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Brief History of Perception

From Ancient Greek to the Cognitive Turn – and a bit of what happened next

Revised version [2024] of BRIEF HISTORY OF PERCEPTION (2021), https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/1025487/1025488, https://doi.org/10.22501/rc.1025487

Introduction and general anticipation

Perception is studied in both the natural sciences and the humanities. First and foremost, it describes an information process between the inside and the outside of a living being. Perception is one of the only tools artists work with. Whether art uses the language of hyperrealism, abstract expressionism, the language of political, social, or simply beautiful images, art is the sensory window through which the mechanisms and interactions of nature plus society become visible knowledge. The British painter John Constable claimed in 1816 that: “Painting is a science, and should be pursued as an inquiry into the laws of nature.” [1]

This study of the consciousness-perception-reality cycle (see Figure 1) is therefore more in line with established cognitive research. In contrast to cognition, perception can generally be understood as the reception of sensory impulses without assigning meaning to them. „I feel the heat of the sun“ is a simple statement about the sensory impulses of a moment in a particular environment. But „The heat of the sun makes me run for water“ describes a cognitive process.

According to the Vienna Declaration on Artistic Research of June 2020, this work cannot be understood as artistic research either, because it does not present and reflect a common artistic practice. Nevertheless, the context of artistic research is preferred here for several reasons. On the one hand, it was the intention of the author, who was fortunate enough to enjoy an artistic education, to get to the bottom of the most fundamental circumstances of perception. On the other hand, the technical developments and social interactions of recent years and decades have been so profound that a major change in the way we see the world is obviously underway.

But while a scientific narrative is always concerned with a comprehensive, detailed description, the artistic reflection here is more concerned with discussing and processing one of the greatest works of art of all time. If the world is considered a work of art, as Piero Manzoni did in 1961, [2] then every human being is an artist, as Joseph Beuys claimed several times. [3] And therefore every observation can be considered as art and, of course, social action, not only with regard to various physical phenomena.

This artifice seems necessary not only in light of the failing political structures of recent years. It also shows how quickly the world and the way it is seen can change in the face of the helplessness of aggressively contagious diseases.

Thus, this thesis attempts to present an overview of some milestones that focus on the issues of vision. Although this overview still has the characteristics of a scientific narrative, the emphasis has been on discovering a meta-level of these developments. This becomes particularly difficult as soon as the threads of the 20th and 21st centuries become intertwined. From a scientific point of view, only a „dive“ into the details seems serious. But a reduced focus on artistic works helps to regain height and to regain an overview. It should be noted, however, that in the 20th century the question of perception was replaced by the question of cognition. This is due to the practical application of various information-theoretical impulses. On the one hand, in terms of electromechanical engineering challenges, and on the other, in terms of computer science, robotics, or artificial intelligence. But one thing emerges. The individual and public dynamics always experience a strong fluctuation when technological achievements strengthen and expand human sensory perception.

Since much of this research predates the publication of the Vienna Declaration, this work can only serve to illustrate the following questions Is public perception the alter ego of individual perception and can it be seen as a living entity? Are mobile phones and big data something like a gigantic compound eye of a global civilization that generates a specific, collective reality (cf. Fig. 71 ff.)?

In very general terms, reality is the common description of everything that can be perceived together. In 2007, for example, Steve Jobs introduced the first smartphone, Microsoft released Windows Vista, a truck bomb exploded in Baghdad, North Korea agreed to disable its nuclear facilities, a total lunar eclipse occurred, a solar eclipse occurred, a school shooting in Virginia killed 32 people, Live Earth concerts were held in nine major cities around the world, Greece suffered the worst heat wave of the century, the Phoenix spacecraft was launched toward Mars, the first signs of the 2007-2008 financial crisis became public, multiple suicide bombings in northern Iraq killed 572 people, an 8.0 earthquake in Peru killed at least 519 people, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, WikiLeaks published the standard US Army protocol at Guantanamo Bay, Cyclone Sidr killed up to 15,000 people in Bangladesh, the Lisbon Treaty was signed by the members of the European Union, and a painting by Pablo Picasso was stolen from the Sao Paulo Museum of Art.

More than a decade later, the tumultuous events of 2007 seem more than normal. Perhaps because everyone has become accustomed to the amount of information available. But with the introduction of smartphones that year, global communication reached a very important milestone, along with several other technological innovations. Three years earlier, Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, Eduardo Severin, and Mark Zuckerberg released a whole new information architecture for web browsers that made it possible for non-experts to create user-generated content. This marked an enormous shift from a standardized information industry system to a broad stream of social channel information system. Now, many people can share their individual perceptions, meanings, and impressions, which do not have to match the information campaigns of the mass media. This technological expansion of individual perception has enabled an unprecedented flow of information and, with it, an unprecedented view of the world.

