“If you change your point of view, you will see something new.” ~ Dad

Who better to help me test my father’s maxim and our ideas of perception than photographer Jason Horowitz?

Listen to Choose to be Curious #71: Point of View with Photographer Jason Horowitz

Walking and looking with Jason was a lot like talking and listening with Jocelyn Frank, a journalist and sound artist.

Both Jocelyn and Jason embody what researchers Jacqueline Gottlieb and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer call “sampling and search.” They wrote in the cover story to Nature Reviews Neuroscience:

In natural behaviour, animals actively interrogate their environments using endogenously generated ‘question-and-answer’ strategies. … We review evidence that both sampling and search depend on individual preferences over cognitive states, including attitudes towards uncertainty, learning progress and types of information. We propose that [they] generate curiosity-driven investigations in large, open environments in which rewards are sparse and ex ante unknown.

That is, we undertake these explorations even when the rewards can’t be known in advance – but I think we do know there will be rewards.

I think that’s what motivates artists like Jason and Jocelyn.

Listen to Curiosity to Go, Ep. 44: Stop. Look. Listen.

Learning as I was from Jason, I decided to take on one of his assignments: make x different pictures in your kitchen, where x is some breathtakingly large number. I decided 100 was suitably daunting and over the course of three days I spent a good deal  of time looking around my kitchen with fresh eyes.

Here’s some of what I saw. For the full collection, visit my Gallery, Kitchen Edition.

To see more of Jason’ work, visit Jason Horowitz Fine Art.

Check out Jocelyn Frank’s work here. 

Jacqueline Gottlieb and Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, in Nature Reviews Neuroscience.

Theme music & “Coyote Kid” by Sean Balick. Thanks to Jackie Steven for sound recording in the cold!

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