Visual experiences of 3d: the Museum of Modern Art

In the museum I've got an interesting new feeling that it is a space full of people that came to see art. I already wrote about this phenomenon. Before it was about me going to a museum and seeing art that's over there. Now it is a place full of people, and I am one of them, wandering around in between pieces of art.

Let me write about good things. First of all, Kandinsky. I am not sure if I have seen this painting today at MoMA, but you get the idea, what kind of paintings by Kandinsky I am talking about.

If we take it for granted that Kandinsky had synesthesia, then it's so simple. No more worries trying to understand his pictures. You know how people look at his pictures trying to figure out what he meant? Picking up lines, circles, splashes. That's how I had been looking at the "Magic Eye" pictures, trying to discover something in the patterns, hoping that it will suddenly show me that hidden picture. I still cannot see them, by the way, but now I can look through, and at least I see that it is possible to see something else, not just whatever is printed on the page.

I can try to understand synesthesia through my understanding of stereopsis. Just like it is virtually impossible to imagine stereopsis unless and until you have it, it should be virtually impossible to imagine synesthesia unless and until you have it. That is, you may be thinking for hours about how sounds can be colored, and not get anywhere. However, I can relate to it by interpreting stereopsis as synesthesia. Then I can project it further and get at least some sense of what seeing sounds or hearing colors may be like. Furthermore, there is the natural smell-taste synesthesia that virtually everyone has but hardly anyone recognizes as synesthesia. In summary, if you want to understand Kandinsky, relax and look at the painting non-habitually.

I also noticed, as I looked at his paintings longer and longer, trying to connect to various parts of the visual system, how sometimes the whole room got darker. At this point the picture would sometimes disassociate into two or three layers, that is, each contour would belong to one of the layers, and sometimes one of the layers would be shifting with respect to the others. The layers were not separated in space, though. Also, at the same time as it got darker, all colors would disappear, and the picture would become brown-grey instead of red-yellow-blue-green-and-who-knows-what-else.


Then, Claude Monet. Look at the lilies. Those are not the ones that are at MoMA, just whatever is easy to find in the Internet.

I don't think I had ever realized that all those paintings showed the surface of the water at an angle. You just have to take my word for that... I had surely realized those were lilies on water. But you can actually see that there is an angle. You can see what angle the surface of the pond makes with the surface of the picture. This is new.

In fact, now as I looked at a huge painting with those lilies, I could easily see how the pond continued outside, from out the picture. I am not sure normal people can do that. I guess, a normal person would need to close one eye in order to suppress the feeling that the canvas is flat and to see the volume. I would assume that Monet himself was able to see volume with both eyes open. I can certainly switch back and forth with both eyes open: to see just the picture or to allow the water to continue out into the space of the gallery, with the lilies.

I tried the same with Picasso - it didn't work quite well, but it seems possible. That is, instead of just conceptualizing, what a cubist painting may be about, one can simply see the space in it as it is, albeit different from our space. I recently had to exercise my ability to see distorted space when I noticed my reflection in the faucet in my bathroom with one eye deviating to the side. As I looked in the regular mirror, however, the eyes were fairly well aligned. I guess, fusing two curved images was still a little bit too much for my brain. However, I was able to improve it, to a degree, by looking into the reflection in the faucet and seeing there the space in the bathroom, but curved. The same technique can be applied to Picasso: look at the painting, perhaps with one eye only, and see the curved space inside it. Not sure if it has to do with the observation that Les Demoiselles d'Avignon actually have strabismus, at least the three of them whose eyes we can clearly see. Of course, their eyes are not the only thing in the painting that can remind me about strabismus: with a moderate stretch of imagination, the whole picture may be seen as the result of switching between the views from two eyes.

After the museum I went to have dinner in a place called Lindy's on 7th avenue. Just a warning if you decide to go there: read the menu and the prices before ordering. The pricing is counterintuitive. I had a great dinner there and paid about $35 including a very generous tip, but once again, the prices are totally random, so you have to choose wisely. One interesting experience with binocular vision was when I went to the bathroom... On my way back I looked at the landscape of the cafe and felt a little bit lost, because the landscape didn't look like anything familiar. However, then I recognized that it didn't look like anything familiar because I was at a different angle, and I still used my old and ineffective navigation habits. Instead, I looked at the structure of what I see, realized what was where, and as I turned to the right, the environment rotated, showing me the familiar picture with my table, just what I was waiting for.

As another interesting experience, after I had my dinner I was thinking what I wanted to drink or if I wanted a desert. I took some time because of the random prices - I spent several minutes reading it over and over. I noticed the waiter in my peripheral vision and thought he was going to ask me if I had finally made some decision. At this time I was drinking water from a glass, so I automatically stopped drinking and barely started moving the glass from my face. Almost simultaneously I noticed that I noticed - that is, I became aware of my very reaction, and started deciding if I wanted to inhibit it, to go back to drinking, put the glass on the table, or something else. Of course, all that took only a split second. Yet at almost the same time the waiter slightly shifted his direction so, as I recognized in my peripheral vision, he was now moving a little more away from me, and said something like "Don't worry. Please, take your time." - and left.

This impressed me so much. This guy noticed my reaction so early that by the time I started inhibiting it or otherwise deciding what to do with it, the glass still an inch or two from my mouth, he had already changed the trajectory of his walk, and was ready to start saying something to me. It was probably an automatic response on his part. In other words, the only possible explanation is that he did what he did subconsciously, as a result of his experience, after having served to many different people and learning to pick up all kinds of signals. Anyway, that's why I left him a tip in excess of 20%.  Good job.