This view was far from benign. Many cases of abuse of power and deliberate infiltration or even damage to the public good became known. [4] This was indeed a very new situation. The ability to identify objects, even abstract constructions, is generally associated with the human sense organs and the perceptible environment, primarily with the function of the human eyes. The brain uses almost a quarter of its activity and about 60 percent of the cerebral cortex to analyze the visual world. [5] Even though visual perception is only a small part of the measurable electromagnetic spectrum (see Figure 2). And the new situation suddenly made it possible to watch someone having dinner on the other side of the world. Obviously, such radically expanded visual ranges bring changes. But let’s take a look at the beginnings of this topic in ancient Greece.

BRIEF HISTORY OF PERCEPTION

One of the earliest concepts in the history of visual perception is the possibility of seeing through eidolons (Figure 3), small copies of real objects consisting of small, indivisible particles called atomos that fly into the eyes. The pre-Socratic philosopher Democritus (c. 460-371 B.C.) was convinced of this idea because he saw the reflection of such objects on the surface of the cornea. [6] He was also convinced that there are two kinds of knowledge, one through the senses and the other through the intellect. [7]

Plato was convinced that the eyes, like a scanner, project a beam onto the objects of reality (fig. 4). It was Aristotle who believed that only shiny objects, such as fire or the sun, produce light that is reflected by objects and reaches the eyes (fig. 5).

It took centuries for the Arab scholar Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham to study the anatomical structure of the eye (Figure 6). Between 1011 and 1021, he wrote the famous Book of Optics, which confirmed Aristotle’s assumption that light rays allow us to see.

But „Alhazen,“ as Western historians called Ibn al-Haytham, was also concerned with neuropsychological aspects of visual perception. He noticed that seeing takes place in the brain rather than in the eyes. And everything you see, he believed, is influenced by personal experience. [8]

Although no new concept of visual perception was developed until Copernicus, Kepler, or Descartes, Alhazen’s Book of Optics was for a long time the only accepted theory and a very important key to the development of central perspective in the Renaissance. [9]

It took more than 500 years for Johannes Kepler to find some answers to the questions of light diffraction left unsolved by Alhazen. In 1604, he published Astronomiae Pars Optica (Figs. 12-14), in which he analyzed the inverted and reversed projection of images by the lens of the human eye onto the retina.

Galileo Galilei referred to Kepler’s achievements in his development of a refracting telescope. The ability to augment the human eye with optical instruments was an important step in the development of perception and a change in the way the world was viewed. When Galileo published his observations of the moons of Jupiter in 1610 in the book Sidereus Nuncius (Fig. 16), he was confirming the research of Nicolaus Copernicus, which had been made public 67 years earlier.

In 1543, shortly after his death, Copernicus‘ book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (Fig. 9) was published. He knew that the ruling political system, which was strongly linked to the Catholic system, could not accept his heliocentric model of the universe. Galilei knew that the Copernican system was inexorable and that the religious interpretation of universal processes was no longer arguable.

René Descartes‘ treatise on light, Traité du monde et de la lumiére, written between 1629 and 1633 (fig. 17), disseminates an almost complete methodological, philosophical, biological, physical, and metaphysical interpretation of the „idea formed in our imagination through the intermediary of our eyes“. [10] It is the beginning of the modern era and the interaction of several substantial polymaths who fused the existing knowledge of their time.

Descartes as well as Galilei were friends of Christantijn Huygens, a Diplomat and advisor of the House of Orange-Nassau, and the father of the Dutch polymath Christiaan Huygens. Christiaan Huygens treatise on light Traité de la Lumière published 1690 (Fig. 20), described that all points of a wavefront of light may be regarded as new sources of wavelets, that expands in every direction. [11]

Four years before Descartes died (1650), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died in 1646, and another four years before that, Isaac Newton was born in 1642. From the voluminous correspondence of Christiaan Huygens (born 1629), it is known that Huygens met Newton in London in 1689 and became friends with Leibniz in Paris a few years later. The connections and rivalries of the polymaths of this period changed the interpretation and perception of the world.

One example is Leibniz’s lifelong interest in developing a universally relevant language (Characteristica universals), which stimulated the development of the binary system, the basis of every existing computer system (see Figs. 22 & 23). [12] Newton’s discovery of different spectral hues overturned a centuries-old dogma of „pure“ light, which was assumed to be white. Although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe defended the Aristotelian theory of the fundamental nature of white light in his Farbenlehre (1810, fig. 27), Newton’s particle theory of light in his Opticks (1704, fig. 24) was the beginning of a completely new understanding of light.

