Light rays traveling from an object to the eye through the atmosphere are bent up or down depending upon whether the density of air increases upward or downward. The result can be a desert mirage, an arctic mirage or the fata morgana which is a combination of both types.

Just as cold snow differs from hot sand, arctic mirages differ from those of desert regions.

Desert mirages result from the heating of air overlying a warm surface; the hot sand. In a desert mirage objects appear to be lower than they actually are. Also, the image is inverted top for bottom.

Just the opposite happens in an arctic mirage because it results from the existence of relatively cold air next to the ground surface. That cold layer exists because the cold snow, ice or water surface extracts heat from the air just above. In the arctic mirage a distant object appears right way up but higher up than the actual location.

Though arctic and desert mirages seem to be quite different, they share a common fundamental cause. It is that light rays passing from an object through air to an observer always refract (bend) in the direction of increasing air density.

In a "normal" atmosphere, air is less dense the higher up above the earth's surface. Consequently, light rays traveling horizontally over the earth's surface actually bend downward as though trying to follow the curved surface. For this reason one sees distant mountains that actually are below the horizon that one would see if light truly traveled in straight lines in the atmosphere.

If the earth's surface is hot, it heats the air just above, making the air there less dense than air higher up. Consequently light rays traversing such a region bend upward causing false lakes and inverted mountains to appear just above the apparent ground surface. These images tend to dance or otherwise change rapidly since dense air above lighter air is too unstable to remain static.

Contrasting with this instability is the steadiness of an air mass which is coldest at the bottom, the condition creating the arctic mirage. Especially over cold ocean areas, the air density can change with altitude so rapidly that the horizon appears to lift up like the edges of a saucer. Coastlines normally well below the horizon are raised up into view.

Early Norsemen called these mirages hillingars. The hillingar effect may well have contributed to the Norse discoveries of Iceland and Greenland, according to the suggestion of H.L. Sawatzky and W. H. Lehn, writing in the June 25, 1976 issue of Science magazine.

The hillingar even has an Alaskan connection in the form of a lodging house, the Captain Bartlett Inn in Fairbanks. The inn is named after Captain John Bartlett who seems to hold the distance record for seeing objects below the horizon with the aid of the hillingar effect. His ship, the Effie. N. Morrissey, was located more than 500 km (300 miles) away from Iceland one day in 1939 when Captain Bartlett spotted one of the Icelandic mountains.

Sometimes, complex mirages called fate morganas are seen in conditions transitional between those favorable for desert mirages and arctic mirages. The fate morgana mirage may consist of a double image of an object, one image inverted, the other right side up. These appear frequently in broad valleys such as Alaska's Tanana Valley where temperature inversions and complex air layering are common.

Arctic Mirage (Hillingar)
Article #347

by T. Neil Davis

The Pierley/Redford Dissociative Affect Diagnostic

You can't take one imaginary dimension, plus another imaginary dimension and get a real dimension.

Check out David Spriggs and Xia Xiaowon as they paint through layers of glass to create portraits and abstractions.

Fabricating Images

Photography is a medium in which reality is captured in one of the rawest senses. Strictly speaking it can tell a truth that no other interpretation really can. In this retrospect, it becomes questionable as to whether it is based in creation or description. Although it leaves room for the practice of expression or deception it still stems from an actual physical moment as opposed to a solely abstract idea or process of the mind. Coleman states in The Directional Mode, “The most important photography is emphatically not Art.” Like other artistic mediums such as sculpture or painting, photography can fit into many categories like abstraction or realism for example. But unlike other forms of art, photography takes the viewers experience to a new level by not only describing and translating a moment or feeling, but sometimes tricking the viewer into obscuring reality from design.

Take Rene Magritte’s painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe. A painting of a pipe, where underneath it states in French “This is not a pipe.” It concentrates on the idea, that although there is a depiction of a pipe, that pipe does not exist in reality. I feel the controversy over photography as an artistic medium hovers around the notion that if we were to look at a picture of a pipe, we know that it once existed. Even with abstractions we can see that although we may not be able to decipher the element itself, we are seeing reality in a new light. The beauty of this is that we can take this instinctual knowledge of reality and twist it to convince viewers of a false reality, allow them to see deeper into the physical world, or portray a feeling or mindset to either identify with or discover.

Taking these tools and utilizing them to communicate in a visual language is the nature of art. Les Krims stated in 1969“I am not a Historian. I create history. These images are anti-decisive movement. It is possible to create any image one might think of; this possibility, of course is contingent with being able to think and create. The greatest potential source of photographic imagery is the mind.” Such as drawing becomes merely the division of space, and how music becomes merely the difference between a noise and silence, photography becomes the absolute between substance and seclusion.

Fabricating Images

Photography is a medium in which reality is captured in one of the rawest senses. Strictly speaking it can tell a truth that no other interpretation really can. In this retrospect, it becomes questionable as to whether it is based in creation or description. Although it leaves room for the practice of expression or deception it still stems from an actual physical moment as opposed to a solely abstract idea or process of the mind. Coleman states in The Directional Mode, “The most important photography is emphatically not Art.” Like other artistic mediums such as sculpture or painting, photography can fit into many categories like abstraction or realism for example. But unlike other forms of art, photography takes the viewers experience to a new level by not only describing and translating a moment or feeling, but sometimes tricking the viewer into obscuring reality from design.

Take Rene Magritte’s painting Ceci n’est pas une pipe. A painting of a pipe, where underneath it states in French “This is not a pipe.” It concentrates on the idea, that although there is a depiction of a pipe, that pipe does not exist in reality. I feel the controversy over photography as an artistic medium hovers around the notion that if we were to look at a picture of a pipe, we know that it once existed. Even with abstractions we can see that although we may not be able to decipher the element itself, we are seeing reality in a new light. The beauty of this is that we can take this instinctual knowledge of reality and twist it to convince viewers of a false reality, allow them to see deeper into the physical world, or portray a feeling or mindset to either identify with or discover.

Taking these tools and utilizing them to communicate in a visual language is the nature of art. Les Krims stated in 1969“I am not a Historian. I create history. These images are anti-decisive movement. It is possible to create any image one might think of; this possibility, of course is contingent with being able to think and create. The greatest potential source of photographic imagery is the mind.” Such as drawing becomes merely the division of space, and how music becomes merely the difference between a noise and silence, photography becomes the absolute between substance and seclusion.

Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature,
nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.
Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is either a daring adventure, or nothing.
To keep our faces toward change and behave like free spirits
in the presence of fate is strength undefeatable.

- Helen Keller

Tara Donovan nebulous Styrofoam cups ( Take somethings for something else entirely)

Sex At Dawn is a book I was reading over spring that describes our ancestry and how that plays into our desires and concepts of fidelity. It discusses our relationship to Bonobos, a highly sexual species of monkies who share intimate relationships with every member of their group including different genders, family ties, and all age groups. It place emphasis on creating unseparated bonds with all of those you depend on and are close to.

Nassim Haramein's research in physics is extraordinary inspirational to me and the concepts I'm interested in. The connectivity of the world can be boiled down to simplistic elements, that mirror themselves infinately. This is relevant to my photographic conceptions in that it describes the dividing lines of matter and perceived reality by interpretation. Weighing in different factors in unison we can can innately find that it isn't just aesthetics or subconscious perceptions in how we feel the world, but also the basic nature in 1:1 vs. 0:1 to determine our interpretation of reality.