Thread by @DilettanteryPod

Time for another art/perception thread that's gonna go...all over the place.

In societies filled with photography, movies, tv, phone cameras, and many other technologies, we don't often think of how weird it is to see a three-dimensional image on a two-dimensional surface.🧵

In 1895, the British formed what they called the East Africa Protectorate, taking it over from the Imperial British East Africa Company because they went bankrupt. In 1920, it became the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya.

There was lots of brutality. Whites were given 999 year leases on land, effectively creating a white monopoly on land use. Native Kenyans were forced to work the land. Floggings were common. We'll never know everything because of Operation Legacy.

Weird!

Anyways, 1953, an anti colonial rebellion began, called The Mau Mau Uprising. It was an uprising led by the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KFLA).
The KFLA was composed mainly of members of the Kikuyu, Meru and Embu peoples, and also some of the Kamba and Maasai peoples.

Communication technology was a very big part of the war and previous decades. For example, the KFLA and associated organizations wanted literacy as well as control of their land. In the 30s, Kikuyu organizations began an education campaign with a heavy focus on learning reading

and writing in English, hoping that becoming fluent in the discourses of their colonizer would be beneficial in the struggle against them. The British put an end to this campaign with force, shuttering the independent schools they had built for that purpose.

The British knew literacy could be harnessed for anti-colonial purposes, something happening in the urban areas, but still wanted a way to propagandize the rural, dispersed, linguistically diverse populations at the heart of the uprising.

Many of their thoughts on propaganda in the context of anti-colonial war had been learned during the Anti-British National Liberation War in Malaya (1948–1960).

Malaya and Kenya are connected. This is a photo of two Kenyans fighting for the British in Malaya. The British couldn't find enough Malayans to fight against the pro-independence fighters, so they had to recruit soldiers from all across the empire.

They're connected in another way: the British borrowed a technique from their fight against the Malayans to use on the Kenyans, something called "villagization."

Hundreds of thousands of largely rural Kenyans were forcibly detained in camps.

In 2013, the UK paid compensation to 5228 Kenyans who claimed they were tortured during the uprising, many in these camps. Here is a horrifying testimony from a couple (warning: involves sexual assault): aljazeera.com/features/2016/…

Villagization meant that the British could now propagandize without granting literacy to the Kenyans. They could use the newer technologies of radio and film. (The picture of the cinema van is from Ghana, I couldn't find any pictures of its use in Kenya).

Marshall Mcluhan's famous phrase "the Global Village" and much of his thought can be traced to these villages, this villagization 👀 manifold.umn.edu/read/the-neoco…

This is because the English brought in scholars from England to study the effects of radio and film on the Kenyan population, to try and find methods for more effective psyops.

In the above link, Ginger Nolan details how many of the studies were not accurate due to various colonial biases and the wartime situation. However, I want to talk about an event she doesn't mention.

One of the scholars brought over was John Wilson of the University of London. He and his team were showing a five minute film to a group of ~30 rural Kenyans about how to avoid mosquitoes, and hence malaria. The film was very simple, just showing a guy going about his business,

taking care to avoid doing things that could lead to standing water that mosquitoes can breed in. At the end of the film, Wilson and his team asked the Kenyans what they had seen, to see if they got the message of the film.

Many quickly replied, “We saw the chicken!” This confused Wilson and his team, because they didn’t even realize a chicken was in the movie. They went back to the film and inspected it closely, and when the man was picking up some tins that had water in them, for a brief moment,

a frightened chicken flew across the bottom right corner of the frame. After further questioning, the Kenyans said they had seen the man too, but they "hadn't made a whole story out of [him]," quoting Wilson.

When asked what they had seen in the film, the Kenyans answered with something that the Brits hadn't seen! And they seemed to not have seen what the Brits wanted them to see.

What could account for this difference in seeing?

We'll come back to this.

But first, let's go to the Amazonian part of Ecuador, where the Huaorani/Waorani people live.

In 1957, they were still uncontacted by people who lived outside the Amazon. Five missionaries tried to contact them. It did not go well for them. From Wade Davis' The Wayfinders:

Another case of people from a culture without the technology to create 3d images on a 2d surface reacting to it in a strange way, from our perspective, this time violently.

Luckily, there are some more lighthearted examples.

Like in Nyasaland, another British colonial protectorate in Africa (it became the country Malawi). Dr. Agnes Fraser and her husband were stationed there for missionary and health work, proselytizing the Ngoni people and introducing medical techniques to deal with the famine.

She noted some peculiarities when showing some Ngoni pictures. Here, she describes two instances:

Another missionary in Nyasaland around the same time, Robert Laws, reported something similar (notice how children are the first ones to see the picture the way we're accustomed):

What these anecdotes suggest, as I'm sure you've already figured out, is that maybe viewing three dimensional images on two dimensional surfaces is an ability not innate to humans, it must be learned.