By the mid-18th century, not only the physical understanding of light and the way humans could see had changed. In 1750/58, the philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten published Aesthetica (fig. 25), a theory of beauty that established perception as an independent science in the humanities. Although he associated the term aesthetics with the concept of human sensation „as the ultimate ground of judgment in questions of beauty,“ it was with this book that the philosophical discussion of aesthetics began, and not at some distant time. In 1781, Immanuel Kant responded to Baumgarten’s publication by stating that aesthetics could never contain „objective rules, laws, or principles of natural or artistic beauty.“ [13] Nine years later, in his Critique of Judgment (fig. 26), Kant declared that an aesthetic judgment must be subjective. Arthur Schopenhauer countered that Kant „does not proceed from beauty itself, from the immediate, beautiful object of perception, but from the judgment about the beautiful…“. [14]

Parallel to the philosophical debate, another development took place that would again change perception and the way the world was seen. In the late eighteenth century, James Watt patented a steam engine with a continuous rotary motion. [15] The beginning of the Industrial Revolution stimulated the study of moving images. Michael Faraday published an essay on a peculiar class of optical illusions in 1831 (Fig. 31). [16] He observed the optical phenomenon of two wheels moving in opposite directions at the same speed. In 1832/33, the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau demonstrated the same effect with a device called the phenakistoscope, which produced the illusion of a moving image by means of counter-rotating disks with repeated images drawn in small increments on one disk and regularly spaced slits on the other (Fig. 32). In 1833/34, the Viennese geometry professor Simon Stampfer invented the stroboscopic disk, which showed a series of images on one side separated by slits (Fig. 33). When the disk was held in front of a mirror and rotated, the images appeared to move when viewed through the slits. [17]

Years later, the Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach became famous for his study of shock waves and in the field of supersonic fluid mechanics. But his early studies were in experimental physics and the study of interference, diffraction, polarization, and refraction of light in different media under external influences. He defended phenomenalism, which recognized only sensations as real [18] and all knowledge as a conceptual organization of data from sensory experience or observation (Fig. 41). Mach’s rigorous criteria for metaphysical concepts of absolute time and space (as proposed by Newton) prepared the way for Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Albert Einstein extended a hypothesis proposed by Max Planck, who suggested that the emission of radiation does not occur continuously, but in discrete packets called quanta (see Fig. 45). [19] Einstein investigated the interaction of matter and light by explaining the emission of electrons from a metal surface irradiated by light or higher-energy photons. The photoelectric effect was based on the concept that light is made up of photons and that an atom in a metal can absorb either a whole photon or nothing (Fig. 46).

Nine years before Einstein’s theory appeared, the physiologist Sigmund Exner published a theory in 1894 which claimed that perception is a complex excitation triggered by consciousness. [20] Exner outlined the idea that the internal representation of the world is made possible by the network of neuronal regions in the brain (Figures 42 & 43). Exner recognized the basic idea of cognitive neuroscience and opened the door to the psychological aspect of perception that the philosopher and founder of Gestalt psychology, Christian von Ehrenfels, had discussed four years earlier in his 1890 essay On the Qualities of Form. Ehrenfels was convinced of the quality of perception of the whole compared to its parts. Alexius Meinong, who had been Ehrenfels‘ dissertation advisor in Graz, specified Gestaltvorstellung as the result of a psychological act as a product of imagination. Together with Stephan Witasek and Vittorio Benussi, the Graz School of Experimental Psychology represented a subjective creation of figures that is added to the complex of perception as a second or higher level. In contrast, the Berlin School of Experimental Psychology, with Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka, identified a figure (Gestalt) as the primary object. [21]

From the development of perception as an internal image of the external world, and from Gestalt theory to cognitive psychology, it became clear that perception is an important part of a mental process along with attention, language use, memory, problem solving, creativity, and thinking.

In 1948, the mathematician and philosopher Norbert Wiener developed a transdisciplinary psychological approach to perception into a regulatory system, which he summarized as cybernetics (Fig. 56). [22] While the term still stands for the technological control of any system, Heinz von Foerster developed Wiener’s concept into second-order cybernetics, which refers to biological processes. Founding the Biological Computer Laboratory in 1958, he investigated self-organizing systems, observing systems, cognitive processes in perception, and developed another branch of constructivism with additional parts of physiology, information theory, perception theory, technology, and epistemology. [23] [24] Foerster’s understanding of constructivism entangles an observer indivisibly with the observed within a system. [25]

In parallel with Norbert Wiener, mathematician and electrical engineer Claude Shannon published A Mathematical Theory of Communication (Fig. 55) in 1948. [26] This paper provided the concepts, insights, and mathematical formulations that are now the foundation of modern communications technology and is widely regarded as the beginning of information theory and the dawning information age. [27]

In art, images have always been central to the representation of the world. The perception of images was equivalent to symbolic markers indicating places and objects of hunting or religious acts. With the development of central perspective in the Renaissance (see figs. 10 & 15), a window was opened that imitated reality so obviously in the world of matter that the imaginary interpretations of these constructed worlds did not attract further attention.

