“Illusions that we experience… as part of everyday visual reality” [“The Starry Rubric Set”]

In February 2012 the Wysing Arts Centre produced a limited-edition artist publication entitled “The Starry Rubric Set”, co-edited by Gareth Bell-Jones and by the designers An Endless Supply. Contributing artists were asked to respond to an invitation to “predict two points in motion that will come into alignment”. The response offered by Joe Banks was…

“To fulfill my prediction, draw two points as dots, about 5mm wide and 10cm apart on a card, and bring them into motion by moving the card backwards and forwards in front of your eyes - the lines described by the motion of these points are parallel and therefore aligned. Cover your right eye with your right hand, and, holding the card