George Shortess

Effects of lesions involving efferent fibers to the retina in pigeons (Columba livia)

Abstract In Experiment 1 data are presented which demonstrate that, with lesions involving the centrifugal fibers, pigeons show elevated log 1 0 latencies of response in a two-choice key-pecking task. This effect persisted over 4 days while within each daily session there was a reduction in the initial log 1 0 latency elevation. In addition, a second part of this experiment failed to support a role for these fibers in mechanisms of response habituation to visual distraction. A second experiment is reported which demonstrates that birds with lesions including the centrifugal fibers also have more difficulty with low luminance discriminations than do controls. The results are interpreted as support for the dynamic adaptation theory of Miles [12].

The Shape of Things: But Not the Golden Section

For two-dimensional rectangular objects, a fundamental characteristic is the ratio of height and width. Ratios were calculated for paintings that are both high art and popular art. They show excellent agreement in both the shapes of the distributions and the medians of approximately 1.3. Ratios were calculated for two-dimensional art supplies and other objects. With some exceptions, the representative ratios for many of these objects are also close to 1.3. Two mathematical ratios are suggested. One is 4:3, found in the first Pythagorean triple, the three sides of a right triangle. The other is the plastic number studied by Richard Padovan. Although neither has the status of the golden section, either ratio would be a better candidate for describing the regularity in the proportions of rectangular objects.

Interactive Sound Installations Using Microcomputers

The author first presents the theoretical basis of his work and some thoughts on the use of computers in the arts. He then describes four interactive computer-based installations that he has completed over the past several years. While all the works contained visual components, major portions of these constructed environments were the sounds generated by the perceivers. The ways the sounds organized the spaces and the effects of these pieces on the perceivers are also discussed.

SOME PHYSIOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS ON AESTHETIC EXPERIENCE IN THE VISUAL ARTS

Any functioning system can, of course, perform only a certain set of tasks since it is constrained by its components and the structural and functional relationships among them. Thus, within the nervous system there are certain constraints that limit and, under certain conditions, dominate neural activity, including aesthetic responses. It is not the intent here to define aesthetic response in any complete manner. It should be agreed, however, that nervous system activity is, at least, part of the response to art objects [1]. It follows that the particular characteristics of the nervous system will filter and accentuate sensory information in ways that place constraints on the aesthetic response and that, in one sense at least, partially define the aesthetic response. Examples from several sensory modalities could be used to develop this idea in some detail. However, the visual system provides a number of examples such as responses to edge, line, color, texture, depth and spacing. In the discussion to follow, the response of the visual nervous system to edges and lines will be used since probably more is known about the neural response to this aspect of the visual stimulus than to others. Also edge or line stimulation results in an elaboration, in one form or another, by most neural units responsive to visual stimulation.

Some effects of antidromic stimulation of frog retinal ganglion cells

Abstract Electrical stimulation of the frog optic nerve produced orthodromic discharges following antidromic invasion of certain retinal ganglion cells, under conditioning which tended to minimize cellular damage. The range of latencies from optic nerve stimulus for the orthodromic spikes was 11–72 msec. Light inhibited these orthodromic discharges without affecting the antidromic invasion. If antidromic stimulation were applied more rapidly than 3/sec the orthodromic discharge did not occur, while the cell could follow antidromic stimulation up to 50/sec. In addition, tetanic stimulation failed to produce reliable changes in the response of ganglion cells to illumination.

The Subject of Aesthetics by Tone Roald (review)

respect to historical relations with both capitalism and modern (mass) society. A self-critique of the arts as a form of essentialism frequently took the form of an opposition between representation and abstraction. Interwoven into the canonical narrative was a belief in the expressive and existential capacity of art to operate as a method of individuation along with a set of other features. These include the pursuit of effects of detachment and depersonalization, mechanization and technology; an emphasis on surface reflexivity; a tendency toward transcendentalism; and attention to the internal ordering and relationship of parts in tension with, in painting, undifferentiated composition. It is from such values that one (to many minds) dominant exclusionary monolith of modernism came to be erected (one that paralleled American postwar hegemony of the 1950s and 1960s), a superstructure considered by many to be at odds with the movement’s resistance to totalitarian extension. Most critics recognize that it was during the 1960s that the central tenets of American modernism began to erode, at the height of Greenberg’s and Michael Fried’s self-conscious defense of abstraction. Greenberg and Fried’s formalist emphasis on unitary integration and impersonal flatness was marginalized by persistent figuration and postwar European expressionism; by kitsch and realism’s “recomplication” of the pictorial field; and by new propositions bound to minimalism, process and anti-form. John Cage’s challenge to authorship, materiality and internal structure— seen also in Alison Knowles’s “Make a Salad” of 1962, as well as in the work of artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol—did much to undermine the dominance of formalist theory. Others have joined critics such as Rosalind Krauss and Carol Duncan, who attacked modernism’s myths of originality and “centeredness” and its position of “privileged” and gendered hegemony in dismantling Greenberg’s paradigm. There are reasons to regard the “historic moment” as relevant in reconstructing a definition of modernism and to confront the role of history as the canyon (versus the canon) of art’s operative field. In this field, modernism’s aestheticism should be tempered, indeed E X H I B I T I O N S

A method for evaluating behavioral activity in Rana pipiens induced by changes in illumination

Abstract The method involved: (a) using the change in level of illumination to determine the start of the time base; (b) recycling the illumination conditions with sessions; and, (c) averaging activity scores within corresponding minutes across cycles. Frogs were generally more active in the light than in the dark when subjected to sufficiently long light and dark periods; several minutes were required to stabilize the activity levels after illumination changes. The lateral eyes had to be functional for the animals to respond relatively rapidly to illumination changes while the lateral eyes were not essential for general activation in the presence of a changing illuminated environment.