In the scientific study of vision and the behavior of light, images became more and more representative of the knowledge developed. The Industrial Revolution advanced the study of moving images and the reflection of perception in physiological and psychological disciplines. The act of seeing became an autonomous expression of art. The development of technical devices to sharpen perception changed the view of the world. Peter Weibel called this machine perception (apparative perception). In the 1960s, Alfons Schilling, Walter Pichler, Oswald Wiener, Max Peintner, and Peter Weibel developed series of artworks that elaborated on this question of perception under the influence of machines and whether „reality had always been a virtual reality (Weibel, 2000).

In augmented reality, tangible reality is virtual reality. Or at least it can be perceived as real through augmented perception (see Figure 72). This development is not the first time that our view of the world has changed. Mass media, the first image of the moon on Earth (Fig. 60), the World Wide Web, have pushed humanity forward in a similar way to the time when the first microscopes and telescopes were built.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, central perspective allowed a photorealistic depiction of nature, but it also somehow developed an egocentric perspective, while the geocentric perspective turned into a heliocentric one. In the 21st century, the technical ability to take pictures and distribute them easily promotes a decentralized perspective. But this process creates so much data as never before in the whole of humanity. There is no augmented reality without artificial intelligence. And in the rush of time, developments can no longer follow a linear protocol.

As always, only a small part of the sum of events can be described. While a fairly linear narrative seems possible until the cognitive turn, the flow of information intensifies enormously in the 20th and early 21st centuries. It should be noted, however, that an understanding of perception implies a view of the world. It would therefore be presumptuous to assume that there is only one world view for all people. This contradicts any notion of diversity within a species. But there are certain unifying perspectives that apply even when it is unclear where the path leads. At least from the continuing illustration, it is clear that many developments revolve around a public perception that points to a collective body.

Although this brief historical outline is as chronological as possible, it is difficult to describe the variety of parallel events. Therefore, this overview does not claim to be complete. It shows that after the establishment of technical aids for the expansion of human perception, phases of intensive information exchange began. This allows existing structures to be viewed and reflected upon in a new way. And this often leads to social reconstruction, riots, uprisings, and sometimes even war. Like the Thirty Years‘ War a few years after the development of the telescope. Or look at World War I, a few years after the first telephone connections were made and the radio went on the air. Such events always mark the end of an outdated world view and a new beginning.

Note that Figure 3-78 is embedded in an iFrame (11264 x 1046 pixels), so scroll down and swipe left and right.

Image index

Fig. 1: Illustration by the author, 2017

Fig. 2: Victor Blacus, Oct. 2021, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Electromagnetic-Spectrum.svg Retrieved Feb. 2017

Fig. 3: Frederick Kiesler (late 1930s). Vision Machine https://daphnelasky.wordpress.com/tag/kiesler/ Retrieved Oct. 2016

Fig. 4: Leon Battista Alberti (1436) Linear perspective https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Principles-of-linear-perspective-proposed-by-Taylor-Taylor-1992-An-explanation-of_fig6_321124103 Retrieved Oct. 2016

Fig. 5: Camera obscura, Ex Bibliotheca Gymnasii Altonani, 18th century https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Camera.obscura.17.jh.jpg Retrieved Feb 2017

Fig. 6: Detail from a copy of the Kitab al-Manazir, MS Fatih 3212, vol. 1, fol. 81b, Süleimaniye Mosque Library, Istanbul, 11th century https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alhazen1652.png Retrieved Nov. 2016

Fig. 7: Spectacles, Paris, ca. 17th Century, KHM Vienna. The photo was taken by the author

Fig. 8: The Guttenberg Bible was the first mass-produced 42-lined book in Europe. An early wooden printing press like Guttenberg used it, depicted in 1568. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Printer_in_1568-ce.png Retrieved March 2021

Fig. 9: Nikolaus Kopernikus (1543). De revolutionibus orbium coelestium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_revolutionibus_orbium_coelestium Retrieved Dec. 2016

