Daguerreotype c 1850

A glossary of a tropic field at the heart of the archaeological imagination.

A photoblog from Michael Shanks - http://figureandground.org

See

Figure and ground - the photoblog

The archaeological imagination

Figure-ground relationships and the archaeological imagination - a talk

Nine archaeological theses on design

argument

The figure-ground relationship is commonly associated with graphic design and with the psychology of visual perception: it refers to the relationship between a subject or figure and the background against which it is set and stands out (or not), how we perceive and distinguish discrete things.

My argument is that if we examine and unpack this relationship, we are taken into a fascinating field that concerns all sorts of issues to do with materiality, making and design, with how we represent and record and understand the world around us. More - given archaeology's interest in our relationships with the material world (as archaeologists work on what remains of the past), an inspection of figure-ground relations takes us into the world of the archaeological imagination.

Include here the blurb from the blog

More specifically, such an inspection prompts us to attend to the relationship and process, balancing figuration, the outlining of forms that matter to us, with what is relegated to background.

I suggest we should critically question the process of establishing subject against background or filtering signal from noise. We might find ways of holding onto the noise, the excess, the matter out of place, the unframed, negative space, the pre-categorized, the ineffable, the ambiguous, that which transgresses form and boundary.

Why? To do so simply makes for a richer experience of history and memory, of the material world we make and inhabit. A richer empirics.

allegory

Allegory is an extended metaphor, when, for example, a story, image or collection stands for something else, makes a broader social or moral point, as in a parable.

An allegory is thus BOTH the story and what it stands for, this AND that.

Consider that many early collections, cabinets of curiosity, were meant to be microcosmic, with the items in the collection standing for the order of existence, even as metonymical fragments.

See the abject, collection, katachresis.

borders

Distinguishing figure from ground involves resolving the border between figure and background, establishing lines of discontinuity.

One can then state as a fundamental principle: When two fields have a common border, and one is seen as figure and the other as ground, the immediate perceptual experience is characterized by a shaping effect which emerges from the common border of the fields and which operates only on one field or operates more strongly on one than on the other.

Edgar Rubin, Synsoplevede Figurer, 1915

See discrimination

camerawork

use of blur, focus, framing, the moment of the shot (decisive moment)

camouflage

When you can't pick out the figure against the background.

See contradiction, discrimination

category mistake

When an environment is too noisy or formless, we might make mistakes and misidentify subject matter or messages. Thereagain we might look to find subject matter or meaning when there is none and make a similar mistake.

Zombies, doppelgängers, ghosts, and cyborgs are examples of monstrous category mistakes.

See formless, the abject

collection

In the act of collection distinction is made between what is valued and what is not, what is to be kept and what discarded.

Collecting is a way of establishing order. Principles of collection are framing devices that organize things.

See

composition

Figure/ground is a relationship used extensively to help artists and designers in the composition particularly of a 2D piece. In its basic sense it refers to a cognitive ability to separate elements based upon contrast, that is, dark and light, black and white. Many times this definition is expanded from a simple perception based on contrast to include abstract (i.e. non-visual) concepts such as melody/harmony, subject/background and positive/negative space.

See layout, positive-negative

contradiction

When the contours within a field are slight and not pronounced, ambiguity starts to creep in and the brain must begin "shaping" what it sees; it can be shown that this shaping overrides and is at a higher level than feature recognition processes that pull together images like Rubin's face/vase.

One can think of the lower levels of cognition putting together distinct regions of the picture (each region of which makes sense in isolation), but when the brain tries to make sense of it as a whole, contradictions ensue, and patterns must be discarded.

This is the key feature of many of Escher's artworks.

Such contradiction in resolving form is also a key feature of many optical illusions: http://books.google.com/books?id=l-tHZfp8C5YC&pg=PA27&lpg=PA27&dq=jacques+jack+canadian+flag+illusion&source=web&ots=5_yke7kncg&sig=qVutzvuB1xebgfukWuXgPVisfcg#PPA41,M1

See category mistake

cryptography

As code is deciphered, what is hidden is unmasked, signal is established in the noise.

See camouflage, epigraphy.

cyborg

A cybernetic organism, hybrid living form and machine, organic tissue and artifact. The ambiguity of the cyborg and the possibility of misrecognition or of misidentification, of attributing subjectivity to a mere machine, is the connection with the puzzle or challenge to make distinction at the heart of figure/ground relationships.

Of course, we might argue against the necessity of such distinction and hold onto the ambiguity - maintaining, for example, that humanity is humanity by virtue of its dependence upon material artifacts, life itself an artifact of human sociality and culture.

See category mistake.

depth

Normally the brain classifies images by what surrounds what - establishing depth and relationships. If something surrounds another thing, the surrounded object is seen as figure, and the presumably further away (and hence background) object is the ground, and vice versa. This makes a kind of phenomenological sense, since if a piece of fruit is lying on the ground, one would want to pay attention to the "figure" and not the "ground".

See visual perception, discrimination, staging

discrimination

A key aspects of figure/ground organization is the assignment of edges or the discrimination of borders and their effect on shape perception. Notice in Rubin's face/vase drawing that the perceived shape depends critically on the direction in which the border (edge) between the black and white regions is assigned. If the two curvy edges between the black and white regions are assigned inward then the central white region is seen as a vase shape in front of a black background. No faces are perceived in this case. On the other hand, if the edges are assigned outwards, then the two black profile faces are perceived on a white background and no vase shape is perceived.

See borders

doors

doppelgänger

One's uncanny exact double.

Threatening selfhood - is this really me?

See the uncanny, category mistake, cyborgs, zombies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doppelganger entropy

Entropy is the natural condition of increasing disorder or noise, in the absence of an imposition or order that requires energy.

More broadly, entropy is a decay of distinction that comes with ruin, loss, and amnesia

environmental control

Environmental control may improve signal strength against noise and interference.

Shielding a microphone cuts out wind noise.

Harrison's ship chronometers succeeded in maintaining their accuracy over long journeys that involved considerable changes in temperature and humidity as well as local disturbance through ship movement by careful use of different materials in manufacture and mounting. This counteraction of environmental variability enabled the calculation of longitude.

See signal and noise, instrumentation.

ephemera

The (material) components of everyday life may be considered trivial and short-lived, the background against which history is played out, against which significant events and things stand out.

See garbage.

epigraphy

Epigraphy is the art and science of reading and deciphering inscriptions and handwriting.

the quotidian becomes history

See palimpsest, cryptography.

excavation

In the archaeological trench, sondage, or excavation, strata, features and finds are distinguished and located. Flows of silt, soil, rock, artifact fragments, organic remains can be conceived as multiplicity, excess, noise, palimpsest and the archaeological task is to establish order against ambiguity, to recognize evidence or source materials in the matrix, against a background of irrelevance.

A common cultural metaphor is to dig deep for authentic meaning.

See stratigraphy

figures in the landscape

Landscape is a genre and ideology of aesthetic relationship with place

A typical landscape literally places figures in a setting, against a (back)ground.

See mise-en-scène, scenography, perspective

filters

Devices to reduce noise and enhance signal.

See signal and noise, spam.

forensics

At the scene of crime anything could be relevant, anything could be evidence. The forensic task is to distinguish evidence from irrelevancy and to establish analytic form.

what should be recorded?

what is the subject?

formless

In the absence of adequate figure/ground signal/noise separation, a field or environment may appear uncertain, disturbed, ambiguous, too noisy, without form.

See the abject.

frames

Putting a frame around something, creating a box, an edge is a way of helping distinguish and arrange figure and ground.

Framing devices include picture frames and windows

Involve transitions such as doors and thresholds and stairways

Forms such as narrative and allegory

Practices such as collection, and performance

buildings such as museums and theaters

fungibility

Fungibility is the function or condition of the breakdown of form into equivalent components capable of recombination.

Fungibility is a central component of digital media - that image is compatible with sound, with text, with moving image.

phase shifts, metamorphoses from one state into another, or as noise becomes signal

("The Conversation" - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071360/)

excess and noise - focusing upon a conversation in the noisy crowd

garbage

Garbage is excess - what is (no longer) needed or desired.

Background noise may be so considered as what is not needed compared with signal or message or the figured subject.

gestalt

The distinction of figure from ground involves higher-level cognitive pattern matching in which the overall picture (involving relationships), rather than the net effect of the individual pieces, determines its mental interpretation. This is a principle of "gestalt".

