The Blind Viewer

After watching Peter Gidal’s Room Film 1973, Michael Snow commented: ‘Your film had to be worked at. I felt… as if it was made by a blind man. I felt that searching tentative quality, the quality of trying to see’ (1.). The desire to see anew, as if it was for the first time, a learning to unlearn (2.), is one of the most enduring aspects of Gidal’s film practice and theory. A body of material as rich with possibilities as unresolved questions, paradoxes and dead ends. And yet, at a time when artists’ moving image has too often become a sheer repository for discourse, a reinvestment in Gidal’s attentiveness to the ‘coming into presence’ of the film may shed light on what these images and sounds do, rather than say. The question remains: how is a critique of image-production enacted, instead of represented? Notes: (1.) Snow, Michael, September 1973, quoted by Peter Gidal, ‘Theory and Definition of Structural / Materialist Film’, Structural Film Anthology, London: BFI, 1978, p.17 (2.) Borrowing a famous line from the poem, ‘what we see of things is things’ by Alberto Caeiro. Pessoa, Fernando, The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro, Exeter: Shearsman Books, 200

Point of view: Te Ruru light festival 2019

Point of View is a perception based installation presented as part of Te Ruru Light Festival 2019. The work consists of a 3 sided box suspended above the viewer. The box is painted white and is projected onto from above the primary viewing point (this prevents the viewer from noticing the projector, but also from blocking the projection). The light-based projection onto the surface of the box creates the illusion that the 3 sided box is actually a 6 sided cube. The viewer is invited to move around the space, observing the cube. Once the viewer walks under or past the suspended cube, they enter the secondary viewpoint in which they see the actual form of the box – a 3 sided/open box. The work talks about how our individual experiences shape the way we see. It raises questions about the difference between reality and perception

Point of view: Waikato Museum 2018

Point of View is a perception based installation presented as part of the 'INDELIBLE' exhibition at Waikato Museum. The work consists of a 3 sided box suspended above the viewer. The box is painted white and is projected onto from above the primary viewing point (this prevents the viewer from noticing the projector, but also from blocking the projection). The light-based projection onto the surface of the box creates the illusion that the 3 sided box is actually a 6 sided cube. The viewer is invited to move around the space, observing the cube. Once the viewer walks under or past the suspended cube, they enter the secondary viewpoint in which they see the actual form of the box – a 3 sided/open box. The work talks about how we as individuals perceive communities depending on our unique viewpoints. One may see a community as a negative group, where others see the same group as supportive or encouraging. Communities are built on shared or common attitudes and interests, because of this, our own experiences shape the way we see them. It raises questions about the difference between reality and perception

Influence of hand position on the near-effect in 3D attention

Voluntary reorienting of attention in real depth situations is characterized by an attentional bias to locations near the viewer once attention is deployed to a spatially cued object in depth. Previously this effect (initially referred to as the ‘near-effect’) was attributed to access of a 3D viewer-centred spatial representation for guiding attention in 3D space. The aim of this study was to investigate whether the near-bias could have been associated with the position of the response-hand, always near the viewer in previous studies investigating endogenous attentional shifts in real depth. In Experiment 1, the response-hand was placed at either the near or far target depth in a depth cueing task. Placing the response-hand at the far target depth abolished the near-effect, but failed to bias spatial attention to the far location. Experiment 2 showed that the response-hand effect was not modulated by the presence of an additional passive hand, whereas Experiment 3 confirmed that attentional prioritization of the passive hand was not masked by the influence of the responding hand on spatial attention in Experiment 2. The pattern of results is most consistent with the idea that response preparation can modulate spatial attention within a 3D viewer-centred spatial representation

MRI image segmantation based on edge detection

Cílem této práce je představit základní segmentační techniky používáné v oblasti medicínského zpracování obrazových dat a pomocí 3D prohlížeče schopného zobrazit 3D obrazy implementovat segmentační modul založený na hranové detekci a vyhodnotit výsledky. Navrhovaný prohlížeč je sestavený v prostředi Matlab GUI a je schopen načíst objem 3D snímků představující lidskou hlavu. Navrhovaný segmentační modul je založen na použití hranových detektorů, zejména Cannyho detektoru.The aim of this thesis is to present the basic segmentation techniques uses in the field of medical image processing and by using a 3D viewer able to visualize 3D images, implement a segmentation module based on edges detection and evaluate the results. The proposed viewer is a 3D viewer build using matlab GUI and is able to load a volume of images representing the human head. The proposed segmentation module is based on the use of edge detectors particularly the Canny algorithm.