Impressions

The Rat sighted...

For various reasons (doing some contract programming on the side), I am currently in the 3AW building. Outside, there is a man in a rat suit, holding a placard with the words "Trust Me!" on them. According to the lovely receptionist, I'm one of the few people that actually figured out that this meant we had the Prime Minister The Rat in the building. As if the two Feds and two uniform coppers standing outside wasn't enough indication... Sheesh.

Earlier this week, mark_latham was wandering out of the building the same time I was wandering in... He smiled at me, in that "Oh, look a punter, hello!" kind of way. Not a bad smile, might even have been sincere. Pro'ly not, though, more likely the standard pollie "Oh look, a humanoid, activate smile reflex" programming at work.

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Impressionists@NGV

Well, seedy_girl and myself were naughty and skipped MUCS to go see The Impressionists exhibition at the NGV. We'd tried to go on Sunday, but at 11:00 when we arrived the ticket buying queue was about an hour long (we got to skip that thanks to being NGV Members) and the queue to get into the exhibition after that was about an hour long also. We decided instead to go wander around the Art of Zen exhibit and also the surrounding Asian Pottery exhibit, after buying our tickets, and we'd come back Wednesday, when they were open to midnight.

Anyway, on returning Wednesday 19:00 or so, the ticket buying queue was over 2 hours long, but there was no entry queue - straight in if you had tickets. So, we went straight in... Place was very crowded, so we did a bit of bouncing around to the lowest density areas, rather than doing it in a perfectly ordered fashion. Having looked at the exhibit, I concur with nigelw's assessment... Impressionism is JPEG (i.e. lossy-compression) for oil painters. Bigger brush paintings (like Sisley and Pissarro) are equivalent to "low quality JPEG" and small brush paintings (like James Tissot's Le Bal) are "high quality JPEG".

The same basic principle is involved - the fact that human vision is a very imprecise and fuzzy thing, mostly constructed after the fact inside the visual centre of the brain. This means that you can construct a close approximation of the image you want to evoke, and that will be sufficient to provoke the brain into thinking it has seen the image. Use the sharp focus parts of the eye and look carefully, and you can break the illusion of the image, but take a broader impression and it looks fine. All in all, very cool.