Fig 10: Albrecht DÜRER, Man Drawing a Lute, Woodcut, 1525

Fig. 11: Reproduction of one of the four optical devices that Zacharias Snijder in 1841 claimed were early telescopes built by Zacharias Janssen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jaansen_Microscope.jpg Retrieved Dec. 2016

Fig 12–14: Johannes Kepler (1604). ASTRONOMIAE PARS OPTICA http://www.milestone-books.de/pages/books/2389/johannes-kepler/ad-vitellionem-paralipomena-quibus-astronomiae-pars-optica-traditur-tractatum-luculentum-de, Retrieved Nov. 2016 (Images not available in 2021)

Fig. 15: Hans Vredeman de Vries (1604) Book of Perspective, plate 30 https://fedora.phaidra.univie.ac.at/fedora/get/o:34576/bdef:Book/view# Retrieved Dec. 2016

Fig. 16: Galileo Galilei (1610). Sidereus Nuncius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereus_Nuncius Retrieved Nov. 2016

Fig. 17: René Descarte (1629 and 1633). The World, Treatise on the Light https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_(book) Retrieved Nov. 2016

Fig. 18: René Descarte (1637) La dioptrique https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dioptrique Retrieved Nov. 2016

Fig. 19: Robert Hook (1665). Micrographia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrographia Retrieved Nov. 2016

Fig. 20: Christiaan Huygens (1690). Treatise on Light (French: Traité de la Lumière) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treatise_on_Light Retrieved Dec. 2016

Fig. 21: Picture from Huygens‘ telescope without a tube. 1684. Astroscopia Compendiaria tubi optici molimine liberata https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aerialtelescope.jpg Retrieved Dec. 2016

Fig. 22: Detail of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz‘ so-called New Year’s Letter to Rudolph August, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, dated 12 January 1697, showing Leibniz‘ binary code scheme as a pyramid of numbers. G. W. Leibniz Bibliothek, LBr II, 15, Bl. 19. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Leibniz_binary_system_1697.jpg Retrieved Dec. 2016

Fig. 23: The Staffelwalze, or Stepped Reckoner, the digital calculating machine invented by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz around 1672 and built around 1700, on display in the Technische Sammlungen museum in Dresden, Germany. It was the first known calculator that could perform all four arithmetic operations; addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. 67 cm (26 inches) long. The cover plate of the rear section is off to show the wheels of the 16 digit accumulator. Only two machines were made. The single surviving prototype is in the National Library of Lower Saxony(Niedersächsische Landesbibliothek) in Hannover; this is a contemporary replica. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Wilhelm_Leibniz#/media/File:Leibnitzrechenmaschine.jpg Retrieved Dec. 2016

Fig. 24: Isaac Newton (1704) Opticks or a treatise of the reflections, refractions, inflections, and colours of light. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opticks?oldformat=true Retrieved Jan. 2017

Fig. 25: Alexander BAUMGARTEN (1750/58). Aesthetika. Science of sensory perception https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Aesthetica.png Retrieved Nov. 2016

Fig. 26: Immanuel KANT (1790). Kritiki der Urteilskraft. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kritik_der_Urteilskraft Retrieved Dec. 2016

Fig. 27: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1810). Theory of Colours. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Colours Retrieved Dec. 2016

Fig. 28: Philipp Jakob Loutherbourg d. J., (1801). Coalbrookdale at night. Oil on canvas. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalbrookdale_by_Night Retrieved, Oct. 2016

Fig. 29: Peter Mark Roget (1824). Explanation of an Optical Deception in the Appearance of the Spokes of a Wheel Seen through Vertical Apertures“, Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 115, pp. 131-140. https://www.jstor.org/stable/107736?refreqid=excelsior%3A19e6c345f82934605213790bd72986ff&seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents Retrieved Nov. 2016

Fig. 30: Stephenson’s Rocket, 1829 at the Science Museum, London Image: William M. Connolley https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co8084947/stephensons-rocket-steam-locomotive Retrieved Feb. 2017

Fig. 31: Michael FARADAY (1831). On a peculiar class of optical deceptions, Journal of the Royal Institution of Great Britain https://archive.org/details/journalofroyalin01roya/page/n665/mode/2up?view=theater Retrieved Feb. 2017

Fig. 32: Joseph PLATEAU (1832) Phenakistoscope. http://infinitedictionary.com/blog/2015/05/27/from-still-to-moving-image/ Retrieved Jul. 2016

Fig. 33: Device for viewing the stroboscopic discs by Simon Stampfer (ca. 1833) http://www.specula.at/adv/monat_0108.htm Retrieved Nov. 2016

Fig. 34: The Giroux daguerreotype camera made by Maison Susse Frères in 1839, with a lens by Charles Chevalier. Westlicht Photography Museum in Vienna, Austria. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Susse_Frére_Daguerreotype_camera_1839.jpg

