On the beauty of time-lapse

And the perception of value

Since I introduced the concept for the field kit for the work in the ruins, I have been testing it out in practice. As always, trialling a prototype has enabled me to see the gaps in the approach. One such observation has been around the question of value.

While the prototype kit privileges sight, the idea is about ‘looking’ in a broader sense of the word - about perceiving what is the value of the object, and contemplating it in the web of meanings and contexts in which we typically encounter it.

The field kit prototype - a tool to contemplate on the four questions by pointing the viewfinder at things.

In practice then, the four questions from

Dougald Hine

, as they are applied in the field kit, become judgments: is what is in the viewfinder good? Or was it never good, or was it once but no more, or is it something to be rediscovered in a new light?

Put another way, these questions take the form of value judgment: does it have value, or is it valueless, or has it lost the value it once had, or has the value always been there, but we’ve lost sight of it and the value should be recovered for a new purpose?

The above questions are utilitarian in the sense that they are meant to help us deal with the predicaments we are in — the polycrisis if you will.

Yet, it can be argued that valorising utility, as manifested in our destruction of the planet, has led us to this point. What, less of functional value, was left behind? Are there universal things the value of which we immediately and intuitively recognise? Surely, those are the ones we should cultivate?

Perceiving value

The above questions have brought me to a notion that I find fascinating: ‘value-ception’. As with many other philosophical concepts, I came across this one in Iain McGilchrist’s work. He refers to the term’s German origins and the philosopher Max Scheler, who was an early 20th century figure revered by Heidegger. In The Master and His Emissary, McGilchrist writes:

Value is not a flavour that is added for some socially useful purpose; it is not a function or consequence of something else, but a primary fact. Scheler referred to the capacity for appreciating value as Wertnehmung, a concept which has been translated into the rather less accommodating English language as ‘value-ception’. For him this value-ception governs the type of attention that we pay to anything, and by which we learn more about it. Our value-ceptive knowledge of the whole governs our understanding of the parts, rather than the reverse. — Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary, p. 159.

In The Matter with Things, he returns to the concept, emphasising its primal nature:

A value can be calibrated cognitively, but it itself is first perceived pre-cognitively, much as we perceive colour or a musical tone directly, not as a cognitive elaboration. In German the word for perception is Wahrnehmung, literally truth-taking: Scheler introduced the word Wertnehmung, literally value-taking, as a parallel. His point was twofold: that value is a primal phenomenon, like colour — it speaks for itself; and, related to this, that it is a Gestalt and therefore cannot be decomposed into bits or parts, or steps or slices, but must be taken in as a whole. — Iain McGilchrist, The Matter with Things, p. 1127.

While looking for more writings on value-ception, I have not come across many depictions of what an experience of ‘value-ceiving’ is like. If value-ception is about intuitively perceiving the qualities of true, good, and beautiful in something, what would represent an example of such discovery?

Time-lapse photography as a value-ception technology

In a YouTube conversation with McGilchrist,

Jonathan Rowson

mentions the image of a mother holding a child as one such focal point of value-ception — an image that “speaks for itself”, encapsulating the pre-cognitive perception of value. This image can also be taken as an example of how the value of any such image gets diluted the very moment we begin to break into its constitutive parts: the mother, the baby, the posture, etc — the magic is gone. Essential to the value-ception moment is that in it we recognise that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

I want to suggest another example, something that also exemplifies how we manipulate our perception of the nature of reality with technology: a time-lapse footage of living things growing or perishing, the blooming of a flower as a prime example. Have you ever met a person who would not inherently recognise the beauty or otherwise poignant quality of such an image?

Image source

In nature documentaries, we sometimes see a time-lapse of an animal corpse decomposing. While the image has a different tone to the flower blooming, and stands in almost direct opposition to the mother with the baby, it has a similar impact — we see the whole, the Gestalt, that goes into the growth of a plant, or how us animals go back to nature after death, contracted in time. The images speak for themselves; of something true.

Can man-made objects evoke wertnehmung?

So, then the question becomes, what man-made objects — such as the various technologies we have created — or materials would qualify as evoking value-ception? Perhaps pieces of music, ones that resonate widely across cultures, evoke an embodied value-ception, as they evoke almost a sense of channeling something that is eternal about nature and the cosmos — sometimes it’s a feeling of the sublime. Art, when it works on impressions and speaks to our intuitions with symbolism and metaphor, perhaps reach a wertnehmung, even the artwork itself would be a representation: a painting of a mother holding a baby is one step removed from the truth, yet it can evoke the feeling of a similar truth?

The experience of music or viewing a painting, importantly, is not material. Hence, I’d argue other types of material man-made objects seldom evoke value-ception. There is a related notion, that of affordance (from mid-20th century psychologist J.J. Gibson) which refers to the rapid perception of what our surroundings offer us in terms of action potentials. In product and other design circles, affordance refers to the immediate perception of a man-made object’s purposeful design; how a chair ‘affords’ sitting is the classic example. Or how a map affords navigating a space.

But, funnily enough, their affordances are of utilitarian value. McGilchrist writes about utilitarian values and how they are derived from the value of pleasure, of getting things done or satisfying a need — something humans have accomplished with the help of technology, old and new. Contrary to this, McGilchrist argues that values like beauty and goodness are not derivable in the same way. They are mysterious yet non-negotiable, he suggests: “Values are not just validated by the outcomes they achieve: they are inseparable from our deepest emotional experience.” (TMWT, p. 1125.)

McGilchrist ties his discussion of value into the hemisphere hypothesis:

For the left hemisphere, value is something we invent; which is separate from and, as it were, painted onto the world; and whose function is utility. For the right hemisphere, on the other hand, value is something intrinsic to the cosmos; which is disclosed and responded to in a pre-cognitive take on the Gestalt; and is not, other than incidentally, in service of anything else. (TMWT, p. 1132.)

As a result, ethical questions about the calculus of utility arise: who decides the measures of utility and for whom, for example. Any calculus represents a form of cognitive processing, a left-hemisphere manoeuvre, and thus happens ‘after’ any pre-cognitive value-ception. With the field kit approach, I seek a balance of value-ception and analysis — to encourage thinking about what is inherently valuable, and thus defies analysis to understand it, but also what still has utilitarian value in the predicament we live in and for the thousand-year view ahead.

Encounters with technology

This post has not been predominantly about technology, but I want to bring it to a close with another observation about using the field kit to look at technologies, because our everyday is so steeped in encounters with them.

The nature of the attention that we bring to bear on the world, and the values which we bring to the encounter, change what we find; and in some absolutely non-trivial sense, change what it is. At the same time, the encounter, as is always the way with encounters, changes who we are. —The Matter With Things, p.1330-31.

McGilchrist quite often refers to a line in a poem by Wordsworth, where the poet suggests that we “half perceive, half create” what we encounter in the world. A time-lapse of a living or a dying thing could be said to encapsulate this process, or perhaps it communicates to us something meaningful about it.

Therefore, using the field kit not only has the potential to uncover layers of meaning about the technologies under scrutiny (my particular focus with it), but the act — the encounter through the viewfinder — changes the viewer. Perhaps it’s like a time-lapse for the inquisitive soul.

Thank you for reading.

With love and kindness,

Aki