The Big Frame

August 20th, 2007 Fred McVittie Posted in Boundary, Embodiment, Imagination, Perception |

The contents of the visual field constantly change, with new perceptions entering this arena every second and the existing content departing at the same time. This sense of content entering and leaving, together with the movement that perceptions make across the visual field is integrated with the other senses, particularly the proprioceptive sense, and contribute significantly toward the construction of the world we occupy.

Taking the visual field on its own, and recognising the flux of the majority of its contents, there is nevertheless one constant item of content which changes hardly at all. This is the faint dark border which marks the edge of the field and which we may not even be routinely aware of. This border is the edge of the eye sockets and the smudge of the nose, possibly also the top of the cheeks. Whatever else changes inside this frame, the frame itself stays in place and is with us wherever we go.

If I pay attention to the frame I notice some details about it. Firstly, even though I have two eyes, I only experience a single frame (although since I wear glasses I also experience a frame within a frame, but this frame is also singular). Secondly, the frame is darker than the images of the world which it contains, it is a grey or possibly black boundary on the visual world. Thirdly, I can only see the frame and its internal contents, I can see nothing of what might lie ‘outside’ of the frame, or make any inference about the width of the frame. In fact, if I continue to attend to the frame and try to intuit what its width might be, or try to guess if there is a ‘beyond’ at all, I find that my understanding of this frame changes. To guess the extent of the frame, and to arrive at a guess which feels intuitively satisfying, I can only work on present evidence and the logical extrapolation of that evidence. Present evidence presents a dark border to the world which extends for some distance in all directions. No amount of careful scrutiny reveals an outer edge to that border; rather it seems to continue outwards to the edge of my ability to perceive at all.

Furthermore, I can detect no internal structure to that border, it seems homogeneous throughout. Nothing about this perceived border suggests that it will change in character, I see no evidence that it might suddenly change colour somewhere beyond my ability to see it for example, or somehow become a square border rather than a fuzzy oval, or break into multiple nested frames. Similarly I see no evidence that it will suddenly stop at an outer edge and have some other, possibly similar or possibly different ‘content’ (context?, extent?) beyond its outer edge. This is not to say that I cannot imagine such a possibility, but nothing from current evidence supports this kind of an imaginative act. Extrapolating from current perception, this frame continues uninterrupted as far as I wish to consider. It is also continuous on all sides, the extension seems to be in all directions, above, below, left and right.

As well as extending outwards in all directions, the frame seems to also extend in the front/back dimension. The front of the frame, which I feel as coterminous with the front of my face seems to extend backwards, with no sense that there is any gradation or dissolution. Again, I can easily imagine all kinds of ways in which the depth of this frame might terminate and of things that might exist behind this frame on ’this side’ of it, effectively what is happening behind me, however, on current evidence and by extrapolation from that evidence alone, I can detect no signs that such a thing exists or that the depth of the frame is limited in this way. By extrapolated intuition, the frame which extends outward without apparent end, also seems to extend backward without end.