#openingtalk

OPENING TALK by Asst.Prof.Dr. İnci Ayhan ---  “Visual Arts and Design from the Eyes of a Vision Scientist”

The first guest speaker of the second semester was Asst.Prof.Dr.İnci Ayhan from Boğaziçi University, Department of Psychology Chair. She talked about the famous pipe at the beginning of her speech. When we look at the aforementioned photo, we perceive the thing in the photograph as a pipe and we can directly call it a pipe, but it's just a representation of something.

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you    stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written      on my picture 'This is a pipe', I'd have been lying! —René Magritte

After then, she mentioned the perceptual presence of objects. Sometimes when we look at an object from the right angle, we can see that the object has a meaningful unity, but when we change our perspective a little bit, we can see that the integrity of that object is lost and something else entirely emerges. Hence, we can say that " Any given perception can be produced by an infinity of different scales"

After these topics, she informed us about lines and contours in drawings. Sudden changes in the amount of light on a surface and what defines the boundaries of an object can be called a line. In fact, there is no such thing as a line in the real world. However, we just pretend that there is such a thing as a line. Lines do not appear in the world we live in, but we can say that the interruption of color, texture, or tone is visible.

(All photos are from İnci Ayhan's presentation.)