Assignment #3 - light and shadow

Due Thursday, February 19 (in class)

CS 48N - The Science of Art
Winter Quarter, 2009
Marc Levoy
Handout #6

Your third assignment is to write a 3-4 page double-spaced paper on one of the topics listed in the first section below. Alternatively, you may do one of the projects listed in the second section. You may also choose another topic or project if you clear it with me in advance. The format and rules for this assignment are the same as in the first two. Don't forget to cite your sources using footnotes and/or a list of references, as appropriate.

Remember that you must present one of your four assignments in class. Thus, if if you did not present a project in class during the first Student Day, you should consider doing so during the next one (February 19). You can present any of your three assignments so far, although I suggest presenting this assignment or the previous one because they are freshest on peoples' minds.

Writing projects

• In Baxandall's essay about Molyneux's problem, Condillac's statue cannot effectively utilize its sense of sight until also given the sense of touch. Do you agree with this prediction? If a person were paralyzed from the neck down and had sight but no touch, what would be their understanding of the world? If they suddenly regained the use of their body, what difficulties might they face?
  
  
• During your upcoming expedition to find the last Amazon tribe that has had no contact with modern civilization, you wish to bring with you visual depictions of the inventions, cities, and other wonders of the outside world. Some of your teammates propose bringing line drawings. Others propose bringing etchings with cross-hatched shading, oil paintings, photographs, or even scale models. Critically evaluate each proposal. Which do you think will be most readily understood by the natives? Do you have other proposals? Feel free to draw for inspiration on Baxandall's essay about Molyneux's problem, but I want to hear your thoughts, not his.
  
  
• The recent cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling suggests that Michelangelo, rather than employing the Renaissance discovery that shadows should be dark, tending toward black, instead adhered to medieval tradition, in which shadows were fully saturated with color. If correct, then this radically changes our view of Michelangelo and his art. If, on the other hand, we have cleaned away Michelangelo's intended tones, as some critics claim, then we have ruined his masterpiece forever. Read one of the many books about the cleaning. Then read James Beck's scathing condemnation of it in Art Restoration: the Culture, the Business, and the Scandal. Who is right?
  
  
• Research and write a paper on an everyday optical effect not described in Minnaert's book, or covered only briefly there. For extra fun, target your essay at artists who might want to employ the effect. This will require you to think not only about what causes the effect, but also about how to paint it.
  
  
• Write on the treatment of light and shadow in a non-Western-European culture.

Some non-writing projects

• Create a illustration that convincingly depicts a scene in extremely bright light, a scene in extremely dim light, or a scene with an extremely wide range of illumination. Use any media you like, including computer graphics. You are also welcome to experiment with extreme viewing conditions, as described in Helmholtz's essay, "The Relation of Optics to Painting", in Science and Culture: popular and philosophical essays, edited by D. Cahan, University of Chicago Press, 1995.
  
  
• Create photographic demonstrations of as many of the optical effects described in Minnaert's book as you can. You may use any kind of camera you wish (film, polaroid, digital, video), but you must take your own photographs - no borrowing from books - and at least most of the photographs should have been taken for this assignment. Briefly explain each of your photographs in your own words, as well as citing the relevant explanation from Minnaert's book.
  
  
• In 1972 Carl Sagan designed a plaque for the Pioneer 10 spacecraft, the first to leave our solar system, that carried greetings from earthlings to any civilization that might intercept the spacecraft in the distant future. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_plaque.) Design a follow-on plaque that communicates, probably in graphical form, the structure of our urban environment. Try to explain not only what a city looks like, but how its parts function. Think carefully about the visual conventions you are using, whether an extra-terrestial civilization would understand them, and what elements you might include to promote that understanding.