LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WE'VE BEEN PUBLISHED.

A good friend is sometimes, all you need. That good friend today is Carl Weiman, obscure scientist, and philanthropist extraordinaire. The mad man was kind enough to provide us with a review of the latest installment. Here it is, unabridged, in original form. We are proud to re-present the old soul window.










Dave Cook’s

“old soul window”, scanned painting/drawing

Review by Carl Weiman


Leonardo da Vinci observed that “The Eye is the Window of the Soul”, a beautiful metaphor that expresses both directions of the intimate flow our consciousness has with the outside world. We drink in the structure and beauty of our surroundings mainly through our vision, aiming it like a spotlight at the natural world. But communication goes in the other direction in face-to-face human contact. The self’s eye reads the intentions and emotions of the other’s eye as a window into the other’s soul, and of course vice versa. A huge distinction between us and animals is our sophisticated mental machinery for imagining and reflecting upon the mental states and intentions of our social counterparts. We build models of the people we are dealing with, and once crossing that boundary, models of their models of our models of …. etc. Inevitably then, we build models of ourselves for public presentation to be displayed in various roles according to our perception of the current stage. Negotiating a deal, convincing a partner or being convinced by one to take up an unexpected action, coercing a supplicant, pleading with a creditor, befriending a long-lost relative. Each has a different context and set of behaviors.

Neuroscientists have identified “mirror cells” in the brain which express these reflective functions of awareness. Sociopaths are purportedly diminished in this regard. All of the social activities of civilization including government, education, criminal justice, religion, art and agriculture involve intense reflective awareness of each other’s shifting roles within the hive of culture.

Mr. Cook’s work depicts the essence of the reflective frames of reference of the human soul, extracting away all content to lay naked the vessel and its unique nesting structure. Frames within frames, each an accurately proportioned image of its predecessor, but necessarily diminished and changed in small details by the subjective shrinking process. Like the successive images in the opposed mirrors of a barbershop. The simplicity of the frame shape and color, and absence of imagery within, focuses the viewer’s attention on the structure of the nesting, and puts the burden of responsibility for satisfaction of content-hunger directly on the viewer. The lack of hues emphasizes structure by eliminating any reliance on the color channel.

At the penultimate level, the spiral notebook is the outermost frame, startling the viewer with the fact that the regression is neither infinite nor anonymous. The artist is the ultimate outer frame, individual and idiosyncratic. All else is within his depicted imagination. But not quite! The ultimate framing level is the digitized image, conveniently used here as a method of communicating the image hundreds of miles away. But the with the side effects are that thousands can see it, and this image will remain intact long after the spiral notebook has disappeared.