This article was originally presented as a lecture at the Type Director’s Club, New York City, as part of the “Type Salon” program on 21 April 2005.
I want to begin, tonight, with where we are, a darkened room with a screen, and with the context of where we are, a slide lecture. This kind of gathering is not without a history, a set of expectations, and the first slide I’ve brought to share with you deals with that.
This is a photograph of the staging of a play called The Heidi Chronicles, by Wendy Wasserstein. It depicts an actor playing the woman we know as Heidi Holland, who is employed by Columbia University as an art historian. The prologue of the play finds Heidi in the midst of one of her slide lectures concerning three women artists that, while well respected in their time and by their societies, are virtually unknown today.
Here is a similar image, though much more recent. It shows Julia Roberts playing the art historian Katherine Ann Watson in the 2003 movie Mona Lisa Smile. Behind her is an image of a bison from the caves of Altamira in Spain. Created around 12,000 B.C., the markings on these cave walls are the oldest we have on record.
But part of what’s remarkable about Altamira is what’s not there: the caves showed no signs of soot. While the Paleolithic people whose designs are found at Altamira resembled other cave-dwelling tribes in a number of ways, none of these tribes made markings of this sort, and none, as far as archaeologists can tell, lived as deeply in their caves as the people that lived here lived in theirs. The absence of soot suggests two ways in which the people here might have been different. Some researchers believe that the tribesmen might’ve found phosphorescent chemicals or clean-burning materials to light their darkened caves. Others believe that the use of red zinc oxides in the coloration of the bison demonstrate that the people of Altamira had eyes that had not yet evolved to match those of their contemporaries.
Human beings could see the color red long before they could see the color blue. The early Egyptians probably did not see the lapis lazuli they used in their crafts the way we see it now. Newborns are blind to the color blue for the first six to eight weeks of life, and, like newborns, the blue-seeing rods and cones in the eyes of early humans were certainly the last to develop. Some anthropologists suggest that this emerging sense of the color blue is part of what drew our ancestors to be fascinated with the heavens.
Regardless, the red zinc oxide used in the caves of Altamira, perhaps on its own, or perhaps in conjunction with another form of light, would have glowed in the early-stage eyes of those who saw it, like light on a screen. A community gathered in the dark, reading its history on a glowing wall. We’ve gone a long way back in history to find ourselves here again. We’ll return to Altamira.
For now, let’s return to the human eye and to its evolution. The human eye is one of the most advanced mechanisms on earth, capable of taking in an enormous amount of information very quickly. The earliest “eyes”—if you can even call them that—were just light-sensing cells that helped early organisms to regulate their metabolic functions. Compound eyes, like those in insects, aggregate these light cells into a fine screen, resulting in an image that looks like the dots on a printed page. Eventually these cells evolved into rods and cones, capable of detecting color, which aids in flower recognition, which aids in pollination. As these cells increased in number, they moved to the back of a spherical chamber called a socket, and a lens evolved in the front of the socket to protect it and focus the light entering it. The light entering this eye is like the light entering a darkened cave, and some of the first animals to evolve this sort of structure were fish.
On the upper right is a fish eye, and, as you can see, it’s basically a lot like our own. There are two primary differences: the flatness of the front, for one; and the roundedness of the lens, for another. The lens of a fish eye, unlike our own, is solid and inflexible. So, while our lens can bend and adjust according to the amount of light our eye is taking in and the depth of the thing we’re trying to focus on, a fish’s eye cannot. Fish don’t need an eye with this degree of complexity. They exist in a limited-light environment (underwater) where, because of the properties of water, focusing is difficult. The purpose of a fish eye is to see as much as possible in as many different parts of a single environment at a given time, to maximize the amount viewed for safety’s sake, so that no one gets eaten without a decent head start.
On the upper left is an image taken with a “fish eye” lens. It’s consistent with what a fish would see out of a single eye. The flatness of its cornea in front and roundness and inflexibility of its lens behind allows for a maximum viewing area, which is further increased by the way a fish’s eyes are positioned on its head.
This is a representation of what most of you are seeing right now. It’s created by your two eyes, mounted relatively close together, seeing slightly different images. Our brains use the minimal amount of difference between these two images to calculate depth. This is because, in a nonliquid world, there are lots of things to bump or fall into, and we wouldn’t want that.
This is more like how fish see. Mounted far apart, their eyes gaze out from the sides of their heads, like the opposing passenger windows in the front seat of a car with no windshield. Fish can’t see a small sliver directly ahead of them, but they can see a great deal more around them than we can. Where people have a viewing area of about 150 degrees, the viewing area of a fish is more like 270 degrees. Fish never see two similar versions of anything; they see two comparative versions of different things. They are constantly living a life of two images side by side that they cannot quite reconcile, but that are always related. This view, a fish-eye view, is a lot like the side-by-side slides on the screen behind me or the side-by-side pages in the spread of a book. The fish surveys a maximum area of the world in order to chart its path and relate its universe. Using this view as our guide, I’d like to see a particular moment in design’s history from the widest possible angle.