See visual perception

ghost

Denying the separation of life and death, usually fleeting, evanescent, lacking stable form, ghosts share that abject lack of distinction at the heart of figure/ground relationships.

See the abject, category mistake.

holes and voids

ichnography

tracing form - tracking - ichnography

See forensics.

instrumentation

Scientific instruments measure phenomena, delivering a metric signal related to an attribute.

Any such measurement device is disturbed by parasitic phenomena. This may include electronic noise (ie as expressed in signal to noise ratio - SNR), but also any external event that affects the measured phenomenon — wind, vibrations, gravitational attraction of the moon, variations of temperature, variations of humidity etc, depending on what is measured and the sensitivity of the device.

It is often possible to reduce the noise by controlling the environment. Otherwise, when the characteristics of the noise are known and are different from the signal's, it is possible to filter it or to process the signal.

When the noise is a random perturbation and the signal is a constant value, it is possible to enhance the SNR by increasing the measurement time.

Among other things, Francis Ford Coppola's movie "The Conversation' (1974) is based upon this feature of instrumentation, in particular recording sound.

See signal and noise, environmental control.

integument

Integument is skin - a surface that marks discontinuity, the edge or transition between figure and ground.

See interpellation, borders.

interpellation

interpellation of the subject - hailing the subject, emergence from anomie - recognition

representation and iconography as the creation of subjectivity and objectivity

recognition in the crowd

multiplicity and definition

interruption

Establishing distinction between figure and ground may be interrupted because of lack of form, or of discontinuity, for example.

In asserting the importance of the relationship, of ambiguity, of the significance of choice, interruption may be deliberate. An artist may deliberately blur distinctions, may play upon positive and negative space, may emphasize the formless ground over subject or figure.

Brecht's theatrical technique of verfremdung involved interrupting the illusion of a performance by having actors drop out of role and address the audience directly, interrupting the frame provided by "theater", suspending an illusion of objectivity.

See frame

interstices

Figure/ground relationships are about distinction - making decisions about edges and borders.

But edges and borders may be indistinct grey regions or zones rather than lines of discontinuity

between different states

edges/borders

katachresis

ambiguity - metaphor - katachresis - the failure of metaphor

the juxtaposition of two unlike elements without a metaphorical association that would give significance to the juxtaposition

involves the denial of an easy separation of figure or subject from background

layout

Figure-ground relationships are often associated with graphical design and layout - the arrangement of graphical elements upon a page, for example.

For an application of such design rules in photography, see http://www.apogeephoto.com/mag2-6/mag2-9gestalt.shtml

See composition

Ma

The Japanese concept of "Ma" is a useful gloss on the notion of negative space. It means "empty", "gap", "space", "the space between two structural parts".

The Taoist philosopher Lao Tse wrote extensively on the concept of Ma including his poem The Uses of Not :

Thirty spokes meet in the hub,

but the empty space between them

is the essence of the wheel.

Pots are formed from clay,

but the empty space between it

is the essence of the pot.

Walls with windows and doors form the house,

but the empty space within it

is the essence of the house.

masks

A mask is an arrangement of holes, discontinuities and voids across a surface that convey a character, selfhood, subjectivity.

Masks can be a kind of second skin or integument

See integument, interpellation, holes and voids.

mirrors/reflections

mise-en-scène

The arrangement of components

See proscenium arch

musical rest

In music figure/ground can refer to the relationship of note/sound to interval/silence.

Notoriously, John Cage's 4'33" played on this relationship in a piece of 4 minutes 33 seconds duration that contained no notes. The experience was not of silence, but of rests/no notes and environmental sound. The audience were directed towards ambient sound - a focus on what is normally filtered out, but which is the only ground on which music can be made.

negative space

The space between and around what is considered to be the subject or figure (in a graphical design).

palimpsest

A superimposition and consequent tangling of lines and forms. As in a manuscript reused without erasing earlier text or graphic, there is a challenge to decode the temporal sequence of marks.

Changes in a landscape may remain long after they occurred. The contemporary/simultaneous coexistence of traces of the history of a landscape offers the challenge of disentangling the palimpsest.

Palimpsest is a term usually applied to a surface, though the time depth makes of the surface a mixing or folding of time, a temporal topology. Like a horizontal stratigraphy, decoding a palimpsest is a task of discerning the points and moments of discontinuity, as an event or intervention in the land interrupts what remains of a pervious event or intervention

distinguish the layers by determining discontinuity

See cryptography

personality

A borderline or bipolar character or condition is one characterized by excessive mood swings, manic depression.

, psychosis, bipolarity

perspective

the role of perspective - centering upon the eye of the observer

foreshortening, blur and focus

place/event

architecture and place/event

the empty space/place as scene of crime - Atget architecture - as a kind of stage/setting?

empty spaces?

Tschumi's

place/event

forensic space and an archaeological sensibility of suspicion - what happened here?

signal and noise - what should be recorded

positive-negative

Edgar Rubin's classic optical illusion of vase/face is a paradigm of figure/ground relationships.

The key issue in the perception of one or the other figure is the edge/boundary of the two tones, positive and negative, and how it is treated.

Consider this image too and how it flips between positive and negative.

proscenium arch

In theatre the proscenium arch is a framing device, marking the transition between audience and performance.

See scenography

protean

Proteos, Greek divinity of the sea, is a shapeshifter, able to change form at will, even becoming formless. In order to put Proteos to question for a route home, Odysseus, the trickster, overcame Proteos's metamorphoses by holding firm onto the god's indeterminate form and forcing a settlement.

Many creatures of horror are similarly protean, shifting form, slimy, without form, indeterminate, beyond stable categories or conventional understanding.

See the abject, formless

record and document

What should be recorded in order to capture the significance of an event or experience? A choice is usually made, of medium and subject, of what constitutes data, evidence, the essential qualities of the event or experience. Selection and simplification occur. Figure is distinguished from ground.

A key question in documentation concerns indeterminacy, focus and choice.

- accurate looking and documentation - accuracy related to the purpose of documentation

accuracy therefore related to frame of reference

See forensics, collection

scenography

setting and components - performer, props, scenery (flats, backdrop)

together with narrative, scenario, script and genre.

up stage and back stage - blocking

signal and noise

In information science figure/ground has an analog in the relation of signal to noise.

A crucial metric is signal to noise ratio - SNR.

spam

Spam is unwanted/unsolicited email or comment upon an interactive website or blog. Spam is a parasitic phenomenon that uses channels of communication and media for the purposes of a third party.

Such noise may be "moderated" - through filters or community policing.

See signal and noise, instrumentation, environmental control.

stairways

stratigraphy

Stratigraphy, the layering of strata, is a relationship between surfaces and depth. Archaeological sites are layered like the land. Recognizing surfaces and distinguishing discontinuities in a geological/archaeological matrix is crucial for understanding geology and an archaeological site.

See integument, palimpsest.

substance of space

Figure/ground is often associated with spatial relationships.

In his 2001 book "The Art of Looking Sideways", Alan Fletcher discusses the importance of treating "space" as a substance:

Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by "taking the fat off space". Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses... Isaac Stern described music as "that little bit between each note - silences which give the form"... The Japanese have a word (Ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission. (page 370)

See negative space and Ma

the abject

The abject is a term referring to that which is BOTH figure and ground, NEITHER subject nor object, foreground nor background, this AND that, ambiguity.

In Lacanian terms the abject is the pre-symbolic, the real. The abject is that which is pre- or de-categorized.

Commonly, abject phenomena are the subject of horror: creatures like zombies and vampires (neither living nor dead, undead).

See category mistake, doppelgänger, formless, cyborg.

thresholds

Thresholds are transitional spaces or lines of discontinuity, borders, as one moves from one state into another. They may thus mark the

limenality - sublimation - the sublime

too much detail

We say "too much detail" when we need to know less, discard the excess and concentrate upon the essential - meaning and/or form.

See excess, garbage.

visual perception

Figure/ground relationships feature significantly in visual perception: the matter is how we distinguish objects from backgrounds.

See gestalt and depth

windows

the infrastructural and transdisciplinary space

chorography

cartography

ichnography

archaeology

ethnology

regional geography

psychology

psychogeography

local history

landscape

forensics

collection

archiving + categorization

information science

Mike Pearson - solo performance "From Memory" - Esgair Fraith, Wales, 1996 - foreground - Guillermo Gomez-Peña