Experience this

You look into a cardboard box that feels warm. It has traveled a long way and so have you. You both share this in common: you are here now.

Inside the box it is dark, quiet. You share that in common too. You’re standing in a softly lit colourless space holding this box. Play along, now.

You raise the box to your head. It is not very hefty, so must be empty. There is a hole cute in one side just big enough for you to see in with both eyes at once. You place the box against your face.

My piece has come together

Peering into eyes is an intense experience. Peering into your own can be chilling.

I invite you to see beyond the physical, and see something that doesn't exist.

I invite you to look not at your own eyes, but your mind's eye.

When you see an object with your face's eyes, it is physically there in front of you.

But when you imagine something with your mind's eye, where is it? The object doesn't exist; and neither does the light allowing you to see it.

Look at the middle of the mirror.

Wild Reading

That was a series of direct statements, which were very logically presented, yet entirely unsubstantiated. I'm a little unsure!

Some cool elements i noted:

1) We feel aware of being alive which makes us happy. We can't represent life in art because it's too big and dimensionless, but we can represent our happiness at being alive. I think this is what i'm going to be doing with my various pieces in this class -- representing my joy that we're alive and demonstrating trick that our brain and perceptual system used to keep us that way!

2) We are born as verbs rather than nouns. I love this, and it is never really explained but needs not be. We will change, and through living we represent potential for growth, more than form that changes. the only thing static in our lives is the fact of life. We are like a traffic jam that propagates endlessly even though its source is long-gone, and even though the individual cars that make it up change, the jam will continue to be, in a formless mass that nonetheless has form.

3) Things done by decision without inspiration will become undone. New Years Resolutions anyone? This is so true.

Further Ideas

I want to objectively portray a subjective perceptual experience. Saccades are one, the face dissolving one, being blind when you move your eye is one

Ideas for experimentation

grazing-angle light vs front 90º angle light on slightly rough material, revealing shape/form at grazing angle (cracks in concrete look like lightning)

seeing only the halo -- black on black with backlight

making 3d light trails (real sculptural light trails?)

project viewer's face onto a mannequin head

looking down giant tube; disorientation; seems longer than it is, lighted from end, sense of movement?

focusing through fingers with lens; using fingers as lens;

correlate what you see with not-you, giving yourself a new body part (head?) mirrors halfway down face in horizontal, and perpendicular to face a foot from face vertical. gives you two eyes;

see through an egg to the yolk/chicken inside with a very bright light from behind, and blacked out sides

seeing your eye squiggles

capturing the the tiny filtered-out movements of the eye, seeing saccades or microsaccades

I found him via youtube

Of all the strange places...

Bradley Pitts. Light and experiential artist. Made me see the world in a different way.

http://bradleypitts.info/

He's amazing. I will give a talk on him.

http://www.youtube.com/user/bmpitts

See only light

Light divorced from object is like a photo without subject -- see the invisible.