’s lazy eye and its importance to his cartooning.
“Sacks says there’s a part of the brain that is specific to recognizing cartoons.”
Seeing the Invisible: The Mysterious Cough, Caught on Film
In Roald Dahl’s novel “The B.F.G.,” the title character, a big friendly giant, captures dreams in glass jars. At Pennsylvania State University, a professor of engineering has captured something less whimsical but no less ephemeral — a cough — on film.
The image, published online Oct. 9 by The New England Journal of Medicine, was created by schlieren photography, which “takes an invisible phenomenon and turns it into a visible picture,” said the engineering professor, Gary Settles, who is the director of the university’s gas dynamics laboratory.
Making the invisible visible! You could say that’s what all comics and graphic art try to do…
First Sight Fabrics by Michael Miller
“Although babies can see the world in color, their vision is immature and they show a preference for high-contrast objects and bold patterns like stripes. Fabric company Michael Miller has developed a line of fabric called First Sight with these vision limitations in mind.”My wife sent me this link: I had no idea that babies see the world in greyscale first, then red, then the rest of the spectrum. Perhaps this is why I like the red, white, and black combination so much: my vision sense is underdeveloped (I also think I’m fairly colorblind…not good for an artist, whoops.) Also reminded me of George Walker’s quote in my recent post on woodcut novels:
“The human eye consists of rods and cones that process the reflected light of our world. These signals are then translated into color and form for processing by our brain. The rods, which are sensitive only to black and white, are the first components activated in a baby’s eyes. That’s why infants readily respond to high-contrast black-and-white images. We are hardwired to appreciate black-and-white artwork.”On a totally unrelated note: I had a conversation with my optometrist about children’s vision — she said she had a ton of young children coming in for vision therapy…they spend so much time in front of 2-D screens (computers, tv) and none outside playing that their depth perception is totally retarded. Imagine!
Newspaper + Marker = Poetry. Pre-order it now for $10 on Amazon.com







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