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Supraliminal

Philosopher of art Helen Huss Parkhurst observes our aspirational ideals are mirrored back in the sounds, symbols, and artifacts of popular culture which “we experience as a miraculous counterpart, visible or audible, of our very selves” (1930, p. 69). Carl Jung contemporary in the realm of art and symbol, psychologist Aniela Jaffé, suggests “that everything can assume symbolic significance… In fact, the whole cosmos is a potential symbol” (1964, p. 257).

In an essay titled “Seeing Elephants: The Myths of Phallotechnology” (1987), author and professor Jane Caputi takes a critical view of the images and symbols presented in popular culture, suggesting that in addition to what is delivered as product, entertainment, or idea, is often also accompanied by additional messages, both supraliminal and surreptitious, with the express intention of manipulating thought or behaviour.

Caputi sees one of the most mythic movies made, Star Wars, whose “patriarchal” tropes including lone female actress Carrie Fisher’s portrayal of Leia, the quintessential princess in distress, to be nothing less than a “gang-rape” in the cinematic sense, and whose intent is to reinforce such values (1987, p. 361). On a different level, she draws our attention to the film’s fortuitous, coincident and corresponding co-opting of its title by the United States Strategic Defence Initiative via popular culture. Now the U.S. can deliver a holy war from space to rival the narrative on the big screen:

“the movie Star Wars is fundamentally about nuclear war, its counterpart, “Star Wars” is fundamentally a fantasy, a political symbol produced for the purpose of manipulating emotions, perceptions, and behaviors. As one analyst observed, “The MX missile, whatever its military usefulness may be, is often seen as a weapon whose importance is largely symbolic, more a tool for manipulating perceptions, than for fulfilling a real military need” … and that its “actual meaning is to set new economic, military, and technological priorities” (1987, p. 364).

Author Wilson Bryan Key explores the surreptitious on an even more suggestive level in his book “Subliminal Seduction” (1973), where he sees various body parts “subliminally” implanted in many of the print advertising and editorial images of the time. Many of Key’s analyses of popular culture imagery, including the phalli and screaming skulls he has us see in the 1960’s and 70’s liquor advertisement ice-cubes of “Subliminal Seduction”, have been questioned. In his more recent book chapter essay “Subliminal Sexuality: The Fountainhead for America’s Obsession” (1999), his flawed analysis of the imagery in a Kanøn men’s cologne ad, perhaps primed by the product name, has a sliver of carved wood mistaken for a thumbnail, and thus its thumb for a phallus of “prodigious proportions” (1999, p. 200). His identifying these images, however apparent, including the “dead beagle with a chisel through its head” in the lower right corner of the same ad (1999, p. 201), suffer from being a posteriori ‘looks like …’ interpretations.

Although popular culture is rife with clever, cheeky, and coy advertising campaigns and images, sometimes bordering near the perceptually or suggestively liminal, as perhaps hinted in these three adverts from the August 1990 issue of British fashion and pop culture monthly “i-D Magazine”, should we approach the images and symbols we encounter nowadays with more skepticism and critical thought as to their intentions, however underlying?

Despite often overt, supraliminal presentation, insofar as the naughty bits are there if we look or have to analyze suggestively enough, Jane Caputi states these images are nonetheless intended to be perceived only subliminally: “Such messages are engineered so that they will be perceptible only to the subconscious mind. Thus, they bypass the critical faculty of the conscious, and the viewer is left unaware of even having received a message or suggestion”. She calls on adman and author Tony Schwartz who suggests such subconscious appeals are not simply subliminally seductive, as Key might want us to believe. Rather, Schwartz coined the concept “the resonance principle” to describe messages and symbols, however concocted by advertisers or perceived by audiences, as resonating in some effort to “evoke stored information out of them in a patterned way” (1987, p. 356).

Shall we agree with Caputi’s thesis and suspect plenty of surreptitious shenanigans, or take a different interpretation of her essay title in that the elephants of phallotechnology are themselves just myths in the non-existent sense of the word? Importantly, given logarithmic advances in technology coupled with knowledge of how our minds perceive and interpret, would it not make sense to consider the plethora of messages and symbols that we are now constantly bombarded with, some of which can be delivered in the truly scientifically subliminal sense, in ways that prime or shape our behaviour more broadly and perhaps even unbeknownst to us?

Caputi, J. (1987), Seeing Elephants: The Myths of Phallotechnology, in Minton, A. J. & Shipka, T. A. (Eds.), Philosophy: Paradox and Discovery Third Edition (1990), (pp. 354 – 381). New York, United States: McGraw-Hill.

