British Gestalt Journal / gestalt and camouflage videos

Links to four videos have been posted on the Features section of the British Gestalt Journal at <https://www.britishgestaltjournal.com/features/2022/1/25/roy-behrens-gestalt-theory-and-camouflage>.

Rorschach, klecksography, bigamy, and camouflage

an essay in The Iowa Source

The German word for inkblot is klecks. In the latter half of the 19th century, it was a source of amusement to drop ink on a scrap of paper, then fold the paper to produce a bilaterally symmetrical "picture." If this at once reminds you of the famous Rorschach Inkblot Test developed by Swiss psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach, you are precisely on target. This pasttime had been commonplace during Rorschach's childhood, and he was preoccupied with it—so much so that his classmates called him Klex (or inkblot). More>>>

video / a dazzle advertisement of a dazzling discovery

Above A damaged, 19th century Swiss photograph of a small child in a white hat (just left of center) seated on her father's lap, with her mother standing at the right. Circumstances are such that, at first glance, some viewers interpret the child's face as the eye of a profile of Christ, facing left. 

Like the man in the moon, or a face in the clouds, this is an example of seeing apparently meaningful forms in random or accidental formations, called pareidolia. Unless of course (as might well be), the photograph has been altered, to increase the likelihood of seeing the figure. 

As I discuss in a new online 25-minute video talk, titled Art, Embedded Figures, and Camouflage, there is a long tradition of the purposeful insertion of embedded figures (or, as they are sometimes called, camouflaged figures), in picture puzzles and works of art. Here's a brief excerpt from the video narration, followed by the two advertising diagrams that it describes—

Not surprisingly, embedded figures have also been used in advertising. During World War I, for example, at the height of the public’s interest in dazzle-painted ship camouflage, this unidentified diagram was published in a British magazine, repeatedly—on the same page, in the same location—for several weeks. It simply read: A dazzle advertisement of a dazzling discovery. That was all that anyone knew. 

And then, suddenly, in the last week of the ad campaign, an “embedded figure” solution appeared, also on the same page, same place. Camouflage has its uses, it said, but Firth’s Stainless Steel needs no protective covering.

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.

Forced Perspective, Stage Design and Camouflage

Above Only a few days ago, an essay that I recently wrote on forced perspective (commonly used in stage design and museum dioramas) and World War I ship camouflage has been published online at the website of Aisthesis (an Italian journal published by the Firenze University Press), where it can be read online or downloaded as a pdf.  The essay, titled "Setting the Stage for Deception: Perspective Distortion in World War I Camouflage," appears in the current, special issue on Mimicries in nature, art and society. Vol 9 No 2 (2016).

Martin Stevens on Cheats and Deceits in Nature

Book jacket for Cheats and Deceits (2016)

A wonderful new book by zoologist Martin Stevens is out today in the UK, with US release to follow. Titled Cheats and Deceits: How Animals and Plants Exploit and Mislead (great title!), it is a timely follow-up to his other two recent volumes: Animal Camouflage: Mechanism and Function (2011) and Sensory Ecology, Behavior and Evolution (2013), all from Oxford University Press. Here is the jacket description from the latest, followed by an author’s bio from Amazon.com—

In nature, trickery and deception are widespread. Animals and plants mimic other objects or species in the environment for protection, trick other species into rearing their young, lure prey to their death, and deceive potential mates for reproduction. Cuckoos lay eggs carefully matched to their host's own clutch. Harmless butterflies mimic the wing patterning of a poisonous butterfly to avoid being eaten. The deep-sea angler fish hangs a glowing, fleshy lure in front of its mouth to draw the attention of potential prey, while some male fish alter their appearance to look like females in order to sneak past rivals in mating. Some orchids develop the smell of female insects in order to attract pollinators, while carnivorous plants lure insects to their death with colorful displays.

In Cheats and Deceits, Martin Stevens describes the remarkable range of such adaptations in nature, and considers how they have evolved and increasingly been perfected as part of an arms race between predator and prey or host and parasite. He explores both classic and recent research of naturalists and biologists, showing how scientists find ways of testing the impact of particular behaviors and colorings on the animals it is meant to fool. Drawing on a wide range of examples, Stevens considers what deception tells us about the process of evolution and adaptation.

