Pattern at Play

In 2008, an intriguing set of experiments was conducted by Jennifer Whitson of the University of Texas at Austin and her colleague Adam Galinsky of Northwestern University. Entitled “Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,” their study demonstrated that the loss of control leads to the perception of patterns which do not actually exist. Through a cleverly designed set of conditions, subjects who were made to feel 'out of control' showed marked increase in the tendency to see nonexistent patterns in random, chaotic images. For some details, see here. The results were widely circulated, and were generally understood to have important implications for the superstitious, for conspiracy theorists, and for people of faith. Leaving aside the problematic clumping of religion, superstition and conspiracy theories, and stepping advisedly into the conflation of graphic concerns with ontological ones, the suggestion that these impulses are a kind of compensatory grasping at straws by untethered people is unavoidable. And it's kind of compelling. It is, in a word, elegant. 

One of the images from the study showing a recognizable figure.

But it's also wrong. Or at least incomplete. 
The study itself was fundamentally flawed. And in this flaw, the orchestrators of the study tip their hand. Surely the results demonstrate a true phenomena. But if the study were truly impartial and unbiased, if it were inspired by a more pure curiosity, it would have featured additional control groups which would have been shown images with difficult-to-perceive patterns. As reported, "nearly everyone saw the hidden figures" in the images which had them, indicating that they were not, in fact, particularly challenging patterns to discern (see the example above). While it's possible that the "lack of control" groups would not have been able to tease out more difficult patterns any easier than the "control" control groups (is there a better term?), it seems exceedingly unlikely. It is far more probable that the false patterns are the product of hyper-vigilant pattern-seeking, activated by the distress of chaotic circumstances. Couldn't this hyper vigilance be reasonably expected, then, to pick out difficult (actual) patterns... in addition to non-existent ones? 
This omission of difficult-to-perceive patterns from the study is both telling and unfortunate. It strongly suggests that the research was motivated by an interest in discrediting any reading of the world which allows for non-mechanical phenomena. Ok, nothing terribly new there. But I for one would like to know the answer to that question: does lack of control, whether circumstantial or cultivated, lead to a greater ability to perceive subtle or difficult patterns, in addition to the tendency to see them where they are not? Or doesn't it? 


I would like to know this for three reasons; one scientific, one existential and one professional. Scientifically, well, doncha just wanna know? I mean, that is supposed to be the basic scientific impulse. It is not supposed to be motivated or shaded by ideological or commercial or political or ANY interests other than curiosity. 


Existentially, I feel confidant (humbly confidant) that my faith can withstand whatever this world reveals itself to be over time. Still, I would need to do some adjusting in the face of conclusive evidence that the world itself runs on nothing but mechanics. It just doesn't square with my personal experience. 


And finally, on a professional level, if it turned out that lack of control led to enhanced pattern-seeking, this would be a significant consideration for the design of worship spaces.
Worship spaces are places where we (among a couple of other important activities) cultivate a relinquishing of control. If lack of control leads to enhanced pattern perception, then, conversely, difficult patterns might foster a sense of lack of control. Then again it might not. More probably, subtle patterns might reveal themselves progressively over the course of the liturgy, as the intentional relinquishing of control (through the various instruments of the liturgy) progressively enhance the pattern-seeking faculty. Providing these subtle patterns, then, in the visual elements of the sanctuary space would allow the worship service to mimic the larger dynamics of life in faith. 


How cool would that be? 


littlepictureBIGPICTURE.


To read more on the subject of Pattern in the Worship Space, read my earlier blog postings here and here.

Future Projections

It is time--it is probably past due--that architects and liturgical designers begin making it a habit to think of an area, or areas, within the sanctuary which will be kept simple and whose geometry should be oriented to make it receptive to projected images. Flat or gently curved wall space, at or near a focal axis, which will take a projected image without the 'seam' of a screen or (jumbotron) monitor, or disruption from structural or design features which break up the picture. Many sanctuaries already have a screen, retractible or sometimes permanent, for their Powerpoint sing-alongs or inspirational eye candy. But the screen proclaims that what is presented is electronic media, distancing it from any role more than functional. And when it does aspire to a role more serious than conveying lyrics, most of the content is ultimately distracting. Time will come when visual artists of merit will develop work which will ask to be integrated into the space and into the action in ways screens or other technical containers inhibit. What will this work look like? The lousy stuff, well... there will always be lousy stuff. But the good stuff: What will it look like?

Recent Writings

A couple of recent writings have been posted on the websites of Interfaith Forum for Religion, Art and Architecture (IFRAA) and the Architecture, Culture, and Spirituality (ACS) forum.

