The Micro-Phenomenology of Seeing
Note: I approach this essay as an artist researching painting and drawing. I draw on neuroscience and research into visual perception not to make scientific claims, but to explore questions arising from my own artistic practice. Where I refer to established research, I cite the relevant sources. Where I develop ideas such as Apeiron, nano-liminal, and perceptual residue, I present them as my own artistic and phenomenological propositions.
I use the title The Micro-Phenomenology of Seeing because this essay asks a central question:
Can something become operative within perception before it becomes consciously recognisable as something seen?
This question emerges from my understanding of Apeiron and from my interest in the relationship between visual registration, recognition, sensory persistence, and painterly praxis. I am interested in a condition in which something has entered the perceptual system without necessarily becoming an explicit object of consciousness.
I want to distinguish carefully between what neuroscience can establish and what I am proposing as a phenomenological and artistic interpretation.
Rapid visual processing
Research into rapid visual perception demonstrates that the visual system can process information from remarkably brief visual presentations. Potter, Wyble, Hagmann, and McCourt reported that participants could detect target pictures under rapid serial visual presentation when individual images were presented for as little as 13 milliseconds. Their findings suggested that observers could extract limited but meaningful information from extremely brief exposures under the conditions of that experiment.¹
This result should not be understood as establishing 13 milliseconds as a universal boundary between unconscious and conscious seeing. Nor does it mean that every image presented for 13 milliseconds becomes fully and consciously recognisable.
Experimental findings depend upon conditions including the task, visual context, masking, attention, and the observer’s expectations. Maguire and Howe, for example, reported that when adequate masking was used, observers did not reliably detect the presence of a specific target picture even when each image in a rapid sequence was presented for 27 milliseconds.²
These differing findings do not cancel one another out. They demonstrate that the interpretation of extremely brief visual presentations depends substantially upon experimental design.
The significance of this research for my argument is therefore not that 13 milliseconds represents a precise threshold of perception. It is that visual processing can begin, and in some experimental circumstances can support limited recognition or categorisation, under extraordinarily brief conditions.
Thorpe, Fize, and Marlot provide another important reference point. In their experiments, participants viewed photographs flashed for approximately 20 milliseconds and performed a go/no-go categorisation task concerning whether an image contained an animal. The researchers reported neural activity associated with the categorisation task at approximately 150 milliseconds after stimulus onset.³
This finding does not establish one universal speed for human vision, nor does it identify a single moment at which recognition always occurs. It demonstrates instead that the neural processes associated with a particular visual categorisation task can develop remarkably rapidly.
The processes through which visual information becomes meaningful can unfold before conscious description has necessarily become stable or reportable.
Registration and recognition
These findings lead me to distinguish between registration and recognition.
By registration, I mean the point at which visual stimulation has become operative within the perceptual system. By recognition, I mean the point at which an observer can consciously identify or report what has been encountered.
I do not regard these as two fixed points on a universal clock. They describe different aspects of perception.
Registration may precede recognition. It may contribute to recognition. It may also remain distinct from stable recognition when a visual encounter is too brief, ambiguous, masked, or incomplete to become consciously identifiable.
A fleeting glimpse of a hill, for example, does not necessarily have to produce the immediate conscious thought, “I am seeing a hill.” The visual system may nevertheless respond to differences in light, colour, contrast, orientation, and spatial organisation.
I do not need to claim that the observer possesses a complete unconscious image of the hill. A more cautious proposition is that aspects of the visual encounter may become operative within perception before the observer can consciously identify the object as a whole.
This distinction is central to my understanding of Apeiron.
Sensory persistence
The distinction between registration and recognition is also important when considering sensory and iconic memory.
Iconic memory has traditionally been understood as a short-lived, relatively high-capacity form of visual memory associated with the temporary availability of visual information following stimulation. Visual working memory is generally understood as a more limited and selected form of storage that can maintain information for longer periods. Bradley and Pearson describe early visual memory as involving a transition between high-capacity, short-lived iconic memory and more limited visual working memory.⁴
Sperling’s foundational experiments demonstrated that observers could have access to more information from a briefly presented display than they could report when asked to reproduce the entire display. His findings suggested that a substantial amount of visual information could be briefly available before rapidly declining.⁵
This does not mean that the visual system preserves a complete unconscious photograph.
