The reproducibility conundrum...

Recently I revisited Ways of Seeing by John Berger. Originally a PBS short series, it has spawned a variety of resources.

The uniqueness of every painting was once part of the uniqueness of the place where it resided. Sometimes the painting was transportable. But it could never be seen in two places at the same time. When the camera reproduces a painting, it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.

This is vividly illustrated by what happens when a painting is shown on a television screen. The painting enters each viewer's house. There it is surrounded by his wallpaper, his furniture, his mementoes. It enters the atmosphere of his family. It becomes their talking point. It lends its meaning to their meaning. At the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen in a different context. Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified. — John Berger

The argument that paintings lost mystery once the camera made them reproducible is powerful. Berger laments that historically people had to make pilgrimages to the museums and locations of the art and observe them in their intended context. The same way with the printing press. Before texts were “mass” produced you either held the original text in your hands or observed it in its original form.

Now confronted with perspective, what do we make of it?

The consideration of perspective is important when building a presentation or a talk. Data visualizations or graphics are now subjective now that they are imbued with your unique experiential history. This isn’t just important for a designer or illustrator of graphics but maybe even more so for you the consumer.

John Berger uses the Procession to Calvary, Pieter Bruegel the Elder 1564, as an example. We are observing a large landscape that simply by the title we would anticipate a non-secular painting.

Look what happens if we focus our gaze on smaller portraits within the painting.

Would we now be distorting the theme? What are the first moments that focus your attention?

If the context was removed we might think we are admiring a landscape painting.

Here we can see what appears to be daily life in a village.

Only now can we observe the unfolding crucifixion as the trajectory of the wagon and observation of the cross depict the central theme of the painting.

It isn’t only images that can distort if they are presented out of context. We need to consider the friction inherent in the way we see the world.

Think about only hearing part of a discussion or perspective. What happens with missing data?

“Missing data” is normative as we label it as missing — we anticipated it being included yet it is not included.

Context is worth 80 IQ points — Alan Kay, American Computer Scientist