Research Problem
ZoomADIct (homepage and abstract), next section: Research Method
A small thumbnail-size image (say, 50 to 100 pixels wide, and only one among many such thumbnails on the web page) every now and then "jumps out" at us, or "pricks" us, as Barthes would say (ref.), and we feel that tingle of hazy anticipation (or anxiety) as when we think we might have just seen a friend (or foe) in the distance. Typically we find ourselves clicking on the thumbnail long before we could give any articulate account of our biased attention. The page has now disappeared while the new one is still loading, but the temporary blankness only helps keep our attentiveness uncontested. The new page is finally loaded and the full resolution version of the thumbnail image is coming into focus (as we are gradually "taking it in", but also, more literally, as with progressive scanning of compressed image files). The enticing superposition of possibilities now collapses leaving this one, definite, indisputable, and often enough equally disappointing, "actual" image.
True, the full-resolution image might well "overshoot" our expectations instead. This is, of course, much more likely to happen if we did not expect much of it to begin with (e.g. when we are obliged, for one reason or another, to click through all the thumbnails on the index page of a web gallery). Typically, though, we are more "enthusiastic". Indeed, it is a well known evolutionary stratagem that compels us, and other animals, to economise with our attentional resources on the side of caution: because of the dangers, as well as opportunities, we cannot afford to ignore (ref.). And so, we find ourselves consistently overestimating the importance of inconclusive stimuli (ibid.). This is a potently motivating estimate and any persistent perceptual hindrance we experience as tantalising. Interestingly, for this “epistemic hunger” (ref.) to be reinforcing in its own right, the eventual perceptual identification of the nature of the stimuli must feel somewhat disappointing even when the animal realises that, say, "that was not a tiger in the bush after all". This is important because the animal would otherwise quickly learn not to pay much attention to all those partial sightings that invariably turn out to be of no consequence, for, it is a statistical tautology that extraordinary things happen extraordinarily rarely. Thus, this "peekaboo" effect (ref.) that motivates our untiring curiosity and active probing of the world is experienced as rewarding in advance of its own utility (see e.g. recent fMRI study of human responses to novelty).
Of course, like so much else of human nature, curiosity too is increasingly institutionalised, notably as modern scientific research. Unlike scientists, however, many artists' practices appear to move from the "initial inkling" inward, so to speak, not toward the hidden thing "out there" (for better or for worse), but towards the formalisation of the "inkling" itself; towards that which is lurking (apparently) inside us instead; that which motivates. As many theoreticians of art recognised (see e.g. ref.s), this formlessness itself is both the highest prize and the toughest challenge to formalise as formlessness...
Indeed, many artists' creative method involves indefinite perpetuation of this "zooming in" movement, as with the chiaroscuro masters, for example, whose drawings evolved from the initial clouds of provisional strokes, known as abbozzi (ref.), towards the elusive "resolution" of the (co-evolving) ideal. Of course, drawing from memory (even a loved one we see every day and could easily spot in a large crowd) is notoriously difficult. But the reasons that projecting our memories out into the world is so difficult for us reach right down to the fundamentals of the philosophy of mind (see e.g. ref., on the Cartesian homunculus and its "Theatre"). According to recent understanding (see my ref., for an extended account of the literature), there are in fact no memories as such inside us to project. We may feel they are there, stored, but memory just does not and cannot work that way: while excellent perceivers, we are comparatively poor "projectors". Our brain is, in evolutionary terms, exceedingly costly as it is. To maximise efficiency of its use, we have evolved, and continuously learn in the course of our lifetime, to offload as much computation as possible to the rest of the body (ref.), our "extended phenotype" (ref.), and even our physical (ref.) and social habitat (ref.) — which is what "habit" in "habitat" alludes to.
Thus we find these perplexities of memory, creativity and intentionality play out in the domain of the digital image capture, manipulation, and compression, too. The "disappointing thumbnail experience" indeed appears to be just a particularly simple manifestation of the general problematic. As a case study, it is in fact so simple that an artist/programmer might even have access to some of the "cogs and levers" of the mechanisms behind these phenomena.These, of course, are precisely the reasons to pursue the following question: How could we (say, in the manner of the chiaroscuro masters above) "zoom in" on the thumbnail image to see, not the aesthetically incidental "actual" high-resolution image that was used to generate it, not even the "anticipated image", for it does not exist as such, but the shifting/co-adapting nature of the anticipation itself.
The following section of this project description details the technical/theoretical argument for the feasibility of such a solution.
ZoomADIct (homepage and abstract), next section: Research Method