Iconic memory is fragile and susceptible to interference from subsequent visual information. The information initially available may therefore be altered, lost, or transformed rather than transferred intact into a permanent store.⁴
For my purposes, however, the important point is that visual stimulation does not necessarily cease to have perceptual consequences at exactly the moment the external stimulus disappears.
Something can therefore become perceptually operative without immediately becoming consciously recognisable.
The nano-liminal
This distinction is central to my use of the term nano-liminal.
I do not use nano-liminal as an established neuroscientific term. It belongs to my own phenomenological and painterly vocabulary. By it, I mean an extremely fine threshold at which something has entered perception without necessarily becoming consciously identifiable.
The term allows me to describe a condition that I believe is important to painterly practice without presenting the term itself as a scientific finding.
A brief encounter with a hill does not necessarily produce the immediate conscious thought, “I am seeing a hill.” The visual system may nevertheless respond to differences in light, colour, contrast, orientation, and spatial organisation.
I do not need to claim that a complete unconscious image of the hill has been formed. A more cautious proposition is that aspects of the visual encounter may become operative within perception before the observer can consciously identify the object as a whole.
This is where the idea of residue becomes important.
Residue
I use the word residue in a phenomenological and artistic sense rather than as a claim that neuroscience has identified a literal residue corresponding to every visual encounter.
Residue describes, for me, a perceptual consequence whose precise origin may no longer be consciously recoverable.
It might involve sensory persistence, memory, association, later reconstruction, bodily response, or a combination of processes that cannot subsequently be separated with certainty.
I cannot scientifically demonstrate that a particular brushstroke originated from a particular neural event during a brief glimpse of a hill. I do not propose that a painting can provide such proof.
My proposition is more limited:
Painterly praxis may transform perceptual consequences whose origins are no longer fully accessible to conscious recollection.
This distinction between scientific evidence and artistic hypothesis is important.
Neuroscience can investigate the speed and conditions of visual processing, sensory persistence, recognition, and memory. It cannot establish that a particular painting contains an unconscious perceptual residue.
That is the territory of my own artistic and phenomenological inquiry.
Apeiron as a painterly field
Within Apeiron, I understand painterly praxis as a field in which perceptual consequences can become materially operative.
Apeiron is not a container holding unconscious photographs. It is a painterly field in which perception, memory, intention, accident, alteration, and material transformation can become entangled.
A visual encounter may be consciously remembered. Another may be partially remembered. Another may be reconstructed. Another may have no identifiable source.
These different conditions can nevertheless enter the same painterly process.
Underpainting can remain beneath later painting. A colour can be altered without being completely eliminated. A form can disappear and later become visible again. A mark can cease to be recognisable as an independent event while continuing to influence the structure of the surface.
The painting therefore does not have to preserve an identifiable chronology.
Different perceptual consequences can coexist materially.
This is what I mean when I say that Apeiron can integrate residue.
I am not claiming that an unconscious visual image has been stored intact within the painting. I am proposing that painterly practice can transform the consequences of seeing without requiring their origins to remain consciously identifiable.
Moon on the Midnight Hill
Moon on the Midnight Hill provides an example of this proposition.
Although its title identifies the moon and midnight, I understand the painting as also containing conditions associated with day. Object Painting freed me from the requirement to depict one fixed observational condition.
I do not need the painting to conform to a single state of light, atmosphere, or weather.
The painting can contain different perceptual conditions within the same surface.
Toward the middle right of the painting, a series of clouds has been both underpainted and overpainted. These layers bring different atmospheric possibilities into relation.
Some traces remain visible. Others have become partially obscured. Others may no longer be recognisable as separate events at all.
The importance of these layers is not simply that one layer was painted before another. Rather, the surface carries the consequences of transformation.
The earlier configuration does not need to remain fully visible in order to have affected what came afterward.
This gives the idea of residue a material dimension.
The painting can preserve consequences without preserving a complete account of their origin.
Time and perceptual difference
My interest in the fleeting glance toward the hill does not depend upon assigning that glance a precise number of milliseconds.
