Can eye get a witless?

Guanyin blesses the New Year of Ox 2021
“Good Propitious, Health, Happy-吉祥安康幸福！”

Alokiteshvara (India), the self-born eternal Buddha Amitabha who is the compassion of all Buddhas may artistically be represented as male or female. Avalokiteshvara is also known as Guanyin in China,  Kannon in Japan, Chenrezig in Tibet, and Karunamaya in Nepal. 
The Heart Sutra is Avalokiteshvara  explaining the fundamental emptiness to Sariputra, a disciple of the Shakyamuni Buddha.
Drawing of Guanyin by Janney

At Sensoji (temple) in Asakusa, Tokyo, dedicated to Kannon, early in the morning local residents volunteer to keep the temple grounds clean.

Before reaching the temple is an incense burner where pilgrims can expose their ailing body parts to the smoke of healing incense. I don’t know any scientific knowledge which would support the efficacy but they do it all day, at the least it must be fun.

Visitors make a lot of photographs here; enabling people to make creative quality images was one of the visions of Steve Jobs. Everywhere people carry a personal computer around with them, who cares that is not running Word or a Excel or taking inventory, people like the small computer-phone.

Art it fun, We1 enjoy it. Would you think a man who is a murderer and also a father enjoys taking selfies with his child? Should God allow murderers to enjoy happiness? I don’t sit around and wonder about this all day, Who am I to tell God what to do? But my guess would be that murderers often enjoy being with their children and that if God wanted to prevent them from feeling happiness God would do it, or have done it at the beginning. Or how about in-between?

Alameda Creek

Sometimes it seems easy to confuse a medium’s technical qualities with an artist’s style. Like any graphic art, a photograph has its own unique technical qualities which the eye identifies by feeling—categorizes and classifiess without thinking. Technique generally has a protocol, a standard, which the eye can “feel.” When this happens the eye feels its a photograph, or a silk screen, an etching, or a tree or a house, a blade of grass, etc and the brain moves onto the content. It finishes by giving it a name and judgement.—Its danger!, its a joke. its the right moment . . .. To know something by feeling.

The eye sees what it is, and then later the brain tells you what it is. Sometimes the eye is confused and unwilling to admit the image, it may ask:
“Is this a real thing? I cannot find a match to any of the categories of things in the universe that this brain knows.

If known things can not fit, the eye declares an alarm to the brain—what is this? Think of this as visual tension. The experience of visual art usually begins with a visual tension/attraction, especially in advertising, which works to attract the eye like rubber necking on the highway attracts almost everyone and forces the others into line.

Sometimes a style can be a violation of the standard which the artist has used as a technique. In “standard photography” people expect to see “reality,” or a violation of the reality standard which is some kind of artistic statement.

Its not just black or white, there is continuum between first seeing and judging which seems like it is traversed in instant time because this human ability to respond is what it means to know some thing. What we know is more easily measured by our automatic responses which act naturally than our brain which requires human skill to use or measure.

Unfortunately our “natural knowledge” is based on our perception of experiences. Things change, and those conditions of the situation of those experiences have changed which can make the knowledge no longer applicable. All the time we are learning, and later discarding age appropriate behaviors.

Photographs can have different kinds of information and generally people are comfortable with that. With words for example, (words as things) which can have variable meanings we learn to moderate the literal meaning to fit the situation—“I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.” In the same way we learn to moderate our experiences with photographs.

One of the features of the photographic process is its ability to express continuous tone. Most pre-digital printing techniques needed halftones to express the photograph, but electrical media only needs light on a surface —but a different kind of media surface. As ink needs paper electric information needs it own kind of surfaces.

The film and ink image printed on paper needs the printer to bring the paper to the printing press and later to deliver the paper to the reader. The digital image can go to wherever the printer is, can be printed by many different printers inlay different locations and in the case of the cell phone, the printer may be personal property of the reader (the cell phone screen) which makes the person available anywhere and anytime . . .

. . . as long as there is electricity. Then, there are always Plan B, Oracle Bones from the Shang.

End Pieces

Real and fake people come together along the river in Asakusa.

Real and fake people again, , but if you consider the boys in the advertising photo as Fake then what about the whole image itself Is not it all fake people? A photograph is not a real person but in this image we can sort out levels of Fake people, some are more Fake than others, we understand that the photo is a Fake image of real people standing in front of Fake people.

What difference does seeing this image make in my life. I will never see this girl again, she will never have seen me . In a photograph, the subject—the photographer and the object come together as one.

Are these moments of my life, the life of the person in the photo, or the moment of the two of us interacting together, never to come together again. Most of these images are not answers but questions about is being seen. Maybe I saw something, pointed the camera, clicked the shutter, and just maybe got a lucky moment.

Perservance landed on Mars and we communicated through photographs. Here are two photographs used for communication between people and Perservance. The first is a “regular human sensitive photograph”;

The second is a visual map for Perseverance plotting the danger risks for landing locations. Two images of the same place do not appear the same to the human eye while enabling precise communication between men and machines.

People have five senses and technology enables us to extend those five sensual capabilities—as quantitative extensions of a specific quality. Can we create a technology which enables us to experience a qualitatively different sense? How would we know it? Only through the technology?
And if that technology was digital, we would need electricity to use it . So if we ever established a relationship with “life from another dimension” using electric technology and then lost access to electricity!! What would happen.

How often do we do what we want to do. Is what we want to do worthy of being done? Is satisfied with everyday doing some stuff that is not satisfying, as well as doing some stuff that is satisfying satisfying enough or do we do it anyway.

Did the Universe create human beings to study itself, to see what its made of, so to speak. Suppose suddenly you are aware you are the Universe, You don’t know your history and as you evolve you are trying to learn more about yourself, or you evolve because you are trying to learn more about yourself and evolving human beings increasingly speeds that up process.

The Universe is trying to find out who it is, or what it is or even when it is, who wants to even try What is it?
Or, perhaps its seen its own death and is trying to stop it.
Wonder? Did the Universe create itself to fail?
Or did it just create itself.

It seems people have many questions which cannot be answered but if they seek an answer they will often find one, kind of the place where religion fits into human society. Why do we have questions for which we have answers? Is something wrong with our language that we have words to make questions but sometimes there no words to make answers.

Krishna and Radha—Try this, question, Why did Krishna and Radha never marry?

What happens when you compare Buddha, Krishna, Avalokiteshvara and Daruma,? Is it better to have some Gods or one God? In Tokyo there many shrines, temples, and many small shrines. Many people in Tokyo do not have cars, they often walk past, or cut through, temples and shrines. Sometimes they stop, others may just bow their head as they pass through, but their daily lives ar imbedded.

Erasing hard drives will become like book burning.