Soft Forms and Warm Gradients
(or, how to circumvent Naïve Realism)
This show is a series of works that are the culmination of a year of studying Transubstantiation. The word is not used in the sense of the religious, but of Alchemy. The effort was a study of things that turn into other things. Things that appear to be other than what they are. Words as Things. Things as Words.
...The final objects are texts that aid the circumvention of Naïve Realism. This is achieved through hallucinations or optical illusions - anything that de-constructs the image of reality and causes you to not perceive the apple as an object, but as a process of neural relationships that mean the experience ‘apple’. The goal is to break down the walls of one’s ‘ego-tunnel’ to reach a true understanding of one’s internal processing, how reality itself is a representation. The goal is to experience your world not as reality, but as a form of mental content.*
--
-
excerpt from a letter:
“… I imagine that’s why the invention of perspective was so appealing - a fixed point of view that locks objects into a consistent and fixed scale, a device to establish your position relative to the unstable world that surrounds you. God, the moral spectator, applauds your attempts to fix down meaning, to craft a fixed and consistent reality that can also, when applied correctly, allow you to make concrete decisions and experience the hallucination of a coherent self, the consistent, contigent ‘I’.”
The conscious brain is a biological machine, a reality engine that purports to tell us what exists and what doesn’t. it is unsettling to discover that there are no colours out there in front of your eyes. the apricot pink of the setting sun is not a property of the evening sky, it is a property of the internal model of the evening sky, a model created by your brain. the evening sky is colourless the world is not inhabited by coloured objects at all, it is just as your physics teacher in highschool told you. Out there, in front of eyes there is just an ocean of electromagnetic radiation, a wild and raging mixture of different wavelengths. most of them are invisible to you and can never become part of your conscious model of reality.*
info document designed by Easton West
*ideas proposed by Thomas Metzinger in “The Ego Tunnel - The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self”
for images of the final work please visit my portfolio website
special thanks to Marwin Bald for helping install the show, Easton West for designing the flyers and handouts, everyone else at Working for suggestions/comments/moral support, and thanks to everyone that came to the vernissage!
/
0 comments:
Post a Comment