Visual Information Transformation

I’ve been experimenting with using Processing software to present the information found in photographs in different, alternate visual forms.

In this case, I’ve divided and simplified the image of clouds into a grid. In each cell, I use the code to evaluate the average light level. I then represent this information in a couple of different ways: an arrow that points up for light and down for dark; a circle that is small in a light cell and large in a dark cell. I’ve also included the light value as a number in the corner of each cell. These representations become a visual language derived from the landscape but no longer ‘look’ like the landscape.

These graphics are analogous to the information that is available to the brain through the senses. The point here is that this information is not the experience of the landscape. The experience of light, dark, colour, space, and ultimately such things as the experience of awe and beauty happen in the brain, not in the eyes.

So where does the landscape we experience actually exist? Out there in the world? Or in the mid?

I am interested in the idea that the landscape we see, the world we experience, is not something we perceive like a camera, but something we construct in our minds.