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The following interview was conducted through email exchanges in the early months of 2013. It was a conversation between Rich Dana, now Special Collections and Archives' Sackner Archive Project coordinator librarian at the University of Iowa, and Roy R. Behrens, now Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Scholar at the University of Northern Iowa. The resulting text was published in Issue Number 8 of Obsolete! Magazine: The Journal of DIY Analog Anarchy (Iowa City IA), which Dana was founding editor of, an experimental magazine that is now apparently obsolete (aha!). In its published form, the interview was a bit longer, and slight adjustments in wording have also been made. Copyright for the text belongs to the interview participants.
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Obsolete Magazine [Rich Dana]: I discovered your work while doing some research on dazzle camouflage. You’ve written quite a bit about dazzle patterns as well as the role of artists in the history of camouflage. Can you give us some background on how you became interested in that?
Roy Behrens: I started writing about it in the late 1960s. I got into camouflage because I was a graphic designer. The big “trade secret” in design is knowing how people are likely to see. At some point I realized that I could learn about that by hiding or disguising things. In other words, camouflage uses the exact same principles as design. It’s just reverse engineering.
OM: Was this like subliminal advertising?
RB: It’s certainly not unrelated to that, but they’re not the same. In subliminal advertising, it was claimed that images were concealed in magazine ads and film trailers, to function as “hidden persuaders.” The principles that we apply in design and camouflage are more straightforward, such as pointing, rhyming and lining things up. They are subliminal to some extent, because they influence us, regardless of whether we are aware of it.
OM: Obviously, the idea of camouflage is an ancient one. When did it become a field of scientific research?
RB: We can thank Charles Darwin for that. Scientists and naturalists became interested in animal camouflage in the late 19th century, because they thought it offered proof of natural selection, the survival of the fittest. But a big breakthrough came in the 1890s when an American artist named Abbott Handerson Thayer realized that camouflage is based on the same “tricks of the trade” that he had learned while studying art at the French Academy.
OM: I'm fascinated by the idea that camo is a type of art that is used to defeat technology. It seems that it’s almost akin to magic to me. Of course, Arthur C. Clarke said that "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Is camouflage art, technology or both?
RB: I think it’s pertinent to both art and technology, but to lots of other stuff as well. The key thing to remember is that camouflage depends on a relationship. It’s a perpetually shifting relation between an observer (these days it could be a drone or whatever) and the object or person that’s being observed. A deer can’t see high visibility orange, but that same color is blaringly obvious to humans. To camouflage something, you have to know what kind of visual system you are trying to conceal it from. In other words, camouflage has to keep up with surveillance, and vice versa—it takes two to tango.
OM: Camo is typically associated with the military. Are there civilian uses for camo, other than hunting?
RB: Actually, there’s a long rich tradition of using camouflage for non-military purposes. For example, you just mentioned magic, which famously works by “fooling the eye.” And there are lots of other uses in stage productions, fashion design, cosmetics, architecture and so on. And of course, some of the most successful camouflage practitioners are in marketing and politics. Camouflage is also used in other forms such as language. Maybe I should mention that recently I’ve been exchanging emails with a university student in the UK who’s working on proposals for benign, non-military uses of camouflage. There’s a lot that could be done in that area. Mostly he’s developing ways to make certain things around us (windmills or cell towers, for example) less like eyesores, and, at same time, to make critical landmarks more conspicuous. But this is a shifting relation as well: Since it’s common now for everyone to walk around in camouflage or high visibility orange clothing, it’s not as easy to be sure who’s really an emergency worker and who isn’t.
OM: Let's talk about dazzle camouflage. To me, dazzle represents very much the spirit of the Modern era. Does that make sense? It seems to be consistent with what was going on at the start of the 20th century, technologically and artistically, and, in some ways, even in psychology, in the use of abstract patterns, and so on.
RB: Over the years, a lot people have said exactly that about the resemblance between camouflage and certain branches of Modernism. During World War I, one of the British Vorticists [Edward Wadsworth] was a dock supervisor for ship camouflage. And there’s the famous story about Picasso seeing French military camouflage for the first time, and saying to Gertrude Stein, “Aha, we invented that. That’s Cubism.” There’s a ton of other examples of this, and my books are attempts to identify those. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of artists, designers and architects served as military camouflage consultants (they ecame known as “camoufleurs”) during both World Wars. But oddly enough,those who were responsible for the most bizarre dazzle patterns had been mostly traditional artists before. And after the war ended, their art careers completely collapsed—because, ironically, their artwork wasn’t Modern enough.
OM: Can you talk a little about how dazzle was conceived and developed, and what made dazzle patterns effective?