The 13-millisecond experiments are useful because they demonstrate that extremely brief visual presentations can be investigated experimentally. They do not establish the complete phenomenology of every brief visual encounter.¹ ²
What interests me is the possibility of perceptual consequence without complete conscious recognition.
The eye receives light. The visual system responds. Features may become available to processing. The stimulus may disappear. Some information may remain temporarily available within sensory memory. Recognition may occur, may occur only partially, or may fail.
I am interested in what it means for the encounter to have consequences even when it does not become a conventional memory.
This is where my understanding of time becomes relevant.
For the purposes of this essay, I do not need to treat time as a substance through which perception travels. I use milliseconds as experimental measurements of relationships among physical stimulation, neural activity, behaviour, and perceptual performance.
When I refer to a 13-millisecond presentation, therefore, I am referring to an experimentally measurable condition, not to a metaphysical substance of perception.
Rather than understanding perception as travelling through a temporal container, I am interested in differences between perceptual states.
A stimulus is presented. The visual system responds. Information becomes available or remains unavailable. An observer identifies the stimulus or does not.
These relationships can be experimentally investigated without requiring me to adopt a particular metaphysical position about time.
For this reason, I understand the micro-phenomenology of seeing as beginning not in a literal temporal interval, but in the difference between registration and recognition.
Painting as a field of relations
This distinction also changes the way I understand Moon on the Midnight Hill.
I do not need to regard the painting as an accumulation of separate moments arranged chronologically. Instead, I understand the painting as a field in which different perceptual conditions have become materially related.
Day and night can coexist.
Different atmospheric conditions can coexist.
Underpainting and overpainting can coexist.
Recognition and uncertainty can coexist.
Memory and non-memory can coexist.
The image does not need to tell us which condition happened first. It can present their consequences together.
The painting therefore becomes neither a snapshot nor a chronological archive.
It becomes a field of perceptual relations.
This is particularly important to Apeiron. The indefinite does not have to mean that everything is vague. It can mean that the image is not forced to resolve every perceptual condition into a single fixed origin.
The cloud in Moon on the Midnight Hill interests me not because I can prove that it represents an unconscious glimpse. I cannot prove that.
It interests me because the cloud demonstrates how painterly material can retain consequences of transformation without retaining a fully recoverable account of its origin.
Something was painted.
It was altered.
Something remained.
Something disappeared.
Something became visible again.
The final image contains the consequences of these transformations even when the complete sequence cannot be reconstructed from the finished surface.
This provides a material analogy for the perceptual problem I am investigating.
A visual encounter can have consequences without becoming a fully recoverable conscious memory. Similarly, a painterly event can have consequences without remaining identifiable as a separate event within the completed image.
The relationship is not one of scientific equivalence.
It is an artistic analogy.
The central proposition
The central proposition of The Micro-Phenomenology of Seeing can therefore be stated simply:
Registration can precede stable recognition.
This does not mean that every brief visual stimulus becomes an unconscious image.
It does not mean that 13 milliseconds is a universal threshold for unconscious vision.
It does not mean that every painterly mark can be traced to a particular neural event.
It means that visual registration and conscious recognition can be distinguished as different aspects of a perceptual process.
This distinction creates a space for artistic inquiry.
A person may not be able to say, “I saw the hill,” while the visual system has nevertheless responded to aspects of the visual encounter.
What matters to my inquiry is not whether a complete unconscious picture of the hill exists somewhere within the brain. What matters is whether the encounter can have perceptual consequences without becoming fully available to conscious recognition.
If so, painting offers a particular material environment in which such uncertainty can become productive.
The painter may encounter a form that feels familiar without being able to identify its source. A colour may seem to belong to something seen although the source cannot be consciously recovered. A cloud may appear to have been seen before without belonging to any retrievable memory.
These experiences do not prove the existence of a hidden photographic archive.
They demonstrate instead the productive uncertainty through which painterly practice can operate.
The limits of the claim
This uncertainty is important to Apeiron.
Apeiron does not need to preserve a hidden image. It can preserve the possibility of consequence without recoverable origin.
The painting can carry what has affected perception without requiring that effect to remain consciously identifiable.
This is why I understand painterly praxis as more than the execution of an already formed image.
It is an encounter between material, perception, intention, memory, accident, and transformation.