Jaffé, A. (1964), Symbolism in the Visual Arts, in Jung, C. G. (Ed.), Man and His Symbols (pp. 255 – 322). New York, United States: Dell Publishing Co., Inc. (1983 ed.)

Jones, T. & Godfrey, T. (Eds.),(August 1990), i-D Magazine, Issue 83 (pp. 1 – 100). London, United Kingdom: Terry Jones & Tony Elliot.

Key, W. B. (1999), Subliminal Sexuality: The Fountainhead for America’s Obsession, in Lambiase, J. & Reichert, T. (Eds.), Sex in Advertising, chapter 11, (pp. 195 – 212). London, United Kingdom: Routledge. [PDF document] retrieved December 2021 from ndl.ethernet.edu.et/bitstream/123456789/50104/1/280.pdf#page=208

Parkhurst, H. H. (1930), Art as Man’s Image, in Hoople, R. E., Piper, R. F., & Tolley, W. P. (Eds.), (1946), Preface to Philosophy: Book of Readings (pp. 68 – 70). New York, United States: The Macmillan Company (1952 ed.)

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Illusion

From afar a coastline might look as though it is smooth and inviting, whereas a closer-up, higher resolution view might reveal a rocky, forbidding shore. Similarly, standing directly beside a large circle painted on the asphalt might make it appear elliptical or oblong-shaped, as compared to looking at it from directly overhead. Even with adequate context, appearances can still sometimes be misleading. What we perceive as the truth is often just an emergent phenomenon and perhaps only a partial picture of the whole. Notions of scale, context, as well as the abilities and limits of our own perceptual systems, all play a role in interpreting how things look, sound, smell, and feel.

In stereophotogrammetry, photographs of a particular region, purposefully taken seconds apart from an aircraft flying high above, might initially appear identical. A closer look reveals minute changes, such as shadows shifted due to the slight difference in perspective. Nowadays this type of imaging data can be fed into complex algorithms, and in some instances combined with range-finding laser data (LiDAR) to generate accurate three-dimensional views of the landscape.

In days gone by, viewing such a stereoscopic pair of photographs, or stereogram, required a contraption called a stereoscope. You may recall the more recent plastic View-Master with its shutter-like lever that came with round disks of tiny, paired images, 3D glasses, or Virtual Reality (VR) systems based on the same principle, that are in common use today. These technologies present just the left perspective image to the left eye, and the right perspective image to the right eye, from a set distance. When the nearly twin images are viewed in this manner, the resulting three dimensional illusion does not appear on the glass of the device, or as on the page or screen of an artist’s drawn visual perspective, but rather materializes with realistic clarity directly in the viewer’s mind. Viewing an air-photo stereo pair would have hills and mountains rise up from the erstwhile flat land, while the valleys and lowlands receded. A rich gestalt sense of an area could be derived from such a  three-dimensional portrayal, not otherwise apprehensible from an individual air or satellite photo. Convincing appearances thus need not necessarily exist in just the physical world, and are sometimes purely figments of the perceptual system, or even of the imagination.

More broadly, beyond our hacking of binocular vision, nature has conferred on us the intrinsic ability to illude; to imagine what is and isn’t there. The world around us is perpetually being crafted as we perceive, as though we’re each an artist interacting with it, conjuring illusions and interpretations of what’s in front of us, and what lies beyond the range of our perceptions. Neurologist and author Oliver Sacks remarked that, “each act of perception is to some degree an act of creation, and every act of memory is to some degree an act of imagination”.

Sacks, O. (2007) Musicophilia. Toronto, Canada: Knopf

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Deep Design

From the perspective of an artist or designer, deep design can have several, similarly-aligned meanings. Successful pieces of art, to use one of many subjective metrics to define success in this context, are popular, and often so because the audience sees in them some common, underlying aesthetic or informational aspect which is pleasing. Perhaps this is a result of mathematical symmetry or asymmetry, or that the piece in question somehow resonates in a particular way with their emotions, or their perception of reality.

An artwork may even go so far as to solve or reify some belief because viewing, reading, hearing, or participating in it evokes a particular memory or feeling. Author Tim Parks (2019) describes “Manzotti’s Spread Mind Theory” of consciousness, wherein images, and other sense gate throughput, don’t get stored in the brain, but instead create an impression upon initial exposure, which thereafter gets called up and compared with the subject’s live sensory experience, as a key trying to fit a lock. There are no vast libraries of images, sounds, or smells filed away up there, nor are there images or other sense data being found in any meaningful neurological sense in the grey matter, apart from correlated flashes of neural activity. Does such a view support the case of an artwork whose idiosyncratic qualities elicit a particular response, often among many people, and perhaps in a manner similar to Jung’s patients identifying common archetypes in their recounted dreams? Does deep design in this sense become a question of intention on the part of the artist, or does it have to do with perception, on the part of the viewer?

