Ambigrammia

• 10. As in any work of art, almost the entire creative process lies hidden beneath the surface.
• 16. Cheating of this sort, and of a myriad of other sorts, lies at the heart of the art of ambigrammia.
• 20. Is that first shape really a "D"? Is the final shape really an "E"? Such questions make it sound as if precise scientific determination is called for, but category membership is blurry and is influenced by context, and the nearby letters (or nearby shapes, to use a more neutral term) form a context in which each of these four shapes is perceived. Even if each shape taken in isolation is a somewhat shaky member of its intended alphabetic category, it's a different ballgame when all four are placed side by side, since now, the shaky alphabetic suggestion made by each one, supplemented by the prior existence of the familiar name "DAVE" results in each questionable part reinforcing all the other questionable parts, and the overall upshot is, mirabile dictu, a strong member of the higher-level "DAVE" category.
• 21. After all, written words, no less than letters are visual categories, and they too can have members and non-members, and dubious in-between cases.
• 28. Over the next fifty years (from 1920), experimentation with far-out letterforms continued apace, passionately exploring heretofore unimagined regions of alphabetic space.
• 35. A successful ambigram is an artwork delicately balanced on the knife-edge between creation and discovery. It is, on the one hand, a highly personal artistic invention, and yet it is, at the same time, a find that anyone could have made.
• 35. Well, no - I take it back - not anyone! That's the most important point here. In order to be a high-quality ambigram-discoverer, you must be able to see, in your mind's eye, a myriad of ways to distort letters while maintaining their identities, and all sorts of novel ways of breaking letters into pieces (or combining letters or letter-pieces into new wholes).... But no only imagination counts; also a reliable intuitive sense for designs that will probably "play in Peoria"... versus those designs that veer so far off into wild territory that their readability is lost. And lastly, a strong sense of esthetics is crusial - the ability to imbue a calligraphic design with a unified, appealing style.
• 35. Only someone who possesses all these skills will be able to see the beautiful metaphorical shell lying on the metaphorical beach, partially covered by drifts of metaphorical sand. Yes, the exotic shell is objectively there, lying in plain sight for "anyone" to see - but, ironically, very few people have the vision needed to recognize it.
• 35. Creativity as seeing.
• 36. I would argue that artistic creativity in general is nothing but selection - and for me photography reveals this truth more clearly than any other activity does.
• 40. Picasso: "In a flash, they joined together in my head. The idea of the bull's head came to me before I had a chance to think."
• 43. The seldom-noticed ambiguities lurking under nearly every stone in everyday language are similar to the potential ambiguities lurking in the letters making up each word and name we encounter - ambiguities that allow an ambigrammist to turn a word or phrase into an ambigram - but it takes a lot of practice to develop a sensitivity that allows one to "see" what is there (and always was there) but that goes unseen by nearly everyone.
• 54. But it's a specific type of imagination - one that involves stretching category boundaries left and reight. That is to say, violating norms left and right. And another term for norm-violation is cheating. That's the name of the game in ambigrammie - cheating left and right, cheating up and down, cheating across the board, cheating every which way.
• 55. The human perceptual system is vary forgiving - up to a point. It is forgiving because there are often many redundant clues as to category membership. If one clue is missing or is even severely contradicted, that may not matter, because othe clues can make up for its naughtiness.
• 57. Oscillation in ambigrams involves neither rotation nor reflection, but just a perceptual shift.
• 58. When reading, a human brain is doing two things at once - namely, reading letter and reading words. (I'm simplifying for the sake of clarity. The reading brain is doing many things at once, but that's not crucial for our purposed here.). When reading in a bottom-up fashion, you put letters together to hypothetize a word that contains them in the given order. Conversely, when reading in a top-down fashion, you perceive a word as a whole and hypothesize the existence of several constituent letters inside it.