The painter does not necessarily know the origin of every mark. The completed surface can contain relationships that were never consciously planned.
That does not prove that those relationships originated in unconscious visual processing.
It means that the painting can remain open to origins that cannot be completely recovered.
The micro-phenomenology of seeing therefore does not attempt to reduce perception to milliseconds. Nor does it attempt to prove that painting contains unconscious photographs.
It asks what becomes possible when registration is distinguished from recognition.
The scientific evidence provides a basis for this question. Visual processing can occur under extremely brief presentation conditions, and aspects of visual information can persist in short-lived forms of sensory memory.¹ ³ ⁴ At the same time, experimental work demonstrates that the interpretation of extremely brief visual presentations depends upon methodological conditions, including masking.²
My own proposition begins within this scientifically established uncertainty.
I suggest that there may be perceptual consequences that become operative without becoming fully available to conscious recognition.
I call the phenomenological threshold associated with this possibility nano-liminal.
I call the potentially continuing consequence of an encounter residue.
I understand Apeiron as the painterly field in which such consequences can be transformed without requiring their origins to remain consciously identifiable.
These terms are not offered as replacements for neuroscientific terminology. They belong to an artistic vocabulary developed to investigate a problem situated between perception, consciousness, material practice, and image-making.
Science and painting
Perhaps the most important distinction is therefore between what science demonstrates and what painting allows me to ask.
Science can investigate the speed and conditions of visual processing. It can measure neural responses. It can investigate sensory persistence and iconic memory. It can test what observers can detect, identify, remember, and report under controlled conditions.
Painting operates differently.
Painting can ask what it means for something to have become consequential without becoming consciously identifiable. It can preserve ambiguity. It can transform fragments. It can allow different perceptual conditions to coexist. It can materialise uncertainty without resolving it.
For this reason, I do not claim that Moon on the Midnight Hill scientifically proves the existence of nano-liminal visual residues.
Rather, the painting gives me a material language through which I can investigate the possibility.
The hill may be encountered.
Light may affect the visual system.
Features may become operative.
Recognition may or may not occur.
Something may remain consequential without becoming a conventional memory.
Painterly praxis can then transform that uncertainty into material form.
Conclusion
This is what I mean by The Micro-Phenomenology of Seeing.
Not the claim that the brain secretly stores every glimpse.
Not the claim that 13 milliseconds is a universal threshold for unconscious vision.
Not the claim that a particular brushstroke can be scientifically traced to a particular neural event.
Rather:
Registration can precede stable recognition.
Something can become operative within perception without becoming an explicit object of consciousness.
Painting can become a place where the consequences of that unresolved encounter acquire materiality.
In Apeiron, the image does not have to resolve perception into a single origin.
The moon can belong to midnight.
The atmosphere can contain the possibility of day.
The cloud can be both present and partially concealed.
The surface can contain traces whose origins are no longer recoverable.
The image can therefore hold together what conscious recognition might ordinarily separate.
Perhaps seeing does not begin when I can say, “I see.”
Perhaps the declaration “I see” is already a particular achievement of perception.
Before that declaration, there may be registration without stable recognition, consequence without recoverable origin, and visual information without a fully articulated object.
It is within this possibility that I locate Apeiron.
And it is there, at the uncertain distinction between registration and recognition, that I locate the micro-phenomenology of seeing.
How strange sight is.
How uncertain its registration.
And how remarkable that painting might give material form to what consciousness never fully managed to recognise.
References
Bradley, C., & Pearson, J. (2012). The sensory components of high-capacity iconic memory and visual working memory. Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 355. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00355
Maguire, J. F., & Howe, P. D. L. (2016). Failure to detect meaning in RSVP at 27 ms per picture. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 78, 1405–1413. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-016-1096-5
Potter, M. C., Wyble, B., Hagmann, C. E., & McCourt, E. S. (2014). Detecting meaning in RSVP at 13 ms per picture. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 76, 270–279.
Sperling, G. (1960). The information available in brief visual presentations. Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 74(11), 1–29.
Thorpe, S. J., Fize, D., & Marlot, C. (1996). Speed of processing in the human visual system. Nature, 381, 520–522. https://doi.org/10.1038/381520a0