Fig. 35: First rotary printing machine (newspaper printing machine) from ca. 1843 cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_printing_press. This image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Zeitungsdruckmaschine_Deutsches_Museum.jpg Retrieved March 2021 

Fig. 36: Gustav Theodor FECHNER (1876). Vorschule der Aesthetik. https://books.google.at/books?id=SUc-bXrsdlwC&pg=PP7&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false Retrieved Feb. 2017 

Fig. 37: The first telephone connections went commercial in 1878. The image shows an actor portraying Alexander Graham Bell speaking into an early model of the telephone for a 1926 promotional film by American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Actor_portraying_Alexander_Graham_Bell_in_an_AT%26T_promotional_film_(1926).jpg Retrieved Feb. 2021 

Fig. 38: Étienne-Jules MAREY, a photo of flying pelican, ca. 1882 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Marey_-_birds.jpg Retrieved Jul. 2016

Fig. 39: Eadward MUYBRIDGE (1887). Animal locomotion https://archive.org/details/muybridgescomple02muyb/mode/2up Retrieved Aug. 2016 

Fig. 40: Electrical engineer/inventor Guglielmo Marconi with the spark-gap transmitter (right) and coherer receiver (left) he used in some of his first long-distance radiotelegraphy transmissions during the 1890s. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Guglielmo_Marconi_1901_wireless_signal.jpg Retrieved March 2021

Fig. 41: Ernst MACH (1886). Beiträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, p. 14 https://books.google.at/books/about/Beiträge_zur_Analyse_der_Empfindungen.html?id=6MChRgFRN00C&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false Retrieved Sep. 2016

Fig. 42: Sigmund EXNER (1894). Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung der psychischen Erscheinungen https://books.google.at/books/about/Entwurf_zu_einer_physiologischen_Erklär.html?id=NATGcPTw8AQC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false Retrieved Sep. 2016

Fig. 43: Ibid p. 209 

Fig. 44: 1895 the first film projection machine „Phantoscope“ has been exhibited. A creation of Charles Francis Jenkins and Thomas Armat. Published in Scientific American 1896 October 31, page 325 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Film_Jenkins_Phantascope.jpg Retrieved Sep. 2016 

Fig. 45: Max Planck (1899). Planck modelled blackbody radiation https://infraredtraininginstitute.com/infrared-thermography-history/max-planck-introduces-quantum-mechanics/ Retrieved Sep. 2016

Fig. 46: Albert EINSTEIN (1905). Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photoelectric_effect  http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/mod1.html#c1 Retrieved Dec. 2016

Fig. 47: Nils BOHR (1913). On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules http://www.nba-old.nbi.dk/pdffiles/trilogypart3.pdf Retrieved Dec. 2016

Fig. 48: Max WERTHEIMER (1912). Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung http://gestalttheory.net/download/Wertheimer1912_Sehen_von_Bewegung.pdf Retrieved Feb. 2017

Fig. 49: Optical illusion „Kanizsa triangle“ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_contours Retrieved Feb. 2017

Fig. 50: Sigmund FREUD (1921). Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse. https://archive.org/details/massenpsycholog00freugoog/page/n5/mode/2up Retrieved Feb. 2017

Fig. 51: The first known photograph of a moving image produced by Baird’s „televisor“, as reported in The Times, 28 January 1926 (The subject is Baird’s business partner Oliver Hutchinson.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:John_Logie_Baird,_1st_Image.jpg Retrieved March 2021

Fig. 52: Replica of the Zuse Z3. Original built 1941 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer) Retrieved March 2017

Fig. 53: Basic Information Principle. Illustration by the author.

Fig. 54: Warren S. MCCULLOCH, Walter PITTS (1943) A logical calculus of the ideas immanent in nervous activity. Bulletin of mathematical biophysics, vol. 5 (1943), pp. 115–133. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-symbolic-logic/article/abs/warren-s-mcculloch-and-walter-pitts-a-logical-calculus-of-the-ideas-immanent-in-nervous-activity-bulletin-of-mathematical-biophysics-vol-5-1943-pp-115133/7DFDC43EC1E5BD05E9DA85E1C41A01BD Retrieved Feb. 2016

Fig. 55: Claude SHANNON (1948). A Mathematical Theory of Communication. The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656. http://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shannon/entropy/entropy.pdf Retrieved Feb. 2016

Fig. 56: Norbert WIENER (1948) Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Paris, (Hermann & Cie) & Camb. Mass. (MIT Press) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybernetics:_Or_Control_and_Communication_in_the_Animal_and_the_Machine Retrieved Feb. 2017

Fig. 57: 1st-Order Cybernetic Prinziple. Illustration by the author.  

