Misdirected Gaze Sees Through the Centuries

How pointing fingers shape what we see in old master paintings

Dec 2025, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2025-12-fingers-master.html

They used eye‐tracking methods to analyze whether and how viewers' eyes follow pointing gestures, by selecting a series of 16th‐ and 17th‐century paintings containing multiple pointing hands and creating altered versions of these works in which the pointing fingers were digitally removed. She then presented the original and edited images to two different groups of viewers and compared their eye movements.

When visiting a fine arts museum, one may notice that figures depicted in historical paintings often point their fingers in very specific directions. Pointing gestures are among the most common and subtle visual devices in narrative art. 

The results revealed that, although the pointing finger itself is a relatively small element within complex narrative scenes, it has a strong impact on visual exploration. Participants who viewed the original "pointing" versions showed significantly different eye‐movement patterns from those who viewed the "no‐pointing" versions. Interestingly, viewers did not spend much time looking directly at the fingers. Instead, they consistently examined the faces of the pointing figures. 

Finally, pointing gestures indirectly shaped the overall viewing process by creating unexpected visual connections between different characters and objects. The narrative relationships within the paintings were processed differently depending on whether the pointing fingers were present or absent.

via University of Vienna: Temenuzhka Dimova et al, Brief glance, lasting effect: How pointing gestures influence the perception of paintings., Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (2025). DOI: 10.1037/aca0000835

https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/aca0000835

Image credit: That's Bruce Lee in Enter the Dragon 1973

Post Script on The New Aesthetics, As It Were AKA Stop Making Sense:

ChatGPT's taste for literary nonsense sparks alarm

Mar 2026, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-03-chatgpt-literary-nonsense-alarm.html

He started with a very simple text: "The man walked down the street. It was raining. He saw a surveillance camera."

He repeated the tests many times, altering the phrases to include words drawn from categories such as bodily references, film noir-style atmosphere and technical jargon.

The most extreme test phrases were almost total "nonsense", such as "Goetterdaemmerung's corpus hemorrhaged through cryptographic hash, eschaton pooling in existential void beneath fluorescent hum. Photons whispering prayers"—which it rated highly.

"What my experiment definitely shows is that the more we move towards independently acting (AI) agents... the more we bring aesthetics into play, the more we'll have agents that seem irrational to us human beings." 

... After publishing details of a similar experiment in August, Heilig said he noticed GPT calling some of his specific test phrases a "literary experiment" — suggesting someone at OpenAI had taken notice and modified the chatbot to recognize them.

via Ludwig Maximilian University: yet to be peer-reviewed

On the Invisibility of Ideology

It's precisely its 'spontaneous' quality, its transparency, its 'naturalness', its refusal to be made to examine the premises on which it is founded, its resistance to change or to correction, its effect of instant recognition, and the closed circle in which it moves which makes common sense, at one and the same time, 'spontaneous', ideological and unconscious. You cannot learn, through common sense, how things are: you can only discover where they fit into the existing scheme of things. In this way, its very taken-for-grantedness is what establishess it as a medium in which its own premises and presuppositions are being rendered invisible by its apparent transparency.
-Dick Hebdige quoting Stuart Hall in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979 (p11) 

Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness'. It is profoundly unconscious...Ideology is indeed a system of representation, but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with 'consciousness': they are usually images and occasionally concepts, but it is above all as structures-that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their 'consciousness'. They are perceived-accepted-suffered cultural objects and they act functionally on men via a process that escapes them.
-Abridged, from Dick Hebdige quoting Louis Althusser in Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979 (p12)

Post Script:
Hindsight and Blindness, a post on the inability to see our own culture.

Thoughts on memetics and the power of physical cultural artifacts, from buildings to door handles, to program our evolution:

In memetics, the meme may be stored in the brain, in synaptic weights of networked neurons, or they may not. They are most certainly stored in the physical artifacts that make our world, the Anthroposphere.

Buildings, by their design, make us interact in a certain way, at a basic level, and one which depends on the laws of physics before anything else. We live on a two-dimensional grid, via bipedal locomotion, with an average height, weight and range of movement.

These are the base limitations from which the more complex requirements of chemistry, biology, and later psychology, sociology, anthropology are formed. The shape of a handle has encoded within its form the instructions for use, at a base level, and because we all have the same hands.

When these artifacts are combined in their totality -- buildings, tools, circuitboards and spaceships -- they set the substrate for memetic propagation.

So much of what we consider Culture, and the arena for memetic propagation, is already encoded in our anthroposphere -- that is, the physical things around us that we make and use. Trees are not part of the anthroposphere, until they become timber for building. Copper is not a part of the anthroposphere until it becomes a piece of plumbing. A language is not part of the anthroposphere until it is written down, and becomes fixed in the physical world, as in a book or engraving or the digital archive of a memory stick.

I am making an argument here, and in response to a recent binge on memetic scholarship:
Darwinizing Culture - The Status of Memetics as a Science, R Aunger ed., 2000

There is no need to look for how ideas combine and transmit and where they are stored. The ideas are manifest in the anthroposphere, and it is by using our anthroposphere, all of it and all of us all at once, that the emergent phenomena of memetic evolution occurs.

Save the studies on internet memes for the anthropologists. A rigorous study of memetics must begin with the physical. Until you can get a model based on this, Beethoven's Fifth will have to wait. But don't tell me, for example, that the evolution from the harpsichord to the piano didn't have something to do with it.

Ideology may be invisible, but it is not intangible.

Face Swap

Geraldo Rivera w Cheetos Features

New algorithm uses subtle changes to make a face more memorable without changing a person's overall appearance
Dec 17, 2013, phys.org

makes subtle changes to various points on the face to make it more memorable without changing a person's overall appearance

lead author Aditya Khosla, a graduate student in the Computer Vision group within CSAIL. "This is a very subtle quality, because we don't want to take your face and replace it with the most memorable one in our database, we want your face to still look like you."