Author: James Vornov

Cups and Trays in Harbor, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

I think more that a few photographers have begun to realize that we finally have some digital cameras with enough dynamic range to begin to replicate a more classic black and white look. Film, with its slow fade to pure white and pure black captured tonality with ease. This D800 is about there. With a 50mm prime, it’s not much bigger than the film cameras I started with, although it is a good bit heavier.

_DSC0788cc, originally uploaded by jjvornov.

Having made a major life transition in moving to a new job, perhaps it’s not surprising that I’m feeling a need for some simple visual work. Vince Versace’s two new books have been waiting for me. My first goal will be to catch up on the updated technique in Welcome to Oz 2.0. So far, I find my new conversions a bit more naturalistic, a bit less dramatic.

“Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”
Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”
-Italo Calvino
Invisible Cities (1972)

As Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts begins, a man awakes without memory of his life or of his personal identity. He finds instructions to visit a therapist who will explain his situation. The therapist tells him he has a dissociative disorder- he’s blocked his memory because of a traumatic event. This is more or less a conventional explanation for global amnesia, a loss of the past and personal identity.

An alternative explanation soon presents itself. Mysterious letters and packages arrive at the apartment. These have somehow been sent by his previous self, the first Eric Sanderson. His past self warns him that he is pursued by a conceptual shark that seeks to consume whats left of his mind and sense of self. The novel is the story of his quest to understand his situation and somehow defeat or evade the abstract menace that threatens his tenuous existence.

What to make of this abstract threat to mental and possibly physical life? In the opening scenes of the novel, Eric is completely uncertain whether he is crazy or really threatened by the abstract world. Which is real, the outside world or the interior world of mind? The reader is just as confused.

The philosopher recognizes this conflict as having its roots going back to Rene Descartes. Descartes famously asserted that mind and the world “out there” are separate. As thinking beings, people live on the side of mind, entirely without access to physical reality. That is, if the real world can be said to exist at all if it is so far out of reach. The apparent entry of the abstract into the real world. The breach of mind into world breaks the Cartesian divide wide creating the central suspense of the novel.

How can a neuroscientist approach a book like this? I come to the book with a certainty that the central conflict doesn’t exist. There is no abstract world of mind, only physically based activity of the brain. It couldn’t be more clear that Eric’s conceptual shark and his the loss of personal identity are occurring in his brain. Electrical patterns of neuronal discharge can’t leave the brain and pursue the body though the world. So I can’t bring myself to a suspension of disbelief and accept the premise that a conceptual shark might be real and a physical threat.

And yet once I settled into the book I was swept up in the quest and invested in the outcome. It was a great and clever read, full of suspense and action even though I knew the events were occurring in Eric’s brain with no external referent even if he perceived it to be so.

Some neuroscientists take the rejection of Cartesian dualism too far, denying that mind matters at all. After all, it makes no sense to say that mind can control anything since only brain circuits can do anything. Mind is what brain does and so is not able to cause or create anything in a real sense, all metaphor aside. Subjective experience, in the most extreme version of this view, is of no importance. They would, I presume, find the entire book of no interest. Mental states are not something to be taken seriously. We know that scientists and philosophers who espouse this view don’t act this way. Typically when the subject turns to mental events they often act Cartesians, treating mind as existing in a separate world that somehow influences the brain. Like abstract sharks stalking vulnerable people.

A novel like The Raw Shark Texts actually helps demonstrate how important the content of thought really is. Mind matters because it is the only window we have onto reality. It is not reality itself. It is a simplified approximation of the world represented in brain maps that we experience with this marvelous subjective sense of sight, sound, smell and meaning everywhere.

The brain needs the sensory input to be anchored in reality. Without the input, the reproduction of the world continues on, just without as much relevance. Deprived of sensation to anchor it, the brain runs independently and disconnected. Sensory deprivation, for example, results in vivid hallucinations. Dreams are likely to be similar brain network activation patterns untethered to external input.

