Lexique / gestalt

Douglas Edric Stanley

2007.10.06

source code: gestalt

Gestalt. Soit une contradiction apparente. Les psychologues de la Gestalt parlent du caractère « anisotrope » de l’espace perceptif, c’est-à-dire son caractère fondamentalement non symétrique. Contrairement à l’espace du physicien, l’espace du phénoménologue est plus lourd en bas qu’en haut, plus dense à l’arrière des objets que devant eux, et il diffère qu’il est du côté droit ou du côté gauche. Conçu évidemment à l’image du sujet humain — soumis à la gravité, orienté de face, avantagé à droite — il en constitue une projection, renvoyant au spectateur sa propre image virtuelle comme dans un miroir invisible. Mais les psychologues de la Gestalt parlent aussi de ce même espace de l’expérience comme fondamentalement centré et, par là, comme résolument symétrique puisque la symétrie radiale, constituée à partir d’une rotation multidirectionnelle autour d’un point, est la forme la plus achevée d’équillible spatial. – Yve-Alain Bois, Rosalind Krauss ; L’informe: Mode d’emploi ; 1996 ; pp. 83-4

Depuis l’intérieur de cette danse abstraite réunissant pixels et mouvement une sorte de figure du « Gestalt », puisque les pixels qui bougent sont en réalité disposés selon une orientation. Cette orientation parle à notre physiognomie. Il s’agit d’une des figures les plus rassurants des systèmes réactifs, celle du mirroir (cf. Trash Mirror, Wooden Mirror, Reactive Books, Mirror Mirror).

« Mr Palomar sees a wave rise in the distance, grow, approach, change form and color, fold over itself, break, vanish, and flow again. At this point he could convince himself that he has concluded the operation he had set out to achieve, and he could go away. But it is very difficult to isolate one wave, separating it from the wave immediately following it, which seems to push it and at times overtakes it and sweeps it away; just as it is difficult to separate that one wave from the wave that precedes it and seems to drag it towards the shore, unless it turns against its follower as if to arrest it. Then if you consider the breath of the wave, parallel to the shore, it is hard to decide where the advancing front extends regularly and where it is separated and segmented into independent waves, distinguished by their speed, shape, force, direction. In other words, you cannot observe a wave without bearing in mind the complex features that concur in shaping it and the other equally complex ones that the wave itself originates. These aspects vary constantly, so each wave is different from another wave, even if not immediately adjacent to successive; in other words there are some forms and sequences that are repeated, though irregularly distributed in space and time. » –Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar, p.3-4

« [A]t each moment he thinks he has managed to see everything to be seen from his observation-point, […] something always crops up that he had not borne in mind. If it were not for his impatience to reach a complete, definitive conclusion of his visual operation, looking at waves would be a very restful exercise for him and could save him from neurasthenia, heart attack, and gastric ulcer. And it could perhaps be the key to mastering the world’s complexity by reducing it to the simplest mechanism. […] Only if he manages to bear all the aspects in mind at once can he begin the second phase of the operation: extending this knowledge to the enitre universe. It would suffice not to lose patience, as he soon does. Mr Palomar goes off along the beach, tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything. » –Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar, p.5-7