TITLE: Reviewing a Career Studying Camouflage
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 09, 2009 10:04 PM
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A few years ago I blogged when my university colleague
Roy Behrens
won a faculty excellence award in his home College
of Humanities and Fine Arts. That entry,
Teaching as Subversive Inactivity,
taught me a lot about teaching, though I don't yet
practice it very well. Later, I blogged about
A Day with Camouflage Scholars,
when I had the opportunity to talk about how a
technique of computer science, steganography, related
to the idea of camouflage as practiced in art and the
military. Behrens is an internationally recognized
expert on camouflage who organized an amazing one-day
international conference on the subject here at my
humble institution. To connect with these scholars,
even for a day, was a great thrill. Finally, I
blogged about
Feats of Association
when Behrens gave a mesmerizing talk illustrating
"that the human mind is a connection-making machine,
an almost unwilling creator of ideas that grow out
of the stimuli it encounters."
As you can probably tell, I am a big fan of Behrens
and his work. Today, I had a new chance to hear
him speak, as he gave a talk associated with his
winning another award, this time the university's
Distinguished Scholar Award. After hearing this
talk, no one could doubt that he is a worthy
recipient, whose omnivorous and overarching interest
in camouflage reflects a style of learning and
investigation that we could all emulate. Today's
talk was titled "Unearthing Art and Camouflage"
and subtitled my research on the fence between
art and science. It is a fence that more of
us should try to work on.
The talk wove together threads from Roy's study of
the history and practice of camouflage with bits
of his own autobiography. It's a style I enjoyed
in
Kurt Vonnegut's
Palm Sunday and have appreciated at least
since my freshman year in college, when in an
honors colloquium at Ball State University I was
exposed to the idea of history from the point of
view of the individual. As someone who likes
connections, I'm usually interested in how
accomplished people come to do what they do and
how they make the connections that end up shaping
or even defining their work.
Behrens was in the first generation of his family
to attend college. He came from a small Iowa town
to study here at UNI, where he first did research
in the basement of the same Rod Library where I
get my
millions.
He held his first faculty position here, despite
not having a Ph.D. or the terminal degree of
discipline, an M.F.A. After leaving UNI, he earned
an M.A. from the Rhode Island School of Design.
But with a little lucky timing and a publication
record that merited consideration, he found his
way into academia.
From where did his interest in camouflage come?
He was never interested in military, though he
served as a sergeant in the Vietnam-era Marine
Corps. His interest lay in art, but he didn't
enjoy the sort of art in which subjective tastes
and fashion drove practice and criticism. Instead,
he was interested in what was "objective, universal,
and enduring" and as such was drawn to design and
architecture. He and I share an interest in the
latter; I began mu undergraduate study as an
architecture major. A college professor offered
him a chance to do undergraduate research, and
his result was a paper titled "Perception in the
Visual Arts", in which he first examined the
relationship between the art we make and the
science that studies how we perceive it. This
paper was later published in major art education
journal.
That project marked his first foray into perceptual
psychology. Behrens mentioned a particular book that
made an impression on him, Aspects of Form,
edited by Lancelot Law Whyte. It contained essays
on the "primacy of pattern" by scholars in both the
arts and the sciences. Readers of this blog know of
my deep interest in patterns, especially in software
but in all domains. (They also know that I'm a
library junkie and won't be surprised to know that
I've already borrowed a copy of Whyte's book.)
Behrens noted that it was a short step from "How
do people see?" to "How are people prevented from
seeing?" Thus began what has been forty years of
research on camouflage. He studies not only the
artistic side of camouflage but also its history
and the science that seeks to understand it. I was
surprised to find that as a RISD graduate student
he already intended to write a book on the topic.
At the time, he contacted
Rudolf Arnheim,
who was then a perceptual psychologist in New York,
with a breathless request for information and
guidance. Nothing came of that request, I think,
but in 1990 or so Behrens began a fulfilling
correspondence with Arnheim that lasted until his
death in 2007. After Arnheim passed away, Behrens
asked his family to send all of his photos so that
Behrens could make copies, digitize them, and then
return the originals to the family. They agreed,
and the result is a complete digital archive of
photographs from Arnheim's long professional life.
This reminded me of Grady Booch's interest in
preservation, both of the works of Dijkstra and
of the
great software architectures
of past and present.
While he was at RISD, Behrens did not know that the
school library had 455 original "dazzle" camouflage
designs in its collection and so missed out on the
opportunity to study them. His ignorance of these
works was not a matter of poor scholarship, though;
the library didn't realize their significance and
so had them uncataloged on a shelf somewhere. In
2007, his graduate alma mater contacted him with
news of the items, and he has now begun to study
them, forty years later.
As grad student, Behrens became in interested in the
analogical link between (perceptual) figure-ground
diagrams and (conceptual) Venn diagrams. He
mentioned another book that helped him make this
connection, Community and Privacy, by Serge
Chermayeff and Christopher Alexander, whose diagrams
of cities and relationships were Venn diagrams.
