Fascination with
ground and figure carries on in various fields after
The Rubin vase / face Illusion,
M.C. Escher, and
Marshall McLuhan.
Besides being extremely important in the fields of
photography and
poetry, the figure/ground relationship is important to physicist
Paul Davies, who says "the true miracle of nature is to be found in the ingenious and unswerving lawfulness of the cosmos, a lawfulness that permits complex order to emerge from chaos, life to emerge from inanimate matter, and consciousness to emerge from life."
Also, Peter Grundy and Yiang Yan discuss how
contextual ground relates to linguistic figure in Bill Clinton's famous apology,
Andrew Graydon plays with the distinction between sound as environment and sound as music, and W.C. Richardson creates
paintings in which "positive and negative spaces seem unstable; figure becomes ground, ground becomes figure."
posted by Aghast.
on Aug 12, 2006 -
3 comments
