Week 2 Exercise - J. Morris

Perceiving the world through Gibson's Ecological Theory of Perception.

I took some photos as wandering the familiar route near Cuba St/Ghuznee, thinking about Gibson's thoeries, particularly in terms of layout and affordances.
"different possibilities for the behaviour of animals"

Goldstein on Gibson talks about the "affordances"... "what the environment offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes"

The design of this environment affords walking through it with ease, but I also noticed the limitations around access to the trees.

I never really thought about it before, but of course we all know that those areas are not for our access. Gibson states that our understanding of environments is "known implicitly" but Goldstein examines that idea and points out that affordances are in fact learned.

Thinking about the design around the trees and the affordances in the environment actually made me look more closely at the trees and think about their placement, as I would have mostly ignored them before, almost as if the surfaces of the red poles had indicated a invisible barrier to me before.

Goldstein also summarises one of the key points Gibson makes- that for people "...to truly understand perception they must consider the information that an active observer uses while moving through the environment."

I thought about the way the stepped surfaces afforded people to move around the area and how they functioned as sections, seating, and also decorative elements, giving a sense of orderliness to the area when looked at in conjunction with other surfaces (e.g flat, maintained grass, trees, surrounding buildings, as well as other people at rest and play in the area).

Recording of Performance

The following is a recording of our performance. Through sound and light we conveyed the way that atmosphere can change within an enviroment. We specifically considered how over the semester the atmosphere within our classes changed. We replicated the shift in emotion from a sense of calm to panic, through the use of light and an audio recording that we played during our performance.

Wednesday 2 March 2016 - Atmosphere first exercise

We explored the way that atmosphere is the in-between. It is the relationship between our environments and the objects within them and how individuals perceive these. For this exercise we considered how atmosphere can change over time. We presented to the class a brief audio clip of a journey through the museum building documenting different environments.