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Martin Stevens is Associate Professor of Sensory and Evolutionary Ecology in the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter, UK. His research work and teaching focuses on animal behavior and their sensory systems and ecology. Most of his work aims to understand the evolution and function of animal coloration, including camouflage, mimicry, and warning signals, from the perspective of animal vision. His work has included studies on a wide range of animals, including fish, reptiles, birds, insects, crabs, and primates. Martin's work has frequently covered topics related to deception, including mimicry by brood parasites ("cuckoos") and anti-predator coloration, including camouflage, eyespots, and mimicry. He has published over 80 scientific manuscripts, two textbooks, and a general audience book on deception in nature. Martin's research is frequently covered in the international media and he has taken part in a wide range of TV, radio, and magazine productions and given public lectures around the world. 

Patternalia Meets Camoupedia

Cover, Patternalia by Jude Stewart

Jude Stewart is a Chicago-based writer. Back in 2013, she published a five-part online series about the visual history of camouflage at Believer magazine. That same year she also published a book (with lively text and graphics combined) titled ROY G. BIV: An Exceedingly Surprising Book About Color (Bloomsbury USA, 2013) .

In recent months, she has come out with an inevitably suitable sequel, titled Patternalia: An Unconventional History of Polka Dots, Stripes, Plaid, Camouflage, & Other Graphic Patterns (Bloomsbury USA, 2015). Anyone interested in design, vision and camouflage will find this book of value, including the following memorable quotes—

Albert Einstein—

One you can accept the universe as being something expanding into an infinite nothing which is something, wearing stripes with plaid is easy.

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R. Buckminster Fuller, I Seem To Be A Verb—

Man is a complex of patterns, or processes. We speak of our circulatory system, our respiratory system, our digestive system, and so it goes. Man is not weight. He isn't the vegetables he eats, for example, because he'll eat seven tons of vegetables in his life. He is the result of his own pattern integrity.

Cover, ROY G. BIV by Jude Stewart

 

Ship Camouflage and Alzheimer's

Burnell Poole, two views of HMS Mauretania (c1920)

Above For a long time we have known about a wonderful painting by American artist Burnell Poole of the starboard side of the dazzle-camouflaged HMS Mauretania (top). But only recently did we learn that he also created a companion painting (bottom), which shows the port side of the same ship. It clearly shows its camouflage. When dazzle ship camouflage was initiated during World War I, it was decided that no ship should have the same camouflage pattern on both sides. The original paintings are housed in the collections of the Merseyside Maritime Museum, and the US Navy Art Collection, respectively.

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The following is a brief excerpt from Roy R. Behrens' "Khaki to khaki (dust to dust): the ubiquity of camouflage in human experience" just published in Ann Elias, Ross Harley and Nicholas Tsoutas, eds, Camouflage Cultures: Beyond the Art of Disappearance (Sydney University Press, 2015). Among its other contributors are Donna West Brett, Paul Brock, Ann Elias, Ross Gibson, Amy Hamilton, Pamela Hansford, Jack Hasenpusch, Ian Howard, Husuan L. Hsu, Bernd Hüppauf, Ian McLean, Jacqueline Millner, Jonnie Morris, Brigitta Olubas, Nikos Papastergiadis, Tanya Peterson, Nicholas Tsoutas, Linda Tyler and Ben Wadham—

How is it that we experience "things" in contrast to surrounding "stuff"?… Like you, I even see my "self" this way. "I am I" and, to follow, I am not "not-I." We typically regard our “selves” as permeable identities in a bouillabaisse of ubiquitous “stuff,” a surrounding that seems to a newborn, in the famous words of William James, like “a blooming, buzzing confusion.”  One wonders if this might also explain, as Ernst Schachtel suggested, why we are all afflicted by “childhood amnesia,” leaving us with little or no memory of the first years of our lives, because we lacked the “handles” then—the linguistic categories—that enable us to “grasp” events. In recent years, increased attention has been paid to the various forms of “amnesia” at the opposite end of life, including gradual memory loss, senility, dementia, and the horrifying ordeal of Alzheimer’s. If the boundaries of our figural “self” are blurred when we are newborns, perhaps we should not be surprised that the limits of our “self” grow thin—once again—as we march to the end of existence.

