Sightseeing - Reviews - Seeing at The Exploratorium in San Francisco, California

Seeing

The Exploratorium

San Francisco, California

June 29 - January 31, 2003

"Seeing" is a modernization of The Exploratorium's visual perception exhibits, including its "permanent collection" and various brand new pieces and installations. On the critical level "Seeing" exposes the sheer unreliability of human sight, and as vision in the West remains tightly bound to knowledge, belief and faith, such unreliability does not bode well for the species. Few places other than the Exploratorium show works that so easily "turn against" the viewer, quickly grounding an aesthetic experience in nothing less than a minimally mediated encounter with physiology and perception.

One of the first things a viewer encounters in "Seeing" is a projected image being steadily "painted" on a black field by linear strokes with the fuzzy edges of an aerosol spray. This is the output of a device that records a user's gaze as the eyes move from region to region in an image. The experience is then played back, demonstrating that any act of sight we associate with conscious, continuous effort is really a set of jumps from one patch of detail to the next. We do not see the whole of anything, and meaning is created as our brain knits the connected dots together. A nearby exhibit disables this feature of sight by overloading the fovea (the part of the retina specializing in detail) with a single flash of light. Some might consider the result--i.e. a "dead" patch of virtual light "obscuring" the non-location from which we convert what we see to what it means--to be more frustrating than blindness. With one's fovea temporarily handicapped, peripheral vision is transformed from a reserve of potentially recognizable patches of color and shape into a glimpse into the process of memory itself. One remembers the fellow visitor off to the right but cannot see them, as they are blotted out by the strobe's afterimage.

As the retinal overload fades another exhibit demonstrates that even with a fully functioning fovea, the eye-brain is still too slow to trust. In a projected image of a street scene various items are removed and displaced (seemingly at random) between tenth-of-a-second artificial blinks. Recognizing exactly what has changed from one blink to the next is a challenge that is close to impossible. Buttons on a control panel allow the user to pause the process or disable the blink entirely and see parking meters, windows, trees and entire vehicles (dis)appear and migrate...oh, I get it now! Releasing the button plunges the user back into a real-time ignorance. One might return to this exhibit with the knowledge gained elsewhere in the show (motion is better-detected at the edge of the retina), and by not looking directly at the image, catch a small percentage of the changes it undergoes. Eventually the sequence repeats and one's memory takes over from active sight, revealing the car-turned-to-van not as a moment i n the present but a figment and product of the past. It is sobering to think that had the changes not been pre-determined and dynamically generated by a piece of image-processing software instead, even this meager advantage would be lost.

The blink demonstration stresses the importance of intervals in perception. If we look away we can get lost. If we aren't privy to the moment of production, we are at best left to create meaning on our own and at worst programmed by what we see, with a kaleidoscope of possibilities in between. The wide range of exhibits that feature plays of light and shadow, tricks of depth perception, and all manner of zoetropes and persistent visions makes the viewer aware of how optical experiences can be programmed. Fortunately the curators allow the user to stop many of these demonstrations or significantly change their point of view in order to reveal the mechanisms by which their visual reflexes have been exploited. But the most open works are the enigmatic cocoon-like fiber sculptures of artist Judith Scott. Because Scott has Down syndrome and does not speak, hear, read or write, everything that the visitor has learned about vision and meaning is put to the test. Though her work is celebrated and has been extensively documented, the Scott experts have little advantage over the Exploratorium visitor. Her "sculptures" can be anthropomorphized and treated differently from bird nests, spider webs, termite mounds or coral reefs, but we know nothing of Scott's aesthetic motivations or thoughts, thus they are essentially works of alien sentience. Here the interval is more than that of a frame, slit or angle of projection, it is that of an entire state of consciousness. The book of visitors' comments poignantly illustrates how pressing the need is to categorize and metaphorize what we see, to manage the alien, and eliminate the interval--the distance-between.

There is probably no better time for "Seeing," as light is the very medium of our so-called Information Age, and the eye has not only been disciplined but has spawned robotized and prosthetic accomplices. Thanks to the entertainment industry, we are hard-pressed to distinguish digital visual effects from the relatively unmediated play between actual light, object and eye-brain. Based on scientific understanding of the retina and visual cortex, computerized cognitive systems loiter on the horizon, primed to recognize our faces in the crowd. "Seeing" is a "boot camp" for contemporary visual perception, mapping the shrinking interval between new machinic vision and a human optical awareness in desperate need of revitalization.

DAVID GOLDBERG [david@smashtv.com] is a technologist, teacher and freelance writer based in San Francisco.

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