Another example is the case of Jehudo Epstein. He was a painter raised in an orthodox Jewish community in Poland who were religiously against pictorial representation. He describes how difficult he found drawing 3d perspective until he was lent a book on it, a "revelation."

Luckily, we don't have to just rely on anecdotes. Studies were done. I'm not going to go over all of them, because they can get pretty complicated:

One notable researcher was William Hudson, who developed tests involving "depth cues," simple ways of showing depth in images, to see if the various peoples he visited in southern Africa could ascertain depth in the images.

He found "both children and adults found it difficult to perceive depth in the pictorial material. The difficulty varied in extent but appeared to persist through most educational and social levels."

Something to note is the preference for "split-type drawing" among the cultures that weren't accustomed to depth images. An interesting way to frame this is to say that split-type images give more information than perspective images (eg. we see the elephant's legs too).

This idea that seeing 3d on 2d surfaces isn't innate might be less shocking to those who know some art history. Rudimentary ways of showing depth have existed for awhile, but, besides a brief period in ancient Rome, it took humanity quite a while to figure out how to make a

painting look like a window into another world. It wasn't until the 1400s when people in Florence, Italy (re)discovered linear perspective, and codified and fixed the method. Compare these two paintings one before and one after that invention. (left 1338 CE, right 1481 CE)

Or compare these two views of Florence, the first from 1350, the second from 1480.

Interestingly, medieval optics regarded perspective convergence (what would become the vanishing point/linear perspective) as a "Fata Morgana," an illusion that could be geometrically disproven.

So I wonder: did the invention of linear perspective, and the subsequent inventions of photography/film/etc, change our way of seeing? Or, maybe it's better to say: did they emphasize and reinforce a particular way of seeing?

Sidenote: the invention/discovery of linear perspective might have played a role in the development of subsequent technologies and enlightenment science.

A useful dichotomy we can bring in here comes from James Gibson, one of the two founders of ecological psychology, a school of psychology that really emphasized the importance of someone’s environment, someone’s surroundings, to their psychology, especially their perception.

They talked about how the senses interrelate with each other, they are not fully separate things. Now, I’m not going to go too deep into the whole theory here, the important part for us is that Gibson talked about two types of seeing: The visual field and the visual world.

The visual world is what we see when we move around, as we understand the world and objects therein with all of our senses and mind and memory. The visual field is what we see when we just pay attention to our eyes and don’t move around. This is what linear perspective shows.

For example, in the visual world of a railroad worker, the tracks are always parallel. Only if the worker does the strange action of standing in the middle of the tracks, looking to the horizon, and not moving do they converge, in the worker's visual field.

Something else to bring up here is a study done in 1957, by Harvard researchers Gordon Allport and Thomas Pettigrew. It involved rural South African Zulus, urban Zulus, urban Europeans in SA, and an illusion called the Ames Rotating Trapezoidal Window:

Under what the researchers called "optimal conditions" - when one of the subject's eyes was covered - all groups saw the illusion.

But under "suboptimal conditions" - both eyes uncovered - the majority of Europeans and urban Zulus still perceived the illusion, a rotationally oscillating rectangle, but the rural Zulus saw the actual shape and movement, a continuously rotating trapezoid.

I wonder if being surrounded by 3d images on 2d played a role here. That's because another feature of linear perspective is that it's the view from *one* fixed eye.

We can see this in a drawing of Albrecht Dürer's. He was concerned with linear perspective and was around shortly after its invention. In this drawing of someone drawing, the artist has an eyepiece that is fixed and helps with monocular vision.

This monocular vision was/is reinforced by the single lens of the camera. The photographer David Hockney called it "the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops" and tried to photograph in ways outside of that view, reincorporating time and multiple perspectives.

Now we can return to John Wilson and the rural Kenyans who saw the chicken. (If anyone has access to the source I'd love to get my hands on a pdf).

This bring up the conventions that are involved in moving 3d images on a 2d screen. Scholars Wilson talked to said that you need to focus in front of the screen so you see the whole frame. The Kenyans had just inspected the frame for details.

Wilson: "film is...a very highly conventionalized piece of symbolism although it looks very real." Here are some film conventions we don't think about that the Kenyans had trouble with:

This thread has gone on way too long so I'll end here. I just want to mention that most of these sources are decades old and within colonial contexts, so please don't take it as gospel. Part of my reason for writing this out is in the hopes that people who know more than me

will share some of their knowledge about it. If there's any more current research pls let me know. Unfortunately you can follow footnotes only backwards in time, not forwards.

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