Excerpt

Among the classes I took as an undergraduate physics major, one of the most deeply thought-provoking was Visual Thinking. Art professor Dini Erdman made a significant impact on the course of my scientific career starting with her lectures on figure and ground. First, she taught us the ability to see an inverted relationship between a picture’s negative and positive spaces. We can easily experience these shifts in the representations developed by Edgar Rubin and exemplified by his faces/vase picture. One’s sense of the object of perception shifts dramatically as the figure–ground relationship flips.

More to the heart of the aesthetic experience is the construction of visual art based on the dynamics emerging in the tension between these two complementary spaces. The Picasso painting Les Demoiselles D’Avignon is a particularly striking example of this technique. The “empty” space between the women and between their arms and torsos, for example, is depicted with a certain solidity of its own. This does not simply invert the figure–ground relationship but forces the viewer to abandon the traditional way of parsing a scene and instead attend primarily to the higher-order perception arising in the relative relationship between the fields rather than to either field absolutely.

I know that for actual visual artists, this is preschool stuff, but somehow it seemed a revelation—the difference, perhaps, between having been taught and seeing directly.

This was my first lesson in complex systems.

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