Fig. 58: Early monochrome analog TV receiver ca. 1957-1960. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:OTVbelweder-front.jpg Retrieved March 2021

Fig. 59: Ernst GOMBRICH (1960). Art and Illusions. A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Phaidon

Fig. 60: The view of the Apollo 17 crew on the Blue Marble 1972. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Marble Retrieved Feb. 2017 

Fig. 61: The vision of superhuman abilities and special perceptive abilities is visualized in this film still from Richard VIKTOROV’s movie „Moscow-Cassiopea“, from 1974. https://archive.org/details/FromMoscowToCassiopeiamoskva-kassiopeya Retrieved March 2017 

Fig. 62: James J. GIBSON (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual System. Houghton Mifflin Company https://archive.org/details/sensesconsidered00jame Retrieved Feb. 2017

Fig. 63: James J. GIBSON (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin

Fig. 64: Tim BERNERS-LEE (1989). Information Management: A Proposal. https://cds.cern.ch/record/2665088 Retrieved Feb. 2017

Fig. 65: Launch of Wikipedia in 2001. Screenshot from 2021 by the author.

Fig. 66: Launch of Facebook in 2004. Screenshot from the way back machine on https://archive.org

Fig. 67: Alva NÖE (2004). Action in Perception. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/action-perception Retrieved March 2021

Fig. 68: Partial map of the internet, based on the January 15, 2005 data found on opte.org. Each line is drawn between two nodes, representing two IP addresses. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Internet_map_1024_-_transparent,_inverted.png Retrieved March 2021

Fig. 69: First smartphone (iPhone) on display under glass at the January 2007 Macworld show. Arnold Reinhold. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_iPhone_Macworld_2007_DSCF1286.agr.jpg Retrieved Feb. 2021

Fig. 70: Thomas FUCHS (2018). Die gemeinsame Wahrnehmung der Wirklichkeit. Skizze eines enaktiven Realismus (The common perception of reality. Sketch of an enactive realism. German only). https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110563436-011/html Retrieved Jul. 2020

Fig. 71: Compound eye of the Antarctic krill Euphausia Superba. Photo by Gerd Alberti and Uwe Kils https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Krilleyekils.jpg Retrieved March 2017

Fig. 72: Call for urgent action. Interactive website illustrating amout of engaged people. https://explore.panda.org/voice?utm_source=retransfer&utm_medium=wallpaper&utm_campaign=vftp Retrieved March 2021

Fig. 73: The ‘Clean A\R App’ uses modelled air quality data to visualise the pollution in cities using an augmented smog effect on social media. https://surroundvision.co.uk/unity-for-humanity/ Retrieved March 2021

Fig. 74: Visualization of a city’s mobile phone signal data between 8:00 AM and 8:10 AM on August 14, 2017. https://hackernoon.com/ahead-of-the-crowd-visualizing-trajectory-data-with-datav-13112b07bcf9 Retrieved March 2021

Fig. 75: Kenji KAWAKAMI (1995). 360ºPanorama Camera https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/91048/architecture-conversations/ Retrieved Feb. 2017

Fig. 76: SNL, Chris MILK (2015). 360-degree record of Jerry Seinfeld-Q&A Saturday Night Live Show 40 https://www.with.in/watch/snl-40-camera-one-seinfeld-q-a/ Retrieved Jan. 2017

Fig. 77: Keiichi MATSUDA (2016). Hyper-Reality. Video still https://vimeo.com/166807261 Retrieved Jul. 2020

Fig. 78: Barrett Lyon, The Opte Project. https://www.opte.org Illustration of all DNS connections of the global network from January 18, 2021 http://renderbot.nyc1.opte.org/20210116.1200.attempt_1/ Retrieved March 2021