• 58. But how could someone read a whole word without first having recognized the letters inside it? That sounds like nonsense. Indeed, it seems self-evident that when you read, you mentally put together strokes to see letters, then letters to see words, and then words to see phrases - in other words, you carry out perception from the bottom up, always moving from smaller visual elements to larger ones.
• 61. Your brain has a repertoire of visual concepts of words as wholes, and thanks to those higher-level expectations embedded in it, it often sees words faster than it can make out the letters that make them up. Moreover, your brain even has visual expectations for written language-chunks at levels higher (meaning larger) than that of words. See Scott Kim's boxed proverbs.
• 63. Your lifetime as a speaker of your native language has provided you with countless thousands of words, names, and phrases, and those are the concepts that embody your passive expectations.
• 75. A top-notch ambigram is one whose out-and-out cheating aroused no suspicion on the part of most viewers; it reads easily (hopefully instantly) in both directions, and merely seems to have some innocent little embellishments that add charm to it.
• 79. Terms like "read" or "readable" get very blurry. Is the red display above a genuine instance of the word "salsa"? Or is it merely very close to being one? Are the second and fifth shapes in the display actually "a"s?
• 83. To make ambigrams well, you have to develop a strong and reliable internalized Peoria, and you can develop such a model is and only if you regularly ask the opinions of viewers who feel have reactions that are typical of your larger and unseen intended audience.
• 85. Art is a spread-out social phenomenon. The lasting quality of a piece of art, or of an artist, is judged not by one person but by humanity as a whole, or at least by large chunks of humanity. A great work of art jibes with, and thereby reveals, a vein of receptivity in the collective human mind. Put more succinctly, great art is crowd-pleasing art.
• 85. Chopin wasn't playing for Peoria; it simply turned out that his music played in Peoria. To create deep art, you have to obey your own innermost artistic instincts, but those instincts have to be informed by the reactions of people you respect. In the end, it's a subtle balance between your own most private and personal taste and the external world's taste. That's why even Frédéric Chopin, child genius that he was, had to receive a high-quality musical education in order to become Chopin.
• 88. Ambigrammatical analogues to the famous duck/rabbit bistable image (or the Necker Cube).
• 97. Name or word familiarity is a crucial top down force constantly exploited in ambigrammia.
• 99. Ambigrammia forces you to concentrate on two different ways of looking at one thing. But since working on two levels at once is something that comes naturally to me, I feel justified in saying that these discoveries were made "on my own", not with artificial help.
• 99. No matter how many riffs you have concocted before, you find yourself continually confronted with novel challenges whose solutions inspire new discoveries, which you then add to your ever-growing repertoire of riffs. And what at one time was not you at all gradually becomes an intrinsic and permanent part of you.
• 111. All of these "strange fusion" examples exploit the idea that there is no sharp distinction between two separate shapes and a single shape. More generally, whenever one is dealing with a complex structure composed of parts, it is always a judgment call as to whether this is one thing, several things, or many things. It's no natural for us to perceive a fellow human being as an organized collection of dozens of organs, let alone as a collection of trillions of cells, not to mention as a collection of trillions of trillions of elementary particles, but any of those viewpoints is just as valid as the "natural" one. Is "AMBULANCE" one shape, two, nine, or more?
• 112. In this case ("quince pies") the disqualification comes from the fact that the ambiguity is not perceptual but conceptual; it requires some kind of abstract thinking. But where lies the boundary between percepts and concepts?
• 126. In Le Ton beau de Marot, I tried to bring readers around to my stance of placing form on an equal level with content, in poetry translation.
• In this "Schweiz, suisse, svizzera, switzerland" ambigram (is it one or is it a set of four?), there are confirming reverberations sloshing simultaneously upwards and downwards among three hierarchical levels - letters, words, and the four-word phrase. (There is actually a fourth and even finer level - that of pen-strokes.) The perceptual locking-in takes place ultra-quickly and totally unconsciously. Any act of perception involves a subtly mixture of bottom-up and top-down processing, and ambigrammia is all about exploiting that mixture.