RB: The term as it’s now commonly used is more or less synonymous with any pattern that is made up of a hodgepodge of high contrast, distinctively-colored shapes. I call it “high difference” camouflage (because the figure breaks apart), and I distinguish it from “high similarity” camouflage (in which a figure blends in with its background or surrounding). Historically, however, the meaning and purpose of “dazzle painting” was much more specific. It was a kind of ship camouflage that was developed by British artists during World War I. Its primary function was not to hide a ship on the ocean (that wasn’t possible back then), but rather to make it confusing to view through the periscope of a German U-boat. It’s a complex subject, but the idea was mostly to “spoil the aim” (to throw off the calculations) of submarine torpedo gunners. It’s popular now for people to say that dazzle painting was ineffective, but the more you learn about the circumstances, the more apparent it becomes that it did indeed work.
OM: I’ve noticed that dazzle patterns are increasingly used in fashion. Asymmetrical haircuts and face-paint are being used successfully to subvert facial recognition software and surveillance cameras. Any thoughts on this? It's a very 80's cyberpunk dystopian sci-fi look. I love it! But do you think it will be effective? It seems to have a deus ex machina quality to it, in the sense that it undermines digital technology, not with more advanced technology, but with age-old simple tools like abstraction and facepainting.
RB: That’s a curious turnabout, isn’t it. I’ve been following the research on how to prevent digital face recognition, and apparently it works for now. But that too is indebted to Modernism, since it’s related to research that began with the Gestalt psychologists in the 1920s. Not surprisingly, the Gestaltists also wrote about camouflage, and about graphic design principles.
OM: That's really interesting. So essentially it’s about how the brain processes data that it receives from the eyes. Facial recognition computers programs look for geometric specifics of the structure of the face, rather than hair color, skin color, etc, which are really culturally programmed ways that humans see.
RB: Much of what we’re talking about is being confirmed by current brain research. There seem to be aspects of vision that are learned and culture-laden. On the other hand (and this especially interests me), there are also inherent, hard-wired defaults of vision that “come in the box” with everyone’s brain. If we go to war with another country, we can be sure that they will be hoodwinked (to some extent) by the same camouflage patterns that throw us off: figure-ground blending, figure disruption (or dazzle), mimicry, and the combined use of blending and dazzle.
OM: Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think historically there are a lot of examples of technologically “inferior” forces defeating vastly "superior" forces by using the environment to their advantage. Doesn't it seem like the growing surveillance state will always be running to catch up with the low-tech workarounds of the indigenous population?
RB: Well, you could put it that way. Again, the two sides have to correlate, and conditions are constantly changing. But in a way, everything’s a workaround, whether low tech or high. So you could say that, yes, high tech will always be struggling to keep one step ahead of Rube Goldbergian workarounds. But in the same way, low tech will always be struggling to jerry-rig new workarounds. One thing is certain: their dance is unlikely to ever conclude, short of a massive, finite end.
OM: I’m changing direction here: I started thinking about this when I bought an old Chevy Blazer from the National Guard. It is painted "forest" camo, I guess you would call it, mostly olive drab with black and brown. It's a spray can job, so it’s wearing out fast and I need to repaint it. So I began researching other patterns, and thinking about the Iowa landscape. Ideally, what sort of patterns and colors would be most effective in our environment?
RB: It depends on why you’re doing this. If you effectively decrease the vehicle’s visibility by matching it with the Iowa landscape, you might increase your chances of getting hit by another driver. And even then, what is the “Iowa landscape”? Urban, woodland, cornfield, grass? And in what season of the year? Now and then I’ve thought about putting a camouflage pattern on my car, but I’ve always opted out. In relation to choosing a season, if I painted it white for the winter, I wouldn’t want to drive it home during one of those Iowa snowstorm white-outs.
OM: I also considered putting a WWI naval dazzle pattern on it, just as an art project. It would be sort of ironic because it would be the most noticeable vehicle in the parking lot.
RB: I thought about this too, when I was considering my own car. Like you, I have a great fondness for dazzle patterns, so I thought I wouldn’t want my car to blend with the surroundings. I would prefer that it stand out dramatically (like those WWI dazzle-painted ships), and be painted in a clever way that uses confusing brightly-colored shapes to distort the physical shape of the car. But then I thought, that’s really asking for trouble: First, it would stand out in the parking lot and probably get vandalized. Second, when I’m on the road, it might be so confusing to see that I could end up getting hit. Or third, if it’s too distracting to other drivers, they might collide with other cars. Well, whatever you decide, don’t paint your Chevy Blazer in high visibility orange—or you’ll get run into by a deer.
OM: Ha! That would be ironic to say the least! Here's a thought; from what you have said about relationships, landscape and how people see, perhaps a car painted with primer would be the best all purpose camouflage. Culturally, I think people might look past it because primer paint represents lower social status. Just the way people look past a homeless person on the street. Parked in a lot it might be less likely to be broken into. In a field, it might be seen as abandoned. On the flipside of course, driving home late at night, it might be more likely to draw the attention of law enforcement, who are programmed to see something else.
RB: If we continue with this train of thought, we may end up putting antlers on your car, covering it with flocked wallpaper—or better yet, with chia sprouts—and transforming it into an automated jackalope. That might cut down on traffic too, since no one else would want to be seen driving beside it.…
RELATED LINKS
Dazzle Camouflage: What is it and how did it work?
Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage
Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage
