Let’s start somewhere unexpected. How about magic? Or to be more precise, let’s start with a psychological illusion that underpins many magic tricks called amodal absence. Amodal absence is an illusion that prevents you from seeing, or even imagining, what you don’t expect to see. Vebjørn Ekroll, professor of psychology at the University of Bergen, found that if you show people an image of a cluttered desk and then ask them to close their eyes and imagine the clutter, people have no trouble doing so. If, however, you repeat the experiment but show the subjects a photo of the same cluttered desk masked by a perforated screen that hides every item on the desk from view, people find it far more difficult to imagine the clutter even if they are told it is there. Why is that? In the first instance, the viewers see the items on the desk, and they believe their eyes. In the second, the viewers see only the perforated screen and empty areas of desk beyond, and they again believe their eyes.[i]
Amodal absence is an interesting phenomenon as it suggests that our minds actively resist believing or conceiving what the eyes can’t see (conspiracy theorists notwithstanding). Conversely, what we do see serves as ground for understanding and communication – regardless of the veracity of that vision. As Axel Seeman states, “all demonstrative communication requires the deployment of an explicit spatial frame of reference.” He notes we begin life communicating with looks and gestures (as early as the first year) and this body-centric form of communication doesn’t vanish with growing awareness and mastery of a social conception of space. Far from it. “Bodily, action-centered spatial frameworks play a vital role in explaining the demands on the conception of space that enables linguistic demonstrative communication.”[ii]
In short, our entire social repertoire rests on belief in what we see – even if what we see is an illusion.
You may ask, what has this to do with a meditation on architecture as a form of fiction? Both above bodies of research – the psychological mechanism of seeing nothing where something exists (the amodal absence illusion) and language’s reliance on body-centric frameworks – challenge the long held philosophic and artistic notion that aesthetic perception is disinterested. Magic tricks and conversations with friends are rooted in interest. Noticing in general requires interest. And perception, aesthetic or otherwise, is always an act of interest.
The world of physical reality does not consist of meaningful things. The world of ecological reality … does. If what we perceived were the entities of physics and mathematics, meanings would have to be imposed on them. But if what we perceive are the entities of environmental science, their meanings can be discovered.[iii]
James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
I take Gibson to believe that perception is interest through and through. Scientific forms of observation go to great lengths to remove the personal, the prejudiced, the biased or interested. Putting that kind of observation into practice, in fact, requires extraordinary patience, attention and commitment (forms of pre-meditated interest aimed at removing interest in the moment of observation). It is a specialized form of looking and exceedingly rare. Most of the time, observation is perception, which in turn, is interest.
Events occur. We experience the communicative spatial frameworks of those events as settings. Perceiving those settings is always already an act of interest. This interest works in two directions. First, it enables us to see the things we see and not see the things occluded by our own focus – the setting is now ‘scenes,’ ‘transitions,’ and ‘intermediary episodes,’ by turns, based on our interest. Second, it transforms the setting from something seemingly given and objective into scenes colored by our own, seemingly subjective measures – the scene proceeds with vagueness, rapidity, slowness according to interest.
Scenes are where protagonists are enabled to act. Perhaps I should say scenes are where protagonists are able to enact their own interests. The weapon that architects and novelists share, the tool that both disciplines possess to create scenes out of settings is old fashioned, perhaps, but still critical: it is beauty. Beauty is the lure of interest, par excellence. And it is manipulable. Here I am mindful of Marilynne Robinson’s great line regarding literature, “beauty is a strategy of emphasis.”[iv] But if beauty is the strategy, what are the tactics shared by novelists and architects? Order, duration, and frequency?
[i] Vebjørn Ekroll, Bilge Sayim, and Johan Wagemans, “The Other Side of Magic: The Psychology of Perceiving Hidden Things,” Perspectives on Psychological Science 12, no. 1 (January 2017): 91-106.
[ii] Seeman, The Shared World, 98.
[iii] Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, 28.
[iv] Robinson, The Givenness of Things, 111. Marilynne Robinson is here discussing the fate of her literature students who are distanced from texts by the expectations and anticipations of theory and literary criticism. Her lament, in short, is that students fail to the beauty in great works of literature. She writes: “beauty is a strategy of emphasis. If it is not recognized, the text is not understood.”
Architecture is Fiction 