I was looking for things outside to write this blog on when I realized I had a picture on my wall that was perfect for this project. First I want to go into a little bit of the rule that this picture goes with. The global superiority effect causes us to see the whole object that a picture is portraying rather than the small parts of it that make it up. The properties of the whole object take precedence over the properties of parts of the object. This is also referred to as the con figural superiority effect which says that for any complex visual stimuli such as faces, they are easier to be recognized than the individual parts presented in isolation. How far away you are from the object has a lot to do with the way that you perceive it. One example we saw of this was the picture of Marilyn Monroe, but if you were up close it looked like another person. The picture that I have on my wall is a photo mosaic of Bob Marley. The picture is made up of thousands of tiny pictures of different events that happened over his life in order to make up the whole picture which is a poster of his face. If you are standing right against the picture you can see all of the tiny little pictures and have no idea that it actually makes a big picture out of all of them. If you stand back you can’t really even tell that there are thousands of tiny pictures, but it just looks like a photo of Bob Marley. You can find examples of these on google images, but I couldn’t really see the smaller pictures inside of the big picture on the computer screen.
4 thoughts on “Global Superiority”
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Collages have always been used to tell stories that cannot be told with just one object in an image. Your Bob Marley poster is a great example of that. The thousands of lives he touched, the songs he wrote, and shows he performed are all important parts of his life, therefore a collage of these events meshed together to form an image of him is extremely necessary. This is a good discussion topic because it leaves me thinking, are there collages out there that we only see and comprehend as a single image? I feel as though we could even refer to a image of the world as an example; millions of miles and hundreds of countries come together in order to form one image, and if we were to zoom in, we would see all the differences and boundaries between the vast lands that the earth consists of. What other “collages” do you think are out there that we have not noticed as such?
I thought this was an interesting post. In high school, we did an art project on pointillism, which the Bob Marley poster that was being discussed reminded me of. Pointillism is when you take individual dots of different shades or colors in order to make a whole picture. We used ink dots in order to make the faces of celebrities. Thinking about it now, this is also an example of global superiority. If you stand very close to these images, all you can see is a cluster of dots that don’t really make much of anything. However, when you stand farther away, you tend to not see the dots as dots at all, but experience the face (or whatever the picture is of) as a whole. Even though this is such a simple effect, it can completely change your perspective of images that are composed of individual components depending on you’re distance away from it, or even just your experience with it in general.
I thought this was an interesting post as well. I never really thought much about the Global Superiority Effect until we learned about it in class. I think a similar example would be if you were to zoom in into a picture in a digital camera. You would see pixels that would not really have any significance on their own. However, if you zoom out again, you see only the whole picture and the individual pixels disappear in the picture. I think it’s actually amazing that our brain knows that it needs to pay more attention to the overall scene and focus less on the details. It makes me wonder if this is some sort of evolutionary advantage. When our ancestors were hunters, focusing on the whole scene instead of the details of scene could have possibly helped them catch their prey better. In any case, because we learned this concept in class, I am more aware of it when I see an example of it.
I think that it’s really neat that you discussed the relativities involved in the poster. Often times throughout art and design, these mosaics are demonstrated to visualize something that is more than what it represents or appears to be at first. If you think about the idea of this, its actually quite unique, because these photos are micro-components of a greater magnitude that represent something very simple. The appearance of an average person walking down the street for example; can look or represent something completely different than what we originally believed. This usually occurs at a greater distance and as that individual slowly gets closer, that individual will now begin to represent something different from the initial perceived image (person). These similarities between humans and images (posters/mosaics) can be analyzed in a variety of ways. Therefore, just the simple thought of how a poster can capture the process of an individual and be able or capable of encompassing the qualities and emotions within, is beyond exceptional. Great discussion topic and post!