Presence of the Absence

The Presence of the Absence. It is as poetic as theology gets. To speak of the Presence of the Absence is to scratch at the roots of language. It is to turn meaning back on itself, undermining its very substance. We could call it a gimmick--except that it works. It describes places in our experience with accuracy and economy. 

The presence of the absence of a loved one. Of God. And of course, on this tenth anniversary of 9/11, of the towers.

And think about this: A decade is a unit of time which marries the movement of the solar system with the arrangement of our smallest appendages. It links the hurling planet to the number of fingers on our hands. Big picture, little picture.

Ten years ago New Yorkers were hurled, with the rest of the country, into this neighborhood of postmodern theology. Thousands of friends, family members, compatriots; stolen away in a painfully extended instant. And a great empty spot opened in the skyline to mark this absence, looming invisibly. It was an absence which palpably loomed.

The Gotham skyline is the clearest imaginable expression of this sensibility. Everyone who lives in and around the shadow of that city knows the meaning of the Presence of the Absence. 

But Neo-Gothic church architecture has hosted its own anticipatory allusion to this experience. Empty niches, recesses built into the structure and ornament of these buildings, have historical precedence in the European ancestors of the style. But there the sculptures they are built to house have been destroyed or removed during various iconoclastic controversies. Here they stand as (absent) witness to changing realities of labor and skill in the industrialized age. But these realities echoed, in turn, changing perceptions of God, and evolving relationships with religious traditions. 

In a way, they anticipate and reflect a loosening of the literalist anthropocentric views of God. The adornment of these churches with these conspicuously empty spaces of veneration stands as one of the little noted expressions of emerging religious sensibility in plastic arts. Expressing both loss and liberation, they engage a range of contemporary experience, from the prominence of modern atheism to worship of the invisible God.

Six months before the 9-11 attacks, the Taliban displayed a distant kinship with the iconoclasts of Europe by destroying the giant Buddha statues of Bamiyan Valley, creating the monumental empty niches which exist today. While this was certainly a loss to our global heritage, the move was affirmed by some Buddhists as an ultimate enactment of their own spiritual commitments. It was, in an ironic turn, what Buddhists call "killing the Buddha."

Of course, there's killing the Buddha, and there's killing the Buddha.

Material Hymnody, pt. 2

For the first entry on this process, see the post from Feb. 2, 2011, below. This time around, it looks like we're working with line more than with shape. We're drawing. The scissors and paper are really just a way to keep the line somewhat tame, so that the various offerings can be integrated into a whole. Is this the nature of community? We tame ourselves so that we can be integrated into the whole? Well, some of us more than others:

The task is always how to temporarily disable the editorial impulse, how to subvert those critical inner narratives that tell us we're "no good at art" etc.. I had solemnly informed the congregation, members of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of the South Fork, that while the service had been progressing, the paper and scissors located beneath each seat had been in conversation, and that the scissors knew which way to cut. All we needed to do was to allow the scissors to wend their way through the paper. The idea was to remove (to the degree that we're willing to submit to this ploy) the burden of decision-making and 'self-expression' which can actually impede the creative process. Working with UUCSF's talented musicians, Jay Loomis and Megan Chasky, who played a sort of Steve Reich, call-and-response piece with flute and ceramic gourd from opposing sides of the sanctuary. The idea was to stimulate both hemisphere's of the brain, sequentially. Get those corpus callosumses (corpi callossum? corpi callossi?) firing.

I think the results are interesting, and treating the shapes as lines allows some added freedom in arranging and relating the elements.

Below, a preliminary study:

Rapture Monkeys

Rapture:

1600, "act of carrying off," from M.Fr. rapture, from M.L. raptura "seizure, rape, kidnapping," from L. raptus "a carrying off" (see rapt). Originally of women and cognate with rape (v.). Sense of "spiritual ecstasy" first recorded 1629. †

People who know me well understand that most of my personality comes from 70’s TV shows. Having absorbed and assembled myself from persistent and devout spectating, I sometimes feel like an endless medley of quips, puns and one-liners pinched from The Rockford Files, What’s Happening, Welcome Back Carter, etc.. What I rarely acknowledge, and few people know, is that many of my most sustaining epiphanies involve media somehow or another, as well. It is as if technology, the inventions of our age, has filled the role liturgy has served for those of other generations.

I was raised in the Secular Consumerist branch of Long Island Protestantism, and was a fairly devout practitioner of it. This involved the generous and attentive television watching I mentioned, vague subscription to the self-actualizing ethos and obsessive mate-seeking of the evangelized Hollywood pedagogy, and general obeisance to the marketplace it serves. Clouds roll out in flat sheets over the Island, like a great dropped ceiling; trees are rarely grand in the sandy, storm-worked soil; and the highest point of land around is generally the landfill. Even the ocean--when you see it you’re close to it and down near its level--speaks of the human scale. It is, from one end of the LIE (that is, the Long Island Expressway) to the other, Human Country.

