David Peat

96 From Certainty to Uncertaintyregions of the room may seem to move, the ceiling may appear to falltoward us, or figures may leap out of walls.While some of these strategies are hardwired, or genetically determined,much depends on how we grew up and the environment thatsurrounds us. The city dweller learns to see a very different world thandoes a desert nomad or an Inuit in the high arctic. Each would feel lostin the other’s environment. Seeing involves intentionality through constantacts of doubting the world and then looking for ways to resolvethose doubts. In turn, the visual hypotheses we make about the worldhave a great deal to do with the context in which we are placed frommoment to moment, a context that involves not only the particularlocation in which we find ourselves but also the whole of our society,right down to the language we speak.In one experiment, photographs were presented to a variety of subjectswhile the experimenter introduced a topic of conversation. Dependingon the context of the conversation the subjects “read” the samefaces in radically different ways, discovering in them everything frombenevolence to criminality.One of the most striking examples of the way we construct meaningout of contexts is the “Kuleshov effect” discovered in the early daysof the cinema. The Russian director and teacher Lev Kuleshov filmedthe neutral expression of a well-known actor and then edited it into aseries of shots including a bowl of soup, a dead person, and a childplaying. When audiences were shown these edited sequences they “readinto” the actor’s expression the feelings of hunger, sadness, and affection.In fact those who saw the film praised the subject for his actingability.The art critic John Berger demonstrated a similar effect during histelevision series Ways of Seeing. Berger photographed portions ofCaravaggio’s painting The Meal at Emmaus (showing Christ and hisdisciples) and edited them together. He then used this edited sequencein his television documentary to the accompaniment of backgroundmusic. In the first case the music was from Bach’s St. Matthew Passion.In the second case the identical sequence was accompanied by comicItalian opera. In one context viewers “saw” a deeply religious painting,in the second, a group of Italians enjoying a meal.