Figure and ground

‘Is it this star against the night or is it the night against the star?’

We may distinguish the various objects that lie inside space in two different manners. A meaningful and a perceptional one. Despite the fact that these two manners are not completely distinct to each other our main concern will have to do with the second manner the ‘objective’ perceptional one.

What are exactly those mechanistic criteria by which our brain does the distinction between figure and ground? They may be illusionary, but this figure and ground effect has been well studied by art and science. First of all lets focus at psychology and the term ‘gestalt.’ It is a German term that means ‘essence or shape of an entity's complete form,’ and it refers to the characteristic organization of perception into a figure that 'stands out' against an undifferentiated background. In Gestalt psychology, the operational principle of the brain is holistic, parallel, and analog, with self-organizing tendencies. Let’s see for example the following images:

Figure- ground crosses

Someone can focus on the doted triangles or equally on the inside cross. So our brain captures the whole of an image and then tries to analyze its pieces in a figure and ground relation. If we imagine lets say a landscape we can either focus on the mountains or on the valleys.

Nevertheless this figure and ground distinction is not always clear as the following '(Herman’s) grid illusion' shows:

Grid optical illusion

Gray dots that don’t really exist appear at the cross sections between the black squares and the white lines. This is a typical example of the gestalt phenomenon as the brain tries to holistically overview the picture.

As far as art is concerned I am well aware of Salvador Dali’s paintings where this interplay between figure and ground goes on. See for example the following paintings:

Paranoiac Visage, 1935

The Great Paranoiac, 1936

Slave Market with the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, 1940

The Endless Enigma, 1938

I don’t really know what is the connection between gestalt psychology and paranoia, as Dali mentions the last word quite often in that kind of paintings. But he proves excellently the connection between figure and ground.

So it’s about time I went on a further step into the realm of paranoiac illusion and of modern physics as well. The figure- ground phenomenon has been well studied by physicists. Newton as Aristotle believed in absolute motion. A moving (accelerated) object could always know its motion in absolute space. This was an example of a figure (the object) without ground (absolute empty space.) Leibniz at first and then Mach attacked this inconsistency. How can one have possibly anything against nothing? Mach later on argued on the fact that motion must be relative to some kind of background. So Mach decided that motion of an object is relative to the distant fixed stars…

Spacetime frame dragging

Einstein later on proved the Lense- Thirring effect: An object within a rotating shell will experience a gravito-magnetic Coriolis force (frame dragging effect on spacetime by a rotating body). Just out of nowhere. Of course these deductions restored the figure- ground duality, but caused another inconsistency: How is it possible that distant stars or objects spontaneously act on other objects to produce acceleration (non- inertial forces)? Further more I can pose another question: Is there a real figure- ground distinction or is it that two (or more) figures compete with each other for two interchanging and equivalent roles? Is a star against the night or the night against a star? Or is it finally our brain that creates this equivalent duality as a prerequisite for meaning and wholeness?



Further: Metaphor and Figure- Ground Relationship: Comparisons from Poetry, Music, and the Visual Arts.