Eureka: lightning, sympathy, and the lively limits of perception
Last month, the New York Times published a story by Steph Lin—“Do You Know What Lightning Really Looks Like?”—reporting out a study from a team of Hungarian Researchers, placed in Proceedings of the Royal Society A. The dek offers a juicy épater: “[p]aintings by artists over centuries have consistently underestimated the number of root-like veins in a lightning strike, researchers found.” The researchers had computationally analyzed 100 paintings depicting lightning, counting the number of branches in the bolts and comparing those numbers to branches visible in photographs of lightning. The paintings, they found, consistently show fewer branches than the photographic images—or, as Lin puts it, taking note of “the difference between the imagined and actual renderings: There aren’t enough veins of electricity in the paintings” (my emphasis). Lin follows this observation by offering that the study demonstrates “how cultural legacies can distort our perceptions of natural phenomena, even those that we encounter with our own eyes.”
I want to say that a complementary distortion is at work—one that mangles the making and effects of meaning, even that which we encounter with our own imaginations.
Seeking a mechanism in our perceptual apparatus to explain the discreprancy, the researchers challenged a small set of study subjects to estimate the number of branches visible in lightning strikes. They did this not by exposing them to actual bolts in the sky, but by momentarily flashing photographs of lightning in front of them. The results show things we already know about perception and numeration: that people tend to “subitize” small sets, count slightly larger sets, and estimate—often inaccurately—as the number of objects increases beyond ten.
What the study authors do not acknowledge is the degree of difference between a lightning flash and a flashed photograph of lightning. I’m astonished by this, as it seems highly relevant to the kind of approach they’re making to the question, which they describe as “psychophysical.” The study never addresses how we see lightning, and how different that perceptual experience might be from the phenomenon recorded in the photograph. It’s not clear to me that images of lightning in all its dendritic complexity were even accessible to us before photography.
Beyond this question of perceptual efficacy, however, there is the question of painting, photography, and art, and their shifting histories. As matters of both production and representation, painting and photography manifest markedly different relationships with time. As genres and artistic callings they have cycled through a variety of modulated relationships with ideas like mimesis, realism, and veracity over time. For much of the modern era, painters were held to high standards of veracity; the grounds of that truth, however, shifted again and again, through criteria that were spiritual, historical, psychological, and perceptual, as well as empirical.
In the Proceedings A study, the researchers observe that a few historic painters do manage to escape the clutches of fancy and faulty perception. They note in particular the work of J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851). “His main characteristic,” they aver, “was that what he saw in reality, he translated to his own romantic style and painted that on the canvas…. The characteristics of (his) lightnings are typical, that is they are similar to real lightnings.” This power to represent the typical, the researchers conclude, was instilled in Turner by his early career illustrating guidebooks for tourists; “After such a past,” they write, “he understandably became one of the most typical representatives of realistic painting.”
Turner, whose work signals both the empirical encounter with perception and the astonishing vision of a distinctive imagination, is an interesting choice. In his own day, Turner’s great champion was the critic John Ruskin, who defined a visual style he called the Turnerian Picturesque. The picturesque as a whole was a Romantic method, seeking out the ruined and the sublime: visions of abjection and the vastness of time. For Ruskin, the power of the “higher” form of picturesque Turner advanced didn’t lie in guidebook veracity, but in the intersection of images from the world with thoughts and feelings that exceeded those things, that came from elsewhere:
The essence of picturesque character has been already defined to be a sublimity not inherent in the nature of the thing, but caused by something external to it; as the ruggedness of a cottage roof possesses something of a mountain aspect, not belonging to the cottage as such. And this sublimity may be either in mere external ruggedness, and other visible character, or it may lie deeper, in an expression of sorrow and old age, attributes which are both sublime; not a dominant expression, but one mingled with such familiar and common characters as prevent the object from becoming perfectly pathetic in its sorrow, or perfectly venerable in its age.
The artist discovers these sublime connections not through mere representation or mimesis, but sympathy:
Now in all this observe how the higher condition of art (for I suppose the reader will feel, with me, that Turner is the highest) depends upon largeness of sympathy. It is mainly because the one painter has communion of heart with his subject, and the other only casts his eyes upon it feelinglessly, that the work of the one is greater than that of the other.
It is true, as the study authors note, that lightning has been a powerful symbol, from the bolts of omnipotent Zeus to the flash of inspired genius. This cultural history, the cumulative resonance of metaphor and archetype, surely helps to shape the phenomena of perception—how lightning strikes us, as it were.
Our tools are part of that history. When photography first appeared, observers argued that it removed the author from the act of making—for as a recording device, the camera was the “pencil of nature”; the true author of a photograph was not the the operator of the device, but light, the Sun, or Nature herself. Both skeptics and boosters of the new medium emphasized this empiricism: for the critics, it promised to diminish the roles of sympathy and feeling that Ruskin championed, while for boosters, it suggested that we might overcome strike depictions that reached to the heart of things—finally, we might see lightning in its true aspect. In their lively relation with this new tool, however, artists showed the myriad ways it could be used to reach beyond the empirical and the mimetic.
Research like this (and much of the journalism that frames and conveys it to the public) troubles me so because it seems to encourage us to give ourselves over to a subservient relation to technology, much like those early boosters of photography advocated. Our perceptual apparatus is faulty; the imagination is weak and fragmentary; culture clouds our vision and prevents us from seeing things as they really are. In the nineteenth century, photography briefly became the apparatus that would rescue us from this miry condition; today, advocates look to machine learning and data analytics to lead us beyond our horizons, to build a science transcending the limitations even of theory itself.
We need a livelier relation to tools, and to the world, than this.
