The Visual World of Shadows
Title | The Visual World of Shadows PDF eBook |
Author | Roberto Casati |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 407 |
Release | 2023-12-26 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0262550849 |
How the perception of shadows, studied by vision scientists and visual artists, reveals the inner workings of the visual system. In The Visual World of Shadows, Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh examine how the perception of shadows, as studied by vision scientists and visual artists, reveals the inner workings of the visual system. Shadows are at once a massive problem for vision—which must distinguish them from objects or material features of objects—and a resource, signaling the presence, location, shape, and size of objects. Casati and Cavanagh draw up an inventory of information retrievable from shadows, showing their amazing variety. They present an overview of the visual system, distinguishing between measurement and inference. They discuss the shadow mission, the work done by the visual brain to parse, and perhaps discard, the information from shadows; shadow ownership, the association of a shadow with the object that casts it; shadow labeling, the visual system's ability to tell shadows from nonshadows; and the shadow concept, our knowledge about shadows as a category. Casati and Cavanagh then apply the theoretical apparatus they have developed for shadows to other phenomena: illumination, reflection, and transparency. Finally, they examine the art of the shadow, paying tribute to artists' exploration of shadow, analyzing a series of artworks (reproduced in color) from a rich and fascinating art historical corpus.
Shadows and Enlightenment
Title | Shadows and Enlightenment PDF eBook |
Author | Michael Baxandall |
Publisher | Yale University Press |
Pages | 228 |
Release | 1997-01-01 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 9780300072723 |
Shadows are holes in light. We see them all the time, and sometimes we notice them, but their part in our visual experience of the world is mysterious. In this book, an art historian draws on contemporary cognitive science, eighteenth-century theories of visual perception, and art history to discuss shadows and the visual knowledge they can offer.
Painting, Science, and the Perception of Coloured Shadows
Title | Painting, Science, and the Perception of Coloured Shadows PDF eBook |
Author | Paul Smith |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 245 |
Release | 2021-03-17 |
Genre | Art |
ISBN | 1351042009 |
Many artists and scientists – including Buffon, Goethe, and Philipp Otto Runge – who observed the vividly coloured shadows that appear outdoors around dawn and dusk, or indoors when a candle burns under waning daylight, chose to describe their colours as ‘beautiful’. Paul Smith explains what makes these ephemeral effects worthy of such appreciation – or how depictions of coloured shadows have genuine aesthetic and epistemological significance. This multidisciplinary book synthesises methodologies drawn from art history (close pictorial analysis), psychology and neuroscience (theories of colour constancy), history of science (the changing paradigms used to explain coloured shadows), and philosophy (theories of perception and aesthetic value drawn from Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty). This title will be of interest to scholars in art history, art theory, and the history of science and technology.
Human Body Perception from the Inside Out
Title | Human Body Perception from the Inside Out PDF eBook |
Author | Günther Knoblich |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 490 |
Release | 2006-01-05 |
Genre | Psychology |
ISBN | 9780195178371 |
As the general notion of cognition has recently broadened to include its embodied nature, researchers' accounts of perception have increasingly come to include the body's special status as a window on the world and to accommodate the specific perceptual requirements for identifying, interpreting, and interacting with other bodies. This volume presents a comprehensive overview of the rapid progress that has been made in understanding the human body and its relationship to perception. It will help to unify the relevant research from several independent areas of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience and facilitate the development of an integrated framework for the study of human-body perception.
The Visual World of Shadows
Title | The Visual World of Shadows PDF eBook |
Author | Roberto Casati |
Publisher | MIT Press |
Pages | 408 |
Release | 2019-05-28 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 0262039583 |
How the perception of shadows, studied by vision scientists and visual artists, reveals the inner workings of the visual system. In The Visual World of Shadows, Roberto Casati and Patrick Cavanagh examine how the perception of shadows, as studied by vision scientists and visual artists, reveals the inner workings of the visual system. Shadows are at once a massive problem for vision—which must distinguish them from objects or material features of objects—and a resource, signaling the presence, location, shape, and size of objects. Casati and Cavanagh draw up an inventory of information retrievable from shadows, showing their amazing variety. They present an overview of the visual system, distinguishing between measurement and inference. They discuss the shadow mission, the work done by the visual brain to parse, and perhaps discard, the information from shadows; shadow ownership, the association of a shadow with the object that casts it; shadow labeling, the visual system's ability to tell shadows from nonshadows; and the shadow concept, our knowledge about shadows as a category. Casati and Cavanagh then apply the theoretical apparatus they have developed for shadows to other phenomena: illumination, reflection, and transparency. Finally, they examine the art of the shadow, paying tribute to artists' exploration of shadow, analyzing a series of artworks (reproduced in color) from a rich and fascinating art historical corpus.
Alhacen's Theory of Visual Perception
Title | Alhacen's Theory of Visual Perception PDF eBook |
Author | Alhazen |
Publisher | American Philosophical Society |
Pages | 496 |
Release | 2001 |
Genre | Science |
ISBN | 9780871699145 |
Sometime between 1028 and 1038, Ibn al-Haytham completed his monumental optical synthesis, Kitab al-Manazir ("Book of Optics"). By no later than 1200, and perhaps somewhat earlier, this treatise appeared in Latin under the title De aspectibus. In that form it was attributed to a certain "Alhacen." These differences in title and authorial designation are indicative of the profound differences between the two versions, Arabic and Latin, of the treatise. In many ways, in fact, they can be regarded not simply as different versions of the same work, but as different works in their own right. Accordingly, the Arab author, Ibn al-Haytham, and his Latin incarnation, Alhacen, represent two distinct, sometimes even conflicting, interpretive voices. And the same holds for their respective texts. To complicate matters, "Alhacen" does not represent a single interpretive voice. There were at least two translators at work on the Latin text, one of them adhering faithfully to the Arabic original, the other content with distilling, even paraphrasing, the Arabic original. Consequently, the Latin text presents not one, but at least two faces to the reader. This two-volume critical edition represents fourteen years of work on Dr. Smith's part. Awarded the 2001 J. F. Lewis Award.
The Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions
Title | The Oxford Compendium of Visual Illusions PDF eBook |
Author | Arthur Gilman Shapiro |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 833 |
Release | 2017 |
Genre | Games & Activities |
ISBN | 019979460X |
Visual illusions are compelling phenomena that draw attention to the brain's capacity to construct our perceptual world. The Compendium is a collection of over 100 chapters on visual illusions, written by the illusion creators or by vision scientists who have investigated mechanisms underlying the phenomena. --