Calibrate Your Eyes and Ears

We know how to see and hear instinctively. We pay attention to this information selectively. Most sensory input we ignore or process unconsciously. Our awareness and assessment of sights and sounds are largely shaped by our unexamined expectations.

All this makes it possible to communicate with images and music and sound effects. If we couldn't be deceived, we would not enjoy movies, television and the Internet.

This blog is about being observant, about discernment when watching audio visual media. I am not posing as a guru here, just giving voice to a lifelong interest in the art and science of noticing. Sometimes it is useful to substitute for the suspension of disbelief an analysis of how the media exploit this voluntary gullibility.

So here is the premise of this blog: When we indulge in audio visual media, there's a lot we think we sense that isn't really there. There's a lot presented to our senses that we miss entirely. There's a lot we should notice by its absence. There's a lot of absence that is mistaken for insignificance. There's a lot we sense subliminally without scrutinizing the process and its consequences.

One could as well say the same of real world experiences. We notice much more in nature, in a city, even in a social setting, when we have some guidance about what is going on around us. We spend an increasing proportion of our time in the mediated world, however, where our eyes and ears receive highly processed signals laden with ulterior intent. Interestingly, there are few guides to the mediated world; we are pretty much on our own there.

Starting out, the particular objects under observation in this blog will be visualizations created from data. That might seem an esoteric category, but it includes anything shown on a viewing screen and heard through speakers. Yes, movies and television in the digital era are data visualizations, pictures drawn by the numbers. And computers are much better than our voluntarily vulnerable minds at crunching numbers. Using computers, artists and scientists can create realistic images and sounds representing things that don't exist.

But for people who notice, realism in media is just a set of tropes. They know the Matrix is already here, and they hold it at bay by turning it into just another phenomenon subject to scrutiny.