CAEL1001 Chap.7 Sense and Perception Beyond the Eye
Sense and Perception Beyond the Eye
Week 9 removes sight as the governing channel and asks what remains. Rather than focusing on accuracy of likeness, the activities ask you to rely on the other ways you have of finding things out and making things: textured surfaces read by hand, spoken and written description, chance, and drawing while watching the subject rather than the page.
You make tactile drawings, redraw a classmate's work from their words alone while they interpret yours, and use gravity and movement to generate compositions from dropped objects, string and ink. The materials list is unusually physical, and none of it is drawing equipment in the normal sense.
The chapter sets out what each non-visual channel can and cannot deliver to a page, and treats the description exercise as the week's most transferable twenty minutes, since every diary annotation and the week 6 presentation are the same operation.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Removing sight as the governing channel, and why it is not a novelty week
- 02
The materials list as a set of ways to get a mark you did not draw
- 03
Four channels, and what each one is structurally unable to give you
- 04
Touch: precise about edges, useless about size
- 05
Sound as a record of duration rather than of shape
- 06
The description exercise, and why it transfers to every assessed task
- 07
What a usable description contains, in order
- 08
Reading the gap between your words and what came back
- 09
Gravity and chance, with the procedure stated in advance
- 10
Attributing a collaborator's drawing in your own diary
- 11
Preparing the printed photograph the week asks you to bring
Rewriting a description so it can be drawn from
- 1Fix the field first. Name the sheet size and the region the dense area occupies, such as the central third of an A2 sheet.
- 1Convert energy into mark type and density. Short overlapping lines drawn with a broad pen, covering an area about the size of a hand.
- 1Convert explodes into a count and a reach. Roughly twenty single lines running outwards, thinning as they go, of which four reach the edge of the sheet.
- 1Convert quieter bits into a statement about emptiness. The outer quarter of the page is empty except for those four lines.
Key terms
- Perception
- How the world reaches us and is made sense of through sight, touch, hearing and movement together. It is the organising idea of the week.
- Tactile drawing
- A drawing generated from touch rather than from looking, which tends to be accurate locally and wrong globally because touch is experienced sequentially.
- Audio description
- Describing a visual work in words so that somebody who cannot see it can work from the description. Used here as a drawing channel rather than as an access measure only.
- Structural description
- A description built from field, division, anchored positions, mark type and density, in that order, so that it can be drawn from.
- Optical perception
- How repeated patterns and precise geometry affect the eye, producing works that appear to move or vibrate. One of the practices set for this week.
Sense and Perception Beyond the Eye FAQ
Is blind drawing just a game?
No, and the claim underneath it is serious. If a drawing can be made from touch then the marks carried information that never passed through the eye, which contradicts the idea that drawing transcribes vision. One of the practices set this week treats blindness as a creative methodology rather than as a loss.
My tactile drawing has terrible proportions. Did I do it wrong?
Almost certainly not. Touch gives you edges, texture and temperature and gives you very little about relative size, because you experience a form sequentially rather than at once. Wrong proportions are the signature of the channel, and naming that in your reflection is better than apologising for them.
What makes a description someone can actually draw from?
Structure and order. Start with the whole field, then its largest division, then two or three positions anchored to the edges of the page, then mark type and density, and only then a detail. Evaluative words such as delicate or balanced cannot be drawn from at all.
Whose work is the drawing somebody made from my description?
Both of yours, and it should be labelled that way in the diary with the date and each person's role. Attribution is direct evidence for the studio engagement criterion, and an unattributed drawing in your own hand-in that is visibly not in your hand raises a question you do not want raised.
Assessment move
Choose the printed photograph you bring for its structure rather than its beauty, because an atmospheric charcoal wash is almost impossible to hand over in sentences. Write your description in the order the chapter sets out and time yourself, since the discipline is what makes it transfer.
When the returned drawing arrives, do not measure fidelity: write two sentences on where it diverged and what that says about which parts of your work live only on the page. Before any gravity exercise, fix the drop height, the number of objects and the connecting rule, because that turns an accident into a procedure you can describe.
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