References

1. Ernst. H. Gombrich, 1960, Art and Illusion, p.33[↩]
2. Piero Manzoni, „Socle du monde, socle magique n.3 de Piero Manzoni, Hommage à Galileo“, 1961. cf. https://www.pieromanzoni.org/EN/works_lines.htm Retrieved March 2021[↩]
3. Joseph Beuys on his lecture „Jeder Mensch ein Künstler – Auf dem Weg zur Freiheitsgestalt des sozialen Organismus“ photographed by Rainer Rappmann in Achberg / Germany 1978 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:BeuysAchberg78.jpg Retrieved March 2021[↩]
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_material_published_by_WikiLeaks[↩]
5. Michael Simm (2011),
    https://www.dasgehirn.info/wahrnehmen/sehen/sehen-2013-k-ein-selbstverstaendliches-wunder. Retrieved Sep. 2016[↩]
6. Tanja Krämer, 2011, Von Sehstrahlen und schwebenden Bildern,https://www.dasgehirn.info/wahrnehmen/sehen/von-sehstrahlen-und-schwebenden-bildern. Retrieved Sep. 2016[↩]
7. Bakalis, Nikolaos (2005). Handbook of Greek Philosophy: From Thales to the Stoics: Analysis and Fragments, Trafford Publishing[↩]
8. Tanja Krämer, 2011, Von Sehstrahlen und schwebenden Bildern,
   https://www.dasgehirn.info/wahrnehmen/sehen/von-sehstrahlen-und-schwebenden-bildern. Retrieved Sep. 2016[↩]
9. The central perspective was a quantum leap in the history of art. It created a point of view through which the applied sciences of Alhazen became entangled with the artificial representation of reality. It was the manifestation of a view of the world from a single point. A view of the world was avoided by the Arab scholars who were convinced that the representation of the world from a single point of view is impossible. Thus, an ornamental, decentralized view of the world and the universe was preferred. cf. Hans Belting (2008), Florenz und Bagdad, p.11[↩]
10. René Descartes, 1629-1633, The World or Treatise on Light,
     http://www.princeton.edu/~hos/mike/texts/descartes/world/worldfr.htm. 
    Retrieved Dec. 2016[↩]
11. “Huygens’ principle”. Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2017. https://www.britannica.com/science/Huygens-principle. Retrieved Jan. 2017[↩]
12. Martin Davis (2001). Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer[↩]
13. Immanuel Kant, 1781, Critik der reinen Vernunft. Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, Riga. https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Critik_der_reinen_Vernunft_(1781)/Erster_Theil.[↩]
14. Arthur Schopenhauer, 1818/19, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Vol. I, Appendix, p. 531[↩]
15. Richard L. Hills, 1989, Power from Steam: A history of the stationary steam engine[↩]
16. Michael Faraday, 1831, On a peculiar Class of Optical Deceptions, The Journal of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, p. 205[↩]
17. Stephen Prince, 2010, Through the Looking Glass: Philosophical Toys and Digital Visual Effects, http://filmoterapia.pl/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Through-the-Looking-Glass-Philosophical-Toys-and-Digital-Visual-Effects.pdf. Retrieved Nov. 2016[↩]
18. Ernst Mach, 1886, Beträge zur Analyse der Empfindungen, Verlag Gustav Fischer, Jena[↩]
19. Despite Christiaan Huygens‘ wave theory of light in 1690, many scientists were convinced until the late 18th century that light consisted of particles called corpuscles. By the end of the 19th century, physicists almost universally accepted the wave theory of light. However, although the ideas of classical physics explain the interference and diffraction phenomena associated with the propagation of light, they do not explain the absorption and emission of light.See: https://www.britannica.com/science/quantum-mechanics-physics. Retrieved Jan. 2017[↩]
20. Sigmund Exner, 1894, Entwurf zu einer physiologischen Erklärung der psychischen Erscheinungen, Deutike Verlag, p. 224[↩]
21. Peter Weibel, 2000, Wahrnehmung im technologischem Zeitalter, p. 13, http://www.peter-weibel.at/images/stories/pdf/2000/0678_WAHRNEHMUNG_IM.pdf Retrieved Feb. 2017[↩]
22. Norbert Wiener, 1948,Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Cambridge: MIT Press.[↩]
23. Peter Weibel, 2000, Wahrnehmung im technologischem Zeitalter, p. 19, http://www.peter-weibel.at/images/stories/pdf/2000/0678_WAHRNEHMUNG_IM.pdf Retrieved Feb. 2017[↩]
24. The Biological Computer Laboratory also carried out important research in the fields of systems theory, bionics, parallel computing, neurophysiology, biological and artificial intelligence, symbolic computing, cf. Albert Müller, 2000, A Brief History of the BCL, Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 11 (1): 9-30[↩]
25. Constructivism is also known as the artistic and architectural concept of Vladimir Tatlin, which originated in 1913 and had a great influence on the Bauhaus and De Stijl movements, which also influenced graphic design, industrial design, theater, film, dance, fashion, and music.[↩]
26. Claude E. Shannon, 1948, A Mathematical Theory of Communication, The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379-423, 623-656[↩]
27. Robert G. Gallager, 2001, Claude E. Shannon: A Retrospective on His Life, Work, and Impact, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8987/0348fa43e057eff6a8daa7101fbdb5a84b33.pdf 
    Retrieved Jan. 2017[↩]