• 141. Below the surface of any human decision you can probably find dozens of little forays into possibility space, all of them nudging the decider in one direction or another.
• 144. World knowledge comes in. Prior knowledge exerts a powerful top-down effect on how the mind unconsciously assigns a shape to a letter category. Long-time familiarity with the state name "Michigan" makes you read the outline of the state as a capital "I".
• 147. Phrases are to words as words are to letters. Some are very short, like "Thank you" and "Good luck" and "Merry Christmas"; some are frequent sentences, like "I don't know" and "I see your point"; some are famous expressions from literature, like "To be or not to be" and "Let there be light"; some are idioms and proverbs; some are book titles, movie titles, song titles... Each of these thousands of items that you know like the back of your hand is an abstract visual category in you mind.
• 148. The phrase "We all live in a yellow submarine" exists in your mind and in the minds of millions of people around the globe. It's there as a chunk, and it can readily be triggered by a visual stimulus.
• 153. How can one consciously take into account all the myriads of unconscious pressures due to both category membership and esthetics?
• 153. I don't pay attention to all those pressure consciously. I do a bit of it consciously, but most of the work takes place behind the scenes. Or to put it more accurately, I did it in my youth, while I was training myself to write this way and not that way. It was done during my period of a million mistakes! When I was in elementary school, I made all sorts of elementary mistakes, and I made higher-level mistakes when I was in high school, and so forth. Now I'm much older and I still make plenty of mistakes - there's no doubt of that - but they're at a yet higher level.
• 154. To internalize other people's eyes is extremely tricky and takes years of practice. But no matter how much practice you have at judging legibility, you can never be sure of your judgment.
• 155. ...there was no precise goal that I was trying to reach...
• 161. This kind of jumping back and forth is typical of my modus operandi (and maybe of everyone's) in artistic creation - one idea triggers another; which then feeds back into and modifies the idea that gave rise to it - and around and around in a virtuous circle this process can go, eventually converging on a stable final creation.
• 162. There's no exact answer to most counting questions ("How many towns are in Italy?", "How many friends do you have?"); it all comes down to how you assign things to categories.
• 163. Even if some of its letters are hard to make out on their own, that's a red herring; its letters are not on their own, but are together. That's the nature of ambigrams; letters are grouped inside structures, so there's a resonance between the whole and its parts - the parts suggest a whole, and the whole confirms the parts.
• 164. In perception we are influenced by stimuli coming at us on many levels.
• 199. ...about how certain parts of words are far more important for legibility than other parts are; about the unconscious expectations generated by a lifetime of exposure to zillions of letters, words, names, phrases, typefaces, ads, and styles of handwriting; about the ineffable holy trinity of Grace, Elegance, Beauty...
• 234. Emmy Noether's theorem states that to every continuous symmetry of the laws of physics there is a related quantity that is conserved, an idea that stunned the world when she discovered it. Thus:
  • That the laws of physics are time-invariant (they don't change as time passes) implies that energy is conserved.
  • That they are translation-invariant (they don't vary as you move from place to place) implies momentum is conserved.
  • That they are rotation-invariant (they don't depend on one's orientation in space) implies that angular momentum is conserved.
• 255. All serious researchers in physics are always driven by their unconscious esthetic tastes; taste is in fact the principle determinant of what they find promising, interesting, or believable.
• 275. Actually, hallucination is a standard ingredient of the normal act of reading, and it takes place surprisingly frequently in reading-aloud. The kind of unconscious substitution error, which we all commit sometimes, comes from having a rich associative network, including an immense amount of world knowledge. An in ambigrams, such acts of perceptual hallucination not only are allowed, they are constantly needed.
• 279. Maybe 300 hours of work, with roughly one decision taking place per second, yields about one million decisions for making the ambigrams of the 50 state capitals.
• 285. In the white heat of creation, it felt as if the idea of semicircles came to me, not from me, and out of nowhere.
• 285. The final polished piece is the outcome of thousands of microscopic decisions, most of which I was unaware of even as I made them.