Figure & Ground
According to Gestalt figure/ground theory, people perceive the environment as a total unit. The theory states that in the world one object never stands alone. Look around you and you’ll see that there’s always figure or an object that 'stands out' against an undifferentiated background. What’s fascinating, however, is that your mind will unexpectedly change your focus so that you will perceive a figure emerging from the background
The mind is like dominoes falling…
With the Pirolette, the ground image of your loved one’s face becomes figure, which may trigger the memory of taking the image you submitted, which may remind you of your loved one’s smile, which will remind you of a wonderful experience or special secret you share. When you see the Pirolette itself as the figure you see a beautiful work of art, which can remind you of other objects in your life that have great meaning. Your Pirolette will remind you for a lifetime of those related memories.
When looking at a Pirolette you can either see the Pirolette as a vase or cup like object or you can see the profile of you or your loved one being framed by the Pirolette.
This is something that occurs to all of us frequently in our everyday life…
With the old/young women, two persons can be perceived, an old woman and a young woman. When the old woman is figural, all the rest of the picture is ground; when the young woman is figural the old woman disappears into the ground. As you study the picture you may be able to change your perceptions from one figure to the other in order to appreciate the process of emerging figures and receding grounds.
Gestalt figure/ground theory states that the arbitrary change of perception of a figure emerging from the ground has to do with our unconscious mind. It’s influenced by our experiences, values, beliefs; our complex internal world that is usually out of our awareness, but guides us in many ways. So, the theory is that if at the first look you perceive the young woman before the old lady, this may relate to personal experiences with young women that “stand out” compared to your experience with old women. Whether you notice the old or the young is related to your rich and varied unconscious mind from which many of our important beliefs and feelings stem.
Figure/ground theory also applies to music…
Why is it that a guitar that has always been in the background of a song you heard many times, suddenly become the front figure? It’s the subtleties and complexities of our mind making these automatic changes in perceptions.
Also, according to figure/ground theory, something you become aware of (figure) may automatically lead you to become aware of other related things that were previously out of your awareness (ground). So, hearing a few notes of a song reminds you of when you heard the complete song on a trip to New York last winter, which reminds you of how much you like the snow, which reminds you of how good a glass of scotch tasted when you came in from the snow and so on. Seeing your Pirolette does the same thing for you visually.
We are talking about the ability to differentiate visually between an object and its background…
In the early 1900’s Max Wertheimer, the man thought to be the original founder of Gestalt psychology, was riding on a train while on vacation. Along the way he stopped at a train station and bought a stroboscope, a toy drum that spins with little windows that you look through with pictures inside, think of a movie projector or a sophisticated flip book.
From this experience Wertheimer developed the notion of perception of motion. What this means is that when he looked inside he perceived motion where there was none, it was simply “a rapid sequence of individual sensory events” this effect is called the phi phenomenon.
This is known as the Gestalt law of Minimum Principle:
…”we do not perceive what is actually in the external world so much as we tend to organize our experience so that it is as simple as possible…simplicity is a principle that guides our perception and may even override the effects of previous experience.” (Benjafield, p. 173).
Gestalt psychology can also be understood through the Gestalt Laws of Organization, which describe the ways we organize our experiences in a simple and coherent way. These laws are:
• Proximity: We tend to group things together that are close together in space.
• Similarity: We tend to group things together that are similar
• Good Continuation: We tend to perceive things in good form
• Closure: We tend to make our experience as complete as possible
• Figure and Ground: We tend to organize our perceptions by distinguishing between a figure and a background.
The idea behind Turn Your Head comes from the theory of Gestalt psychology and Figure and Ground perception. The word Gestalt means a “unified or meaningful whole”, or more simply put 'form' or 'shape'. For Gestalt psychologists’ form has always been a way of perceiving, “when perceiving we will always pick out form.”
Famous face-vase figure…
Throughout the years psychologists have produced all kinds of stimulants so that they could study how people separate figure from ground. One of these stimuli is the ambiguous figure the famous face-vase figure, what we call the Pirolette, which can be interpreted as two faces looking at one another or a goblet, depending on what aspect a person focuses on.
What Turn Your Head has done is created a stimulus of figure and ground, but this time the illusion of figure and ground is you.