As adults, we use hackneyed phrases like “dust to dust” to imply that at birth we somehow spring from naught; that we metamorphically evolve through infancy and childhood; live out our ritualistic lives as corporeal upright adults; then slowly—or, just as often, catastrophically—“deconstruct”; and (at last) are literally “disembodied” in the process that we dread as death. Instead of saying “dust to dust,” it may be more in tune to say “khaki to khaki,” since it seems as if our lives consist of time-based re-enactments of a spectrum of nuanced relations between figure and ground, some or all of which pertain to varieties of camouflage. 

additional sources

 

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 >>>

FDR In Camouflage | Cecil Calvert Beall

Portrait of FDR by Cecil Calvert Beall (c1933)

The American artist who produced this portrait of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not (to our knowledge) serve as a camouflage artist, but it certainly looks like he could have. It is a clever composite (chockful of delightful puns) devised c1933 (some say 1936) by magazine illustrator Cecil Calvert Beall (1892-1967). This is a black and white version of course, but the initial painting (as shown below) was in full-color. It was met with such widespread approval that the National Democratic Party used it in its next presidential campaign, assigning it the title of Find What Roosevelt Means to the US in This Picture.

Full-color versions of the same composite portrait

Then or sometime later, it was apparently revised for promotional use in connection with FDR's residence at Warm Springs GA, describing it as "The Little White House," and introducing images of Eleanor Roosevelt and the United Nations.

Beall was a native of Montana who had studied at the Art Students League in New York with George Bridgman. It doesn't seem that "visual puns" were his usual way of working (look up Arcimboldo for historical precedents), but we do know that he used the same technique in at least one other painting. As shown below, it appeared in a wartime poster for the US Army Recruiting Service (presumably for World War I, if the soldier's helmet is correct).

In psychology, composite puzzle pictures such as these are typically referred to as "embedded figures." For a discussion of how these have been used in art, architecture and design (as well as, literally, in camouflage), here is an online essay.

additional sources

More Horse Camouflage

Horse puzzle and solution

In earlier posts, we've featured camouflaged horses, notably battlefield listening posts in the form of horse carcasses that were constructed of papier mâché. We've also talked about camouflage-related puzzles that appeared in the entertainment sections of Sunday newspapers before and during World War I.

Reproduced here is a puzzle that predates adoption of the word "camouflage" but is an undoubted example of that. It was devised by a turn-of-the-century puzzle master, chess player and recreational mathematician named Sam Loyd (1841-1911). A compendium of his puzzles titled Cyclopedia of Puzzles was published in book form by his son in 1914, and is available online. It includes his "Pony Puzzle" (p. 17) in which a white pony is hidden among the various parts of a "dark horse" (looks more like a donkey to me) silhouette. Here are Loyd's instructions—

Trace an exact copy of the figure, as shown, and cut out the six pieces very carefully, and then try to arrange them together so as to make the best possible figure of a horse. That is all there is to it, but the entire world laughed for a year over the many grotesque representations of a horse which can be made with those six pieces.

Loyd's solution is shown above. It's a horse of a different color of course. We are reminded of the venerable Chinese puzzle game, the tangram (below), in which seven shapes are rearranged, and which Sam Loyd also wrote about.

Three solutions to the Chinese tangram puzzle

Eric Kandel | Camouflage

The same engraving of a sphere (twice), but the right one is inverted.

As is increasingly being confirmed by current brain research, the Gestalt psychologists were right. They claimed that we as humans share certain perceptual inclinations that are hard-wired or innate—they "come in the box" with the rest of the brain. These are inborn universal traits, neither culture-laden nor unique.

Now that people think of "art" as all but exclusively having to do with individuality and self-expression, artists rarely talk about the traits that we inherently share, including these fundamental organizing tendencies. In contrast, graphic designers (whose temperament is in between artists and architects) use them constantly and, for the most part, are well aware of how they work. In fact, these same tendencies are the basis for all the age-old ploys in conjuring (sleight of hand and stage magic), pickpocketing—and, of course, in camouflage. Chief among them are similarity and proximity grouping, edge alignment, continuity, closure and so on.

Nobel Prize neuroscientist Eric Kandel talks about these tendencies (he calls them "bottom-up processing") in relation to current brain research in his amazingly wide-ranging book, The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain (NY: Random House, 2012). As he explains, when we look at objects or drawings of things, we come with the assumption that the source of light is overhead. As a result (as shown above), if two identical images of a shaded sphere are placed together, but one of them (the sphere on the right) has been vertically flipped, the other one (which is seemingly lit from above) looks spherical, expansive and solid. The one lit from the bottom looks deflated, less substantial and concave.

Solomon J. Solomon, Pencil drawing of a hand (c1910)

Artists and designers, even the earliest cave artists, seem always to have known this, the traditional technical name for which is shading. It is of great importance because it is such a reliable way to make flat drawings (which are merely marks on paper) appear to be three-dimensional shapes that bulge out in space toward the viewer. A particularly skillful example of this is a drawing of a hand (above) by British painter Solomon J. Solomon (1860-1927), from his book The Practice of Oil Painting and Drawing (London: Seeley, 1910).

Solomon was an uncle of the American playwright Moss Hart. Interestingly, he was also the person put in charge during World War I of the British Camouflage Section within the Royal Engineers (1916-18).

Solomon is often credited with the use of overhanging nets, garnished with burlap strips, so that anything beneath them will be visually broken up by irregular shadows—just as happens on the tennis court, when the shadows of the chain link fence disrupt the shape of the ball in the grass. It is also commonly said that he and his camouflage unit devised the first British steel-lined observation post, designed to look exactly like a dead tree on the battlefield.

Examples of countershading from Camoupedia (2009)

Years in advance of WWI, a prominent American artist, Abbott H. Thayer, revealed how inverted shading (commonly called countershading) contributes in a major way to  "protective coloration" (or animal camouflage). An avid naturalist as well as an artist, it was Thayer's belief that there is a functional reason why so many animals have "white undersides" (light-colored bellies, with darker coloring toward the top)—not unlike the coloring of the sphere on the right at the top of this page. As a result, countershaded animals look less dimensional, even flat. I have discussed this in detail, in print as well as online.

If an artist can apply shading to a shape on a flat surface, so that it looks three-dimensional, then the exact opposite can also be done:  Shading can be painted out and inverse shading painted in, so that a truly dimensional form looks flat and insubstantial. Here's how Thayer's son and collaborator, Gerald H. Thayer explained it:

If a rounded object, say a ball or cylinder…is to be made to disappear, it has, in the first place to be countershaded. That is, its shadowed parts must be lighter in color, must be painted lighter until the shadow no longer shows; and the portions facing toward the source of light must be just proportionately darkened. In this way, a rounded, solid form can be made to look perfectly flat.

The elder Thayer demonstrated this repeatedly. Sometimes he used artificial lighting and stuffed animals, such as the tiger he set up a Harvard University (as shown above, the third row down). Lighted from below (on the left), the animal is clearly visible, but it virtually disappears (on the right) when lighted from above. Thayer's more portable standard way of showing the effects of countershading was to "paint out" wooden duck decoys (or short of that, sweet potatoes). In the bottom photo, he claims that there are two decoys, but we only see one. The one on the left (clearly visible) is the color of the ground but has not been countershaded, while the one on the right (which I can't find) has been expertly countershaded.
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• For more information, see this annotated bibliography on Art, Architecture and Modern Camouflage. See also public radio podcast on dazzle camouflage, and the trailer for an upcoming film on the same subject.

More info

Art / Science Camouflage Podcast

Hooded Cutttlefish (photo by Silke Baron). Creative Commons.

EARLIER THIS WEEK, Woods Hole marine biologist Roger Hanlon and video artist Basia Goszcynska were interviewed by Mindy Todd on a 30-minute live radio program called The Point. Hanlon, who was featured on NOVA several years ago in Kings of Camouflage (available now as dvd), is well known for his research of camouflage in cuttlefish. The subject of this podcast is the collaborative work of artists and scientists in studies of camouflage and communication, with allusions to further ideas about architecture, landscape design, advertising and other research possibilities.

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).

Gestalt Theory, Cubism and Camouflage

Above Cover of Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye by Harvard psychologist and art theorist Rudolf Arnheim (1904-2007). Having studied with Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin, he was the last surviving student of the founders of Gestalt psychology.

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Max Wertheimer and Pablo Picasso were contemporaries: The former, who co-founded Gestalt theory with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler, was born in 1880; while the Spanish painter, who invented cubism with Georges Braque, was born in 1881. Both Gestalt theory and cubism emerged in the years that preceded World War I. Gestaltist Fritz Heider does not suggest that Wertheimer and Picasso were acquainted, or even that they knew about each other's discoveries, but only that "the perceptual phenomena with which they were dealing were the same" (Heider 1973, 71). However, it also seems likely, as he points out, that both realized that the factors that they were exploring were used in military camouflage. More…

Brute Camouflage

From George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (NY: Oxford University Press, 1975)—

At every level, from brute camouflage to poetic vision, the linguistic capacity to conceal, misinform, leave ambiguous, hypothesize, invent, is indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness.