The camera obscura was the “photographic” camera before the invention of Photography. Its principles are understood from Aristotle’s’ times, and, in the 16th century − when the narrow (pin)hole in front of it was replaced by a lens −, the apparatus became a medium for the permanent record of images. When Johann H. Schulze (1687-1744) was making photograms with letters that he cut and glued to bottles full of silver chloride and nitric acid, and when the daguerreotype was still only a dream of a young Niépce (1765-1833), there was already a camera obscura prepared to accept the new invention. But in the two centuries before the advent of Photography (drawing with light), camera obscura was used to draw on top of projected images. It was a canvas for the artist’s pencil before being the magic box for photographic art. Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), Canaletto (1697-1798) and Francesco Guardi (1712-1793) were some amongst many painters that probably used the device to create their masterpieces. Museum walls all over the world are filled with works of art that were carried out with the camera’s support. The scenario was projected, through the lens, onto a panel, and then the artist just had to “follow the lines” in order to attain a draft. Only later, the camera was used to project images on top of a light-sensitive medium.
In 1844, Talbot defined light as The Pencil of Nature. Inside the camera obscura, the artist’s pencil was being replaced by light and silver. Photography was born and the apparatus was no longer used exclusively for drawing. But nature has other pencils and the scientific progress of the last decades opened the gates to new worlds. Several research fields are advancing and cooperating in order to understand how natural systems behave and how this knowledge may be applied in real-world problems. Ants, for instance, are known for being able to act as swarms, find food and “build” rather stable travelling paths; ants draw lines on the environment. In 19945, scientists Chialvo and Millonas presented an artificial ant colony model that may be tuned between chaos and order, were structured paths/lines emerge. As in nature, ants communicate by pheromone, which they deposit on the environment and tend to follow as long as they detect it. Other researchers (including the author of this text) followed this line of work, and modified and applied the system in order to look for alternative means to deal with image processing. However, new ideas arise when looking at the aesthetical and metaphorical potentialities of the pheromone fields created by ants. Like pencils in camera obscura, ants draw along the contours of an image by laying more pheromone were contrast is higher (thus attracting other ants that will reinforce pheromone in that area). As light, silver and film developing, the process is gradual, starting with a blank landscape were slowly emerges an image, a sketch of the original picture. We shall stick to the aesthetical outcome of the artificial ant colony and call it Pherographia: drawing by pheromones.
Pherographia is a rather naïve approach to drawing. There are no shadows or highlights, only lines delimiting the main areas of the image (although detail emerges in some regions). The ants’ drawings sometimes resemble other edge detection methods, but we still feel, when looking at the images, to be facing a children’s sketch or some neo-Palaelolithic kind of representation of reality. In that sense, Pherographia departs from Photographia. Solarization, a photographic process popularized by such artists as Man Ray (1890-1976) and László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946), comes to mind when looking at pherographic images. Due to the discontinuities imposed by pheromone trails, pherographic representations of images that hold rich tonal gradations may also resemble cloisonnism (if one mentally fills the blank regions with colors). Perhaps the most notable artist that engaged in such style was the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin (1848-1903), who was influenced by Japanese Ukiyo-e prints. As stated by Roy R. Behrens in “Art, Design and Gestalt Theory” (Leonardo Vol. 39, No. 4, pp. 299-303, 1998):
(…) There is a persuasive resemblance between gestalt principles and the Japanese-inspired aesthetics (…).
Gestalt principles also show resemblance with Swarm Intelligence studies. Both aim at understanding how local perceptions become organized into wholes, and this it is precisely what happens in the ant system discussed in which Pherographia is based on: the restricted awareness of individual ants gives rises to a global perception of the environment. When thinking about these concepts, a braid that embraces all of them seems to arise.
References. Pherographia is based on an Artificial Life model designed by Dante Chialvo and Mark Milonas, and later adapted to evolve on top of monochromatic images by Vitorino Ramos and Filipe Almeida.
(Carlos M. Fernandes, who coined the term Pherographia, also contributed to the scientific development of the model by introducing an evolutionary mechanism.)
Carlos Miguel Fernandes
More information coming soon! Contact us at info@pherographia.org.