The symbolism behind the ReBeL logo

Wed, 30 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The Reality Bending logo includes several references to various concepts. Can you try to guess them?

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Wizard

One of the most striking feature of the logo is the guy in the middle, which represents a wizard. It represent us, the people who delve in the science of reality bending.

Wizards are a powerful archetype, that are primarily defined through the learned ability (by seeking, studying and gathering arcane knowledge) of controlling and manipulating reality. Though many specializations and facets exist, the understanding of the true nature of the world is a core facets that binds all wizards.

the wizard Gandalf facing the forces of darkness with his light.

Beard

In Greco-Roman antiquity, the beard was seen as the defining feature of a philosopher (see the Philosopher’s beard on wikipedia), expressing the idea that philosophy is no mere intellectual hobby but rather a way of life that, by definition, transforms every aspect of one’s behavior (including one’s shaving habits).

Show me your beard and I’ll tell you what philosopher you are:

Cynics had long dirty beards to indicate their “strict indifference to all external goods and social customs”
Stoics were occasionally trimming and washing their beards in accordance with their view “that it is acceptable to prefer certain external goods so long as they are never valued above virtue”
Peripatetics took great care of their beards believing in accordance with Aristotle that “external goods and social status were necessary for the good life together with virtue”

A glorious beard.

Eyepatch

For any mythology fan, a bearded figure with an eyepatch (or a missing eye) is known to represent Odin, the chief deity of the norse pantheon. He’s a very complex character, with a deeply ambivalent nature. One of the key moment of Odin’s story is when he sacrifices one of his eyes in return for wisdom…

Losing direct sight of reality in return for a deeper knowledge of reality - here is an interesting idea that we can discuss and (over)interpret with some drinks 🍺

Odin portrayed by one of my favourite actor.

Pipe

The pipe refers to the most famous painting of the surrealist René Magritte. One of the common interpretation suggests that it symbolizes the difference between the authentic thing (a real pipe) and its representation. This, we believe, is just one level that differentiates the real from the unreal…

The Treachery of Images (Magritte, 1929).

Smoke

The smoke takes the form of a Psi letter Ψ, which is the symbol of psychology.

The Psi within the brain, a representation of neuropsychology, and the logo of the Neuropsydia software.

The Flower

The flower in the background is not just any flower. It is a poppy flower, from which the seed have been used throughout history to create diverse substances to alter our perception of reality…

Incidentally, it is also the symbol of the Makowski family (which names refers to “poppy seed” in polish).

The Makowski's Poppy Flower.

Did you spot any more 😏? Let us know!

What visual agnosia might feel like

Sun, 03 Jan 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Name One Thing In This Photo

Can you name one thing in the image above? It all looks familiar, but something is off. The image makes “sense” overall; there are well-defined shapes and objects, that seem to be placed in a plausible - albeit chaotic - fashion, like some random rubbish thrown in the corner of a room. Even the colors, the lightning, the quality, is coherent, and helps making it believable. And yet, chances are you cannot name one single element that composes it.

This image, after appearing on twitter in April 2019, surfaced on reddit with the caption “This picture is designed to give the viewer the simulated experience of having a stroke (particularly in the occipital lobe of the cerebral cortex, where visual perception occurs.) Everything looks hauntingly familiar but you just can’t quite recognize anything”, and became subsequently viral. However, the author of the caption later admitted that he made this description up.

So where does the image come from?

One can trace back the original publication to an instagram account, which author declared having made the image using ArtBreeder.com. This website gives access to an AI algorithm (Generative Adversarial Networks - GAN), commonly used in the processing and generation of images (one mindblowing example can be found on thispersondoesnotexist.com, which generates realistic pictures of non-existing people). There were even some attempts to reverse engineer the process to retrieve what the original image could have been like.

After all, it seems like there is no intelligent design behind this image. No clever neuropsychologist carefully crafting a meaningful experience. Just one of these lucky accident.

Nonetheless, it’s still an intriguing image, falling in this uncanny abyss of things that we recognize as familiar, but slightly too alien for our sense-seeking brains to dissolve in meaning. Could it tell something about brain processes? Surely, but brain disorders? Maybe.

The “occipital stroke” hypothesis mentioned above suggests, by its formulation, a lesion to the primary visual cortices. However, as neuroscientists know, these brain regions, located at the extreme back of the brain, are mostly supporting lower level aspects of visual processing, and their damage is usually related to alterations of a somewhat different nature than of that above, such as vision loss, visual hallucinations, visual deformations, loss of color, movement, stereoscopy, etc.

However, there is another neuropsychological disorder, referred to as “visual agnosia”, in which patients experience difficulties to recognize visually presented objects, despite preserving an intact vision. In fact, it is more an umbrella term for different subcategories of deficits, and the image above could be reminiscent of visual agnosia of the associative type, which corresponds to a a specific impairment in the assignment of meaning to a stimulus that is accurately perceived (and can be visually described). This symptom is often related to injuries in the left occipito-temporal region, located on the ventral “what” stream of the brain (as opposed to the so-called “where” dorsal stream).

Ivan Seal’s Art

From there, the youtuber Solar Sands helped me discover the artist Ivan Seal, which work is somewhat akin to the image above. They are not purely abstract renditions, or depictions of impossible entities, but plausible objects that sit in this awkward space, deep between boring reality and total weirdness.

Thanks for reading! Do not hesitate to tweet and share this post and don’t forget to join me on X 🐦 @Dom_Makowski

Art | Reality Bending Lab