This story brings to light yet another incidental
connection between Behrens's work and mine.
Alexander is, of course, the intellectual forebear
of the software patterns movement, through his later
books Notes On The Synthesis Of Form,
The Timeless Way Of Building, A Pattern
Language, and The Oregon Experiment.
UNI hired Behrens in 1972 into a temporary position
that became permanent. He earned tenure and, fearing
the lack of adventure that can come from settling
down to soon, immediately left for the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He worked there ten years and
earned his tenure anew. It was at UW-M where he
finally wrote the book he had begun planning in
grad school. Looking back now, he is embarrassed by
it and encouraged us not to read it!
At this point in the talk, Behrens told us a little
about his area of scholarship. He opened with a
meta-note about research in the era of the world wide
web and Google. There are many classic papers and
papers that scholars should know about. Most of
them are not yet on-line, but one can at least find
annotated bibliographies and other references to
them. He pointed us to one of his own works,
Art and Camouflage: An Annotated Bibliography,
as an example of what is now available to all on
the web.
Awareness of a paper is crucial, because it turns out
that often we can find it in print -- even in the
periodical archives of our own libraries! These
papers are treasures unexplored, waiting to be
rediscovered by today's students and researchers.
Camouflage consists of two primary types. The first
is high similarity, as typified by
figure-ground blending in the arts and mimicry in
nature. This is the best known type of camouflage
and the type most commonly seen in popular culture.
The second is high difference, or what is
often called figure disruption. This sort of
camouflage was one of the important lessons of World
War I. We can't make a ship invisible, because the
background against which it is viewed changes
constantly. A British artist named Norman Wilkinson
had the insight to reframe the question: We are
not trying to hide a ship; we are trying to prevent
the ship from being hit by a torpedo!
(Redefining one problem in terms of another is a
standard technique in computer science. I remember
when I first encountered it as such, in a graduate
course on computational theory. All I had to do
was find a mapping from a problem to, say,
3-SAT,
and -- voilá! -- I knew a lot about it.
What a powerful idea.)
This insight gave birth to dazzle camouflage, in
which the goal came to be break an image into
incoherent or imperceptible parts. To protect a
ship, the disruption need not be permanent; it
needed only to slow the attackers sufficiently that
they were unable to target it, predict its course,
and launch a relatively slow torpedo at it with any
success.
Behrens offered that there is a third kind of
camouflage, coincident disruption, that is
different enough to warrant its own category.
Coincident disruption mixes the other two types,
both blending into the background and disrupting
the viewer's perception. He suggested that this may
well be the most common form of camouflage found in
nature using the Gabon viper, pictured here, as one
of his examples of natural coincident disruption.
Most of Behrens' work is on modern camouflage, in
the 20th century, but study in the area goes back
farther. In particular, camouflage was discussed in
connection to Darwin's idea of natural selection.
Artist Abbott Thayer was a preeminent voice on
camouflage in the 19th century who thought and wrote
on both blending and disruption as forms in nature.
Thayer also recommended that the military use both
forms of camouflage in combat, a notion that generated
great controversy.
In World War I, the French ultimately employed 3,000
artists as "camoufleurs". The British and Americans
followed suit on a smaller scale. Behrens gave a
detailed history of military camouflage, most of
which was driven by artists and assisted by a smaller
number of scientists. He finds World War II's
contributions less interesting but is excited by
recent work by biologists, especially in the UK,
who have demonstrated renewed interest in natural
camouflage. They are using empirical methods and
computer modeling as ways to examine and evaluate
Thayer's ideas from over a hundred years ago.
Computational modeling in the arts and sciences --
who knew?
Toward the end of his talk, Behrens told several
stories from the "academic twilight zone", where
unexpected connections fall into the scholar's lap.
He called these the "unsung delights of researching".
These are stories best told first hand, but they
involved a spooky occurrence of Shelbyville, Tennessee,
on a pencil he bought for a quarter from a vending
machine, having the niece and nephew of Abbott Thayer
in attendance at a talk he gave in 1987, and buying
a farm in Dysart, Iowa, in 1992 only then to learn
that Everett Warner, whom he had studied, was born
in Vinton, Iowa -- 14 miles away. In the course of
studying a topic for forty years, the strangest of
coincidences will occur. We see these patterns
whether we like to or not.
Behrens's closing remarks included one note that
highlights the changes in the world of academic
scholarship that have occurred since he embarked
on his study of camouflage forty years ago. He
admitted that he is a big fan of Wikipedia and has
been an active contributor on pages dealing with
the people and topics of camouflage. Social
media and web sites have fundamentally changed
how we build and share knowledge, and increasingly
they are being used to change how we do research
itself -- consider the
Open Science
and
Polymath
projects.
Today's talk was, indeed, the highlight of my week.
Not only did I learn more about Behrens and his work,
but I also ended up with a couple of books to read
(the aforementioned Whyte book and Kimon Nicolaïdes's
The Natural Way to Draw), as well as a
couple of ideas about what it would mean for software
patterns to hide something. A good way to spend an
hour.
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