#gestalt theory

[outsidewolves]

[lucidsdog]

a goat and a walrus i made on adobe illustrator

[marvelousartcatastrophe]

Some gestalt theory work for my design class. Gotta pick one to refine for my final project :’) These are just sketches. The horrors are coming.

(If you know, yes these are Sharu Valley shenanigans)

[schizoidvision]

Dr Elinor Greenberg Interview

Topic Areas - Schizoid Adaptations, Childhood, Object Relations, and the Possibility of the Onset of Schizophrenia

[hyperfixater-extrordinare]

Who up writing they thesis rn.

[lead-academy]

Mastering Gestalt Therapy: Online Training Course

Gestalt Therapy Training Course Online provides an excellent opportunity for individuals seeking to learn about Gestalt therapy. This course equips participants with the knowledge and skills necessary to provide patients with effective therapy sessions that are grounded in the Gestalt approach. Students can study at their convenience, as the course is fully online, and receive a comprehensive understanding of the essential concepts of Gestalt therapy, including awareness, the Here & Now, relationship, and contact. Participating in this course empowers individuals to become Gestalt therapists with the capability to offer compassionate and effective therapy to support their clients' well-being.Here is the course link:https://lead-academy.org/course/gestalt-therapy-online-course

[imaginationstimulation]

...Last year, Zekun Sun and Chaz Firestone at Johns Hopkins University, USA, concluded that there is a probably a Goldilocks porridgy zone of art. Not too complex, not too simple, not too square, but just right.

In their paper ‘Beautiful on the inside: Aesthetic preferences and the skeletal complexity of shapes’ published in Perception (August 2022), they try to untangle the relationship between aesthetics and complexity with a novel experimental approach using information-theory.

They represented an object based on an internal “skeleton”; a kind of blueprint that can be analysed for its level of “surprise” — a measure of how predictable or unpredictable one part of the skeleton is given another part. One way to capture this is to imagine a person walking along the skeleton of a shape; the more often this person changes direction (such that their next step was not easily predictable from their previous step), the higher the surprise factor of their walk. In most ways, curved objects are less surprising than very angled ones.

Using a computer, they generated a library of 2D polygons and changed their complexity by gradually smoothing out their features — essentially decreasing the amount of information in the objects. They then presented these shapes as “paintings” and “mounted” them on framed canvases hung in a virtual room.

Around 200 participants were shown pairs of these mounted shapes (they had similar structures but varied in skeletal complexity) and asked to chose which shape they preferred. Participants preferred paintings that were neither too simple nor too complex. In other words, moderately complex shapes were chosen as the most attractive paintings.

In a second experiment, they took the shapes and divided them into boxes and then scrambled the boxes. The idea was to keep the curved and angled lines but remove the overall shape.

Now the Goldilocks effect was less pronounced. But there was still a medium complexity that the volunteers preferred. The authors suggest that ‘higher-level notions of complexity play a role over-and-above their lower-level correlates’. Or in other words, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, which is related to the idea of 1920s Gestalt movement.

Gestalt (german for ‘shape’ or ‘form’) Theory says that when looking at a group of objects, we first identify the outline, and then match this outline pattern against shapes and objects we know to find a match. These could be shapes in nature, like trees or faces or dogs, or cityscapes or even steam engines. Whatever we are familiar with. That’s one of the reasons we like Mondrian and his squares; underlying them are objects from everyday life he’s abstracted into a grid formula. Gestalt theory says that only after the whole object emerges through this outline-pattern-matching, do we start to identify the parts that make up the whole. If there isn’t a clear outline (or a clear idea and intention from the artist), maybe it’s more difficult to get a sense of the whole?

None of the theories we’ve looked at say much about colour or texture in art. Although in some ways Birkhoff’s poetry formula tries to captures some of what we might call ‘colour’ and ‘texture’ in writing. (I note he hasn’t got a metaphor or simile factor in his equation). Colour and texture add to complexity, but they also help us to focus on particular areas of a picture to pick out the whole from the underlying components. A red oblong object might make us think of a London bus. If painted yellow, a slab of cheddar cheese. Colour and texture can simplify what we see?

Aesthetic ideals of balance and beauty i.e. objects that please the eye, are just one way we judge art. What marks out great art is that it expresses deep truths and ideas. We need to feel it too, which makes Lundholm’s experiment so interesting: his non-artistic volunteers put their feelings into lines. Great art alters the way we look at and think about ourselves and the world around us. But art also emerges from wider culture, nature, society, fashion, war, technology, engineering, science and even economics. It’s a response to the entire complex world we life in; can we measure that?