The fact is that I can close my eyes at will and bring sights and sounds to mind that exist only in memory. Imagination is a mechanism by which new reality can be constructed from bits and pieces of the known and remembered.

After all, the brain is an amazing realtime engine that uses a simplified model of the world to reconstruct a guessed at reality and predict outcomes based on imperfect knowledge. There is nothing more important than the battles that occur inside, the self-referential arguments to decide what is real and what is right.

The Raw Shark Texts puts this idea in a literary frame and dramatically portrays the struggle as a fantasy thriller. The genre we call magical realism gets much its power from projecting the interior imagination out into a story that seems to be about the real world. It’s more dramatic to read about the clash of swords than the clash of ideas. It’s a bigger problem to have your life threatened than to have your ideological underpinnings or emotional stability attacked.

The life of mind is important. It’s our most important experience in life because it’s our only experience in life. What you perceive becomes what is. Your perception of me, my motivations, my character is what I am to you. Who I really am or what I really think is entirely inaccessible to you. Even as you read this you are assembling a model of me that may be wildly different from the view I hold of myself. Who’s understanding of me is more accurate?

To awaken completely isolated from oneself, from one’s memories is a dangerous situation for Eric Sanderson. His journey to save himself is no less epic if it only happens in his mind. It makes my own daily interior struggle to be better seem more important, more noble.

It would be depressing to judge myself only based on my position in the world. Material success as measured by the bank account or the rank and esteem bestowed by others seem empty because they are external. Perceptions of the perceptions of others are mere shadows of shadows. It’s bad enough that we have to live in the illusion we’ve created for ourselves. What a greater pity to live that fragile illusion reflected from the shifting and conflicted illusions of others.

We know or at least imagine who we want to be. Success is best measured by the distance between who we are now and that goal of thinking, knowing and acting well.

Eric Sanderson awakes completely missing his memories, disconnected from what he has been and what he’s learned. He’s as far away from who he wants to be as possible. He doesn’t know who he was, who he is or who he wants to be. That conceptual shark has taken away most of his life and now threatens to wipe him out completely. I can’t think of anything more real than that.

Yesterday I visited the Metropolitain Museum of Art in NYC to see the Stieglitz and His Artists: Matisse to O’Keeffe just to soak in this important period of the arts in the US. There was a small associated gallery with some of Stieglitz’ photography collection. The photographs brought to mind once again how much photography was competing with painting until technical advances in film and printing gave photography the kind of technical image perfection that we now think of “photographic”. I’ve always yearned for the painterly results that the early techniques porduced. Our technical abilities have now advanced to the point that Flickr has thousands of well composed, perfectly exposed images that were hard to achieve in the predigital era.

There was another small photography gallery at the Met which was more inspiring to me, After the Gold Rush: Contemporary Photographs from the Collection. The images were all ones that addressed culture and political power. What struck me was the choice of a test wall installation as the closer for the gallery. I’d never seen his work before, but I believe he is on to something in presenting mulitple images in multiple sizes of multiple subjects that relate to each others in a way that a single image cannot.

I’ve begun printing images again and have been looking at how images relate when prints are placed in relation to each other. So far, it suggests why these images get created and how they are connected.

Last night’s dinner: Duck Risotto with Duck Skin Gribenes. In the US, fried skins are usually called Cracklings. Gribenes is the Yiddish term of art.

On Chanukah, it’s traditional to eat fried foods like potato latkes. It’s just a culinary not to the miracle of the oil that’s celebrated.

Reading Mark Bernstein’s discussion of the future of books reminded me of my research methods in my academic days and a shocking recent discovery about the future of a library.

I never learned the classic index card source method. I would grab a new legal pad and scribble some information at the top of a page to link the notes to some source, generally a book. I’d then just write and write and write on the page, flipping to a fresh page as needed. It was a crazy mix of my my own thoughts and information directly from the source. The raw material. Since I never had the patience to actually copy quotes or information, I only wrote enough to recapture and document the dissuasion going on between the source and myself in that notes page.