Artists and designers often approach a creative undertaking as a problem that demands a solution or some form of reconciliation. On one level, a designer might identify such a problem as finding an appropriate “look and feel”, however socio-culturally defined, which will help achieve the aim of attracting attention, clarifying information, educating someone, or marketing a product or service. Design in such cases might not only seek to achieve such an aesthetic benchmark, but also to convey messages beyond the overt. For example, Google is noted for their various interfaces’ clean, uncluttered design, and judicious use of white space to help steer and focus users’ attention. The hierarchies, menus, buttons, the geometry of the layout and other virtual affordances, all combine in a gestalt manner to enable information coherence. Not only does design support the key function of helping such data assimilation, it performs an additional, deeper function; embedding in the user’s mind the sense of an efficient, precise, perhaps even trustworthy organization. This is translated into, for example, the obtained service or commodity being perceived as pertinent and up-to-date. The simple, colourful treatment of Google’s wordmark brand performs a similar deep purpose; namely, conveying a sensation of broadly appealing approachability. One may even be moved to feel that this is an organization they want to interact with, despite it being merely an algorithm. Deep layers of meaning can therefore be embedded or projected in a variety of ways using design.

Physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek similarly states that the structure of reality is far richer than its surface appearances, and that this underlying order itself may be regarded as exemplary of deep design. He points to the analogy of using visual perspective in art, where it’s applied to create an illusion of space. A flat, two-dimensional portrayal springs to life in illusory three-dimensions with careful attention to drawn perspective. Using mathematics, such an approach can be applied even more deeply, as in the case of projective geometry, where specific math is applied to create the appearance of a measured reality. One example are the various mathematical formulae used to create geographic maps. As an artist or draftsperson uses perspective to reduce a scene’s three-dimensional appearance to two-dimensions, a cartographer would employ a map projection, created using geodetic datums, to reduce the three-dimensional nature of the earth’s surface down to an appearance in two-dimensions, and enable the precise transposition of different measures from a curved, irregular surface onto the projected two-dimensional plane. Math imparts a deep, meaningful design to the projection, and the resulting map.

Taking these ideas a step further, if the reality that we inhabit, or perhaps more appropriately, if the appearance of a reality that we experience is in fact a projected, unfolded space-time construction, what does the original source look like, or where does it exist?

One of David Bohm’s thought experiments used to help illustrate his theory of the invisible, implicate order that underlies reality, involves inserting one hollow, clear plexiglass cylinder inside a similar, wider one. The space between them, wide enough to allow rotation, is filled with a viscous, translucent substance such as glycerine. A drop of black ink is inserted into this medium and the outer cylinder is then rotated against the inner one in a given direction so that the ink droplet stretches to become a thin line coiling around the inner cylinder with each successive turn. In theory, the cylinder could continue to be turned until the line winds up disappearing from sight, creating the illusion of having completely vanished, and becoming enfolded within the otherwise clear viscous medium between the nested cylinders. Due to this viscous nature though, a careful rewinding of the outer cylinder back in the opposite direction causes the line to recompose and reconstitute as its original particle-like droplet.

In a slight variation, rotate the cylinder just a quarter turn after inserting the first droplet, and insert a second droplet immediately adjacent along its axis to where the first had been inserted. Rotate it another quarter turn, insert a third droplet, and continue this pattern up and down its entire length. Now, as the cylinder is rotated, there appears a sole particle moving along it’s axis as each wave-like coil of ink briefly manifests its droplet in succession (1987, p. 172).

In such a manner, can some tangible aspect of our perceived reality be reverse distilled, its projection run backwards, and its higher-order essence revealed or modeled in some way?

Is the ultimate essence simply math and binary code? If artistic beauty, for example, can be boiled down to such a fundamental level, does it not still speak to the need for there to be some underlying impetus driving the whole affair? Does the framework of Panpsychism, where some form of consciousness, and thus intention, inhabits everything in the universe, offer a reasonable explanation? Does physicist Frank Wilczek’s phrase “Nature’s Deep Design” evoke the notion of an artist, designer, or some other pre-ordained intentionality that’s currently beyond our grasp? Importantly, if we are part of a projection that has been created in a manner metaphorically similar to that of an artwork or a map, is this resulting construct which we have come to know as reality therefore completely illusory, in some grander context?

Bohm, D. (1980) Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London, United Kingdom: Routledge

Bohm, D., & Peat, F. D. (1987) Science, Order, and Creativity. London, United Kingdom: Routledge

Parks, T. (2019) Out of My Head: On the Trail of Consciousness. New York Review of Books: New York, United States