Black Paper Drawing #9

aridamus (39)in #art • 8 years ago (edited)

Hello everyone and welcome back to another wonderful mystery tour of my subconscious journeys. Todays drawing is based on phosphenes. In layman's terms they're those grainy images that show up in your vision when there is no light. They also show up a lot when you rub your eyes although I wouldn't recommend doing that as it can potentially damage your eyes...and we DEFINITELY don't want that otherwise no art!

Thankfully a group of scientists have documented a few examples of these patterns. Also they compared the similarities between them and preschool kids drawings; examining the concept that these drawings could be influenced by phosphenes.

Illustration © Kellogg, R, Knoll, M., Kugler, J. (1965). Form-similarity between phosphenes of adults and pre-school children’s scribblings. Nature 208,5015:1129-1130. Table 1.

That would be fascinating if that was true. Also, phosphenes could have heavily influenced most of the ancient patterns and hieroglyphs we see around the world. I could easily see this being true. Aboriginal dreamtime is basically oozing with similarities to phosphenes. This would make sense since a lot of the images of the sky were done on extremely dark nights. Also, it's more just a guess but it's in the name "dream"time. I figure there could be some sort of connection.