[glfry]

I can’t cope with this

[shybreadgarden]

I think a lot about why the humans are called Gestalts. There has to be a reason. It’s like the Replikas are considered to be only partial, whereas the humans are considered complete. And not only that, but encompassing the Replika and the culture. We use Gestalt in literary theory too (because we use psychology in literary theory) and it means that thing of the whole being more than the sum of its parts. It also has a meaning that is a little like zeitgeist. It’s a worldview, and a sum of the way the world is looked at through culture. So if the human is the zeitgeist that encompasses a replica, an idea, of itself… the memory reciprocation also makes sense. Especially considering the existence of bioresonance capabilities. It’s like saying, this human you were based on is your culture.

Addendum: with the new dictionary update on gestalts as meaning “original” I think this definitely still makes sense.

[canonical-transformation]

Gnoses and Gestalts: Archons as Vibe Checks

(CW: unsubstantiated theory)

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that you are Celestia, the Second Throne of the Heavens. You have usurped the throne from the Primordial One, laid waste to the civilisation of the Seelies, and now hold dominion over the mortal realm of Teyvat.

Say, too, that you are in the process of carving the world into seven nations, implementing a system of Gnoses wielded by seven Archons, in order to (error: speculation out of scope for this post).

And suppose—to run with the voxel-pixel motifs associated with you, Celestia—that your mind(s) are inhuman, that your neurology and biology are alien to this world, that you look at mortals and terrestrial "gods" alike and see only the mysterious cognition of jellyfish and ant colonies (metaphorically).

Allogenes are, in part, a mechanism for getting 'better' Archons. You intend to allocate Visions to those with the potential to achieve Godhood (presumably Archonhood).

You don't have a grasp on mortal (or demigod or god or etc.) psychology, not nearly enough to run a job interview for a farmhand, let alone an Archon.

How do you do it?

(N.B. For simplicity, I'll be treating Celestia as a singular entity with consistent goals: maybe a hive mind, maybe a collection of seraphim all aligned on the same purpose, whatever. Also let's drop the second-person hypothetical now that we're below the cut.)

Well, the groundwork had been laid: the Archon War was a pretty good start. A vicious free-for-all between all terrestrial powers, resulting in seven clear winners? The War was a well-optimised mechanism for selecting something. (Whatever Celestia's goal was in having seven Archons+Gnoses, we can assume that the War's selection process comports with that goal.)

Now, recall, we're assuming that the hearts and minds of Teyvat are like black boxes. It's easy to comprehend the actions of nations in aggregate, but to inspect, say, Mao Xiangling and conclude that she has the potential to achieve Godhood, that she's worth allocating one of their bounded(?) supply of Visions towards? How do you do that without understanding human desire (or yokai desire or wind-spirit desire, etc.)?

Can a brainwave scan tell you that? Can analysis of the neurochemical mix in a little vertebrate alien's brain tell you, at any given moment, that this person is a candidate for Godhood?

Well, the convenient thing is, you're not analysing vertebrate alien brains from scratch.

You have access to seven entire brains of Archon War winners.

You can't be sure what goes on in the Archons' minds either, but they're structurally far more similar to the mortals' minds than to your own.

So what if you just... compared them?

Imagine "what makes somebody a suitable Archon?" as a question, and these seven Archons are all different but seemingly good answers. Celestia can look at the Archons' minds. How do these minds work? How do the Archons think?

(a pilgrimage[...]; a battle ¶ is the noblest and most eminent in ¶ someday, they will blow towards a brighter future ¶ a very, very long dream[...] the dancing circle ¶ you shoulder the grievances of the world ¶ this is the trust[...] betray it, and you have tainted ¶ my ideals have no stains)

...and once Celestia understood the shape that Archons contort their minds into at the height of their power, it's not too hard an exercise to look out for mortals doing the same.

Moments of self-certain unchangeability. Moments of resistance and defiance. Moments of unwavering idealism. And so on.

And really, how else could Celestia find Vision wielders, if not by searching for people who, for just a moment in time, resemble an Archon?

(❤️❤️ with thanks to @eujean for their recent Visions theory posts, which inspired me to write this up. There's more to say but I think this gives the general idea of this maybe-not-crack headcanon)

Side note: I titled this post "Archons as Vibe Checks" following Peli Grietzer's fascinating account (link) of computational models coincidentally encoding vibes, or aesthetics, or the impression that a gestalt leaves (where a gestalt, approximately, is a collection of things which collectively have more 'meaning' than the sum of its parts).

Side side note: a quick self-plug for Seven Prayers to Seven Archons, which builds upon this theory with 45 standalone Vision stories.

[currentlyonstandbi]

[m1shapanda]

calling all artists, what's one obscure art tip that changed your art

[vidtape]

most evil thing about the human mind is that its easily influenced by how the environment looks

[jojolimons]

here's a thing i made for an assignment in my class lol

[direful]

no celebrimbor mention but yeah I’m going through this presenter’s whole body of work later