As sometimes happens when the traditions of our youth turn stale and empty over time, I fell away from this tradition later in life, exploring the currents, as we Americans are uniquely free to do, of the free-market of religion and ontology, of conviction and doubt. I was well into this process when I first encountered the vervet monkey on a nature program about Sub-Saharan Africa. 

People who know me well will also attest that I am more closely related to monkeys than most. And so it was with especially familiar ease that I slipped into the old discipline, and watched these distant kin ply their way.

The narrator’s narcotic baritone induced a kind of gentle trance as he described and interpreted the events unfolding. I watched this lively, tenuous colony navigate a wilderness that seems to have created it for comic relief, and for being eaten. They are a popular meal for savvy carnivores. 

But they’ve got a couple of things worked out. When one of their number sees a snake with monkey on his mind, he stands upright and directs a distinctive chortling bark at the still-concealed intruder. On hearing this signal, the other vervet monkeys in the vicinity bolt upright and scan the ground until they see the offender as well, all the while repeating this initial alarm call. Eventually repulsed by this wall of monkey chatter, the snake creeps off with his ears back and his tail between his legs. Survival of the most annoying, it would seem.

Interestingly, the response of the vervet monkeys is very different when, as the television camera observes, one of their number spies a martial eagle approaching in lazy, purposeful arcs overhead. A different call issues from the alert sentry, and, in an instant, the entire troupe dashes for the dense inner branches of a nearby tree. Here they are safe from the hunting bird, which would damage it’s wings if it attempted to pluck a monkey from the thicket. Clearly they’re responding in very different ways to these audibly distinct alarm calls. 

As I watched, as I absorbed this, something perceptibly shifted inside of me. I became aware that I was watching something larger than a nature program, larger than entertainment, larger even than Public Television. This was no longer natural phenomena or slapstick drama. I became aware that what I was seeing was a form of biblical paleontology, of theological primatology. What I was watching was the very first proto-words. What I was watching was the book of Genesis. Wherein: “Man gave names to all the animals...” as Dylan sung it. “Man”, once again, a beguiling and neurotic group of schmucks, stuck between the serpent and the raptor...    

    ...right there on my tele.

Snakes, of course, have neither legs nor ears to speak of. Not any longer, at least. Not since, well, you know. But the rest of this is what is called True. Three vervet monkey alarm calls can be heard at  http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~mnkylab/media/vervetcalls.html, including another call for jaguar. According some, they have other calls for hyena and crocodile. According to some, they have another call for humans. According to some, they have named us.

† Source: Online Etymology Dictionary

"Summa 4" 2008; Digital drawing. 

All text and images ©2008 Erling Hope

www.hopelw.com

New Ways of Making Liturgical Art

“Material Hymnody”

It is imposible to overestimate the genius of the hymn tradition in Judeo-Christian liturgy. Each human body pushes its voice out into the space with singular effort, each voice rises and arcs into the envelope of the joined refrain, disappearing into the gathered whole. These are moments when ordinary grace reaches into extraordinary Grace. It perfectly describes to our senses our faithful role in the universe. 

The ways a congregation goes about “doing” liturgical art are evolving. The model of the solitary artist, adrift in the existential ocean of monastic studio practice, is giving way to more collaborative approaches. But collaboration without some sort of informed guidance will have difficulty crafting a clear vision. 

I have been working on several approaches to making the design and appointment of a worship space a truly collaborative product of the community it serves. Inviting every member into the creative process allows a real and profound sense of participation in, and ownership of, the built environment. The professional artist serves this process as a technician to a family of specialized concerns, stewarding the creative energies of the community to form a cohesive and durable vision.

Starting with simple processes--pen and ink, scissors and paper--and extensive conversation, we move on to deploy both traditional handwork and state-of-the-art communication, design and fabrication technologies to turn the products of the gathered community into figurative and abstract patterns. These can be used as ornamental motifs on furnishings, banners and appointments or as more focal elements of murals, altar screens or leaded glass panels. 

These elements can be arranged to suggest the larger pattern which is only glimpsed.

littlepictureBIGPICTURE.

When we hear our voices leaning in to a larger song of a community, we know that we are members of that community, if only as sojourners. When members of a faithful community see ourselves reflected in a work of art or design, can identify our own marks in the larger canvas, we know we are spiritually at home. The thrill of participation in the corporate, communal, creative effort is an experience of Grace. It is material hymnody.