I remember now that I’d often read a book cover to cover with excitement and then take a second, leisurely stroll through it to have that conversation with the author. Other times it was a page flipping attack on a book to see whether a particular subject was to be found in its pages. Researching obscure topics lead to a lot of attacks on a lot of books. Often I’d go from one end of the shelf of the library to the other, flipping systematically through every plausible source.

When it was time to write, I’d outline a section and decide what sources were relevant. Then I’d have the sources physically piled up in front of me, my notes to my left and a new pad for writing on the right. The process was to write, reference material by pulling the source and my notes and write some more. Of course revisions included pulling all of the physical sources together again.

This method was perfectly suited both to my poor memory, distractibility and the library environment. I didn’t work in my dorm room or, later, my office. The library was where I read, researched and wrote. As a faculty member at Johns Hopkins, I loved setting aside the time to begin the preparation of a manuscript or grant so that I could spend those hours lost in the stacks of Welch Medical Library.

Once out of college and focused on neuroscience, the system worked just as well as long as the Xerox machines were working. I probably spent more time dragging bound journals down to the basement and flipping pages to copy than I did reading or writing. I developed a commitment to never cite research that I hadn’t read and, generally, didn’t have a physical copy of to refer to. In fact, hidden in a couple of the book chapters I wrote are indirect references to sources, such “Jones (1936) as summarized in Smith (1994)”" when I couldn’t get a copy of Jones to read directly or it was written in another language. Sadly, as abstract services became electronic, it became a very, very common practice for papers to cite research that the author had clearly never read critically based solely on the research as inaccurately described in the paper’s abstract.

Imagine my surprise when I learned last month that Welch Medical Library at Johns Hopkins was going to close the doors of its historic building. Of course library services were not going away, it was decided that a better use of resources would be to enhance electronic services and campus delivery of books rather than keep a building open for the 106 visitors a day who circulated around the stacks of journals which were almost all available on line anyway.

Checking the Welch Medical Library website today, I see that the plan has been scuttled and instead there will be a larger discussion about the library. Despite such rearguard actions, the future of the library is clear. Libraries will be a service, not a place.

Mark closed his discussion about the future of books this way, “If our books are not as good as they can be, we can make them better. If we know how to make them better, and we want to make them better, why would we not?”

I submit that the books (and journal articles) are only one part of this transition. The real change is in the environment of these books, migrating from physical form to distributed digital information. It’s chaotic now, with way too many devices and contexts for retrieving and collecting information. I find myself redeveloping my stack of of sources, my legal pads of notes and my writing pad over and over again every six months, but where the sources are in a dozen forms that partially overlap, notes in half a dozen systems (text files, Findings, Tinderbox), and writing in yet another half dozen programs.

We call it “workflow”, but that’s a symptom of the world in transition. If we’re smart, we’ll be choosing and developing tools that together create a more powerful version of the library carrel. And valuing scholarship, not just the ability to weave a few sources into an entertaining yarn.

Reclining
Florence, Italy

I was inspired by Zack Arias to look back on my photographic output of the last few years and try to put together a portfolio, perhaps as prints. I’ve been working on editing and rating photos lately to put together some photo books to give as gifts. That turns out to be a real motivator for me to bring photography more into my life.

I thought that I might cut the process short by just finding the photos in my aperture library that were tagged by FlickrExport as being uploaded. Flickr tells me that since I started uploading in late 2005, I’ve posted 628 images. Using the Archive Thumbnail View I could survey my body of work on screen quickly and see the number of images for each year. It looks like this:

So in 2008, my Flickr posting peaked at about an image every other day. I was surprised the pattern. Based on a review of image counts within Aperture, it looks like it has to do both with decreased numbers of shots taken and processed plus a waning of intrest in Flickr’s social side. A few years ago, I was active in several groups and anticipated the views and feedback.

I’m pretty confident that I can use the Flickr tags through 2008. But I’ll need to do a broader reivew for the last few years to identify promising images and process them.