new three-part film series on the Ames demonstrations

Del Ames / The Man Who Made Distorted Rooms / Part 1

 

Part 03 has been posted / Ames and Anamorphosis

Unbelievable! At last I have completed it. Earlier this afternoon, I finished and posted on YouTube at <https://youtu.be/mxOEx2JLQBA> the third and final segment of a documentary trilogy on the life and work of Adelbert Ames II (known as Del Ames) (1880-1955), an American artist, lawyer, optical physiologist, and psychologist, best-known for having devised the Ames Demonstrations in Perception.

This part primarily focuses on Ames' influence on others, among them scientists, filmmakers, and artists, especially by his targeted use of anamorphosis (aka "forced perspective") in his well-known laboratory set-ups. It reveals the little-known links between Ames' experiments, Vorticism, and avant-garde filmmaking (Ballet Mécanique), as well as in popular culture, such as cinematic special effects and roadside tourist attractions.

In conclusion, it also provides a close-up look at the recent works of three contemporary visual artists, who, in one way or another, make astonishing use of perspective. They are Jan Beutener (Amsterdam), Richard Koenig (Kalamazoo MI), and Patrick Hughes (London).

All three parts of the trilogy (about 90 minutes in combined length) can be accessed online free at my YouTube channel at <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzYrUfsAvkZur5cBv6xlhSg>.  Of course, I am eager for others to see this. Do not hesitate to share it with anyone and everyone who might find it of value or interest.

Ames Demonstrations / replications of some of those

Fifty years ago, as a means of learning about the role of vision in art and design, I replicated a small number of the so-called Ames Demonstrations in Perception (as well as Dürer's drawing machines, Van Gogh's grid-based drawing frame, Alberti's perspective veil, stereo viewers and cameras, et al.). As shown above, I am looking into the back window of a small-sized Ames Distorted Room. Below is a much earlier newspaper article on this and other experiments by its originator, artist and psychologist Adelbert Ames II. Having published a number of articles on Ames and aspects of his life, I am now producing a three-part series of video talks, the first of which can now be viewed on YouTube.

Poet William Carlos Williams meets Gerald H. Thayer

Above Gerald H. Thayer, Male ruffed grouse in the forest (1907-08). Watercolor on paper. 19.75 inches high x 20 inches wide. First published as an illustration in his book, Concealing coloration in the animal kingdom, New York: Macmillan, 1909. Plate II, 38 (public domain). The original painting is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Roy R. Behrens, “Khaki to khaki (dust to dust): the ubiquity of camouflage in human experience” in Ann Elias, Ross Hartley and Nicholas Tsoutas, eds., Camouflage Cultures: Beyond the art of disappearance. AU: Sydney University Press, 2015—

The grouse [in Thayer’s painting] is completely motionless (a common means of defence among animals) for the same reason that the Ames distorted room [one of the Ames Demonstrations in psychology] works best from a rigid, “frozen” one-eyed view. Motion is a great spoiler of camouflage, and if the grouse moves even a muscle, it will be quickly given away.…

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Halter Peter, The revolution in the visual arts and the poetry of William Carlos Williams. Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 125-126—

[From an analysis of a William Carlos Williams poem]…the last lines [of the poem]—“a / partridge / from dry leaves”—contain a reference to the painting Male Ruffed Grouse in the Forest by Gerald H. Thayer…Thayer’s watercolor of a partridge merging with dry leaves and winter trees behind it is related to the Audubon tradition of accurate and loving observation of the American fauna which Wlliams so highly valued…

Moreover, Thayer’s painting is a kind of picture puzzle: Based on the systematic exploration of mimicry in animals, it depicts a partridge that is indeed difficult tell “from dry leaves.’…Williams may well have singled out Thayer’s painting as a work of art that, not unlike his own poem, explores ambiguty and foregrounds the problem of figure and ground. Both painting and poem are about what has to be “figured out”; both contain, in other words, the hide-and-seek dimension that asks for the viewer’s or reader’s active participation.

VIDEO LINKS

Nature, Art, and Camouflage  

Art, Women's Rights, and Camouflage

 Embedded Figures, Art, and Camouflage

 Art, Gestalt, and Camouflage

talking to children about illusions at the Hearst Center

I had a great time this morning at the Hearst Center for the Arts, in Cedar Falls, Iowa, where I talked to a group of about 15 children about "illusions." I'm the big kid on the left, properly masked. I shared two of the Ames Demonstrations (that's a Rotating Trapezoid Window on a table in the front), red/green 3-D stereograms (which they loved), and ended by showing examples of World War I dazzle ship camouflage. 

The children asked some excellent questions, and the adult staff at the center were on their best behavior. I had a blast, and I think the young ones liked it too. It was not unlike a flashback, since more than 50 years ago, I began my career in the classroom as a teacher of 7th graders.

There are more posted photographs and a video clip on the Hearst Center's Instagram page.

camouflage and the ames demonstrations in vision

Above Photograph of the author and a colleague in an Ames Distorted Room, a demonstration in perceptual psychology in which people seem to shrink and grow. It was first constructed in the 1930s by American artist, psychologist and optical physiologist Adelbert Ames Jr, at Dartmouth College. It has been replicated innumerable times, for a variety of purposes. This particular model was built in 1975, as one component in a participatory children's exhibit, co-designed by Roy R. Behrens (wearing dark jacket in photos above) and John Volker (not shown), and installed at the Waterloo Center for the Arts in Waterloo IA.

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To Make a Room Look Larger, in Ladies’ Mirror. Vol 5 No 4, October 1, 1926—

It is something of an art into which camouflage may be said to enter, that of creating the sense of space in a small room. 

RELATED LINKS

Ames, Heider and the Chair Demonstration

Wikipedia biography / Adelbert Ames Jr

Eyed Awry: The Ingenuity of Del Ames

The Artistic and Scientific Collaboration of  Blanche Ames Ames and Adelbert Ames II

Ames Room and Chair Demonstration

Adelbert Ames II (1880-1955) was an American lawyer and artist who was known for his discoveries in optical physiology and perceptual psychology. In 1928, while at Dartmouth College in Hanover NH, he diagnosed a visual dysfunction called aniseikonia which resulted in the founding of the Dartmouth Eye Institute.

Later, in the 1940s and 50s, he developed nearly thirty experiments in perceptual psychology, now commonly referred to as the Ames Demonstrations. These ingenious laboratory setups, which are still commonly cited in psychology textbooks, were highly unusual, and they prompted extended discussions among psychologists, philosophers, educators and artists. more >>>

Michael Torlen Remembers Hoyt L. Sherman

Photographs © Richard Koenig

Above We will never cease to be amazed by the illusionistic photographs (he calls them "photographic prevarications") of American artist Richard Koenig, who teaches in the Department of Art and Art History at Kalamazoo College in Michigan.

They are more than photographs; they are puzzling photographic views of dimensional constructions that were partly made from photographs. They are settings that have much to do with experiments in perception, not in a scientific sense, but more in keeping with the work that was done by artist and optical physiologist Adelbert Ames II in the 1930s-40s. Known collectively as the Ames Demonstrations, many of these were reconstructed in the late 1940s at Ohio State University by art professor Hoyt L. Sherman (see story below in this posting).

In one of Koenig's photographs (above top), a brick pavement (including a manhole) appears to levitate in the corner of a room. But in fact, the pavement pattern is comprised of smaller, precisely distorted photographs, some of which run up the wall. Nothing is actually floating. In the photograph below that one, we see what might at first appear to be two identical stepladders, side-by-side. The one on the right is indeed a stepladder, but the second one consists of smaller, photographic tiles that are entirely flat on the floor.

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In the 1960s, among the graduate students who worked with Hoyt Sherman at Ohio State University was the artist Michael Torlen, who would later go on to become a Professor of Art at Purchase College, State University of New York. Now Professor Emeritus, Torlen recently published a paper about Sherman's ideas and Torlen's memories of him. The article is titled "Hit with a brick: The Teachings of Hoyt L. Sherman" in Visual Inquiry: Learning and Teaching Art. Vol 2 No 3 (2013), pp. 313-326. In the following, he recalls what happened at Sherman's first meeting with a group of graduate students at OSU in 1963 (p. 314)—

As we settled into our chairs, Sherman handed out a course outline and began his lecture. Then he turned and walked over to a table stacked with a variety of materials, include a pile of red bricks. Seemingly distracted, Sherman stopped discussing his syllabus and started searching for something beneath the brick pile. He stacked and re-shuffled the bricks, sorting and clinking them loudly against each other, until he suddenly turned and hurled a brick directly at our heads.

Certain he had aimed the brick at me, I scrambled to get out of the way, murmuring, "Is this guy crazy?" Sherman was laughing. The brick he threw was a piece of foam rubber, the same size as the other bricks, painted brick red. Sherman explained that we were unable to distinguish the foam rubber brick from the cluster of real bricks, because our past experience, our associations and our memory of bricks influenced us. Our reactions developed from the false assumption that similar things are identical.

WW1 Ship Camouflage as Hughesual

Above Photograph by Steve Ibbitson of British artist Patrick Hughes, holding an Ames rotating trapezoid window. From John Slyce, Patrick Hughes: Perverspective (London: Momentum, 1998).

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In 2011, when British artist-writer Patrick Hughes published a book of his artwork, word play and related contrivances, called Paradoxymoron: Foolish Wisdom in Words and Pictures (London: Reverspective Ltd, 2011), we blogged about his paradoxes, both visual and verbal.

Still amazingly productive, now he's come out with a wonderful documentary film, produced by Jake West, a rich engaging memoir called Hughesually: The Art of Patrick Hughes.

At a certain point in the film, Hughes begins to talk about the rotating trapezoid window of American artist and optical physiologist Adelbert Ames II, and its relevance to his own perspective-related research. It was Hughes who devised an ingenious means (which he calls "reverspective") of painting perspective scenes on odd-shaped inverse surfaces, which causes the painting to visually bend as the viewer's point of view is moved.

In that previous post, I  talked about the link between Hughes' paintings, Ames' illusory window, and the adoption in World War I of a variety of ship camouflage called dazzle painting.

Last August, at an international conference at the Sydney College of the Arts, titled Camouflage Cultures: Surveillance, Communities, Aesthetics and Animals, I suggested an analogical link between the participant-observer's view of the various Ames demonstrations [see news pictorial below] (looking through a monocular peephole from a fixed point of view) and the periscopic point of view of a German U-boat commander (as shown in the slide illustration below).

News feature in Herald-Journal, Logan UT, July 4, 1954

Camouflage and Patrick Hughes

Patrick Hughes, Vanishing Venice (2007)

For many years, I've been interested in the paintings (as well as the writings) of British artist Patrick Hughes (1939-). As early as the mid-1960s, he began to paint perspective scenes (such as the one shown above, titled Vanishing Venice), not on flat canvases, but on odd-shaped board constructions, as shown in the line drawing above. In the process, he developed a method of painting he calls “reverspective.” In these mesmerizing paintings, features that appear to recede (visually) in space are in fact physically nearer. As a result, as you walk past one of them, it appears to move in astonishing ways (much as did the rotating trapezoid window that Adelbert Ames II invented in the 1950s). You have to experience this to believe it. Fortunately, there are online film clips as well as other notes about these bewildering images.

What does this have to do with camouflage? It has everything to do with a certain variety of disruptive camouflage, called dazzle painting, which was widely used in World War I for ship camouflage. Much as in Hughes' paintings, in dazzle-painted ships, certain surfaces appeared more distant when in fact they were physically closer. The intention was to interfere with the targeting calculations of the German U-boat gunners in their efforts to torpedo ships.

Hughes' paintings are visual paradoxes, a subject that has interested him since childhood. In fact, my first introduction to him was through his writing, not his art. I recall that the first of his books that I bought was Vicious, Circles and Infinity: A Panoply of Paradoxes (co-authored with George Brecht in 1975). In subsequent years, I also found Upon the Pun: Dual Meaning (1978), and More on Oxymoron (1984). Now, he has come out with a new, more comprehensive look at the same subject (a book I highly recommend) called Paradoxymoron: Foolish Wisdom in Words and Pictures (London: Reverspective Ltd, 2011).

Arthur Q. Davis | Architect & Camoufleur

Above The cover of the autobiography of New Orleans architect Arthur Q. Davis, It Happened by Design: The Life and Work of Arthur Q. Davis (University Press of Mississippi / Ogden Museum of Southern Art, University of New Orleans, 2009). In collaboration with Nathaniel Curtis, working as Curtis and Davis, he designed some of the landmark modern buildings in New Orleans, including the Louisiana Superdome, New Orleans Rivergate Exhibition Center, New Orleans Public Library, and various other structures, both national and international. Born in New Orleans in 1920, Davis served in the US Naval Reserve during World War II, in connection with which he was sent to Dartmouth College to learn about naval camouflage (I wonder if he knew Adelbert Ames II, who was at Dartmouth at the time, and whose research was related to camouflage). He was then sent to Washington DC, where he worked as a ship camouflage artist in the Bureau of Ships (c. 1943) under the direction of artist Charles Bittinger, who had also been connected with naval camouflage during World War I.

While he doesn't mention them by name, Davis must also have worked with Everett Warner, Bennett Buck, Sheffield Kagy, William Walters, Arthur Conrad, Robert R. Hays, and Eliot O'Hara. He recalls: I developed a very effective ship camouflage design for painting these massive forms [destroyers, cruisers, even New Jersey Class battleships] and was sent down to the Brooklyn Navy Yard to assist with the actual painting of the ship…Using a long stick with chalk on the end, I drew the patterns on the actual hull in accordance with the design I had developed in the studio in Washington. It was he who designed the camouflage for the USS Missouri. He continues: I was very happy working in Washington at the Bureau of Ships' Camouflage Department and would have stayed there indefinitely, but instead he was reassigned to the Pacific war zone.

It was also of interest to learn about Davis' architectural training at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, which was then headed by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, with whom he worked directly. One of his classmates at Harvard was I.M. Pei. After graduating, he worked as an intern for Eero Saarinen in Michigan.

Architectural Camouflage Unit

Since August 2009, there has been an on-going course called Camouflage: AA Intermediate Unit 6 at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. The course instructors are Jonathan Daws, Dagobert Bergmans and Fumiko Kato (see Flowspace Architecture). The unit will conclude in February 2010 with an exhibition called Camouflage: A Catalogue of Effects, views of which are posted there. The site is particularly interesting if you link to the entire contents of the course blog and browse through its earlier postings. The effects that the students came up with are fascinating, especially in relation to the anamorphic warping of two-dimensional or three-dimensional surfaces, making them appear to be the opposite of what they "really" are. The results are not dissimilar from certain examples of World War I-era dazzle ship camouflage, as well as the distorted room interiors and other shapes that were originated by American artist and optical physiologist Adelbert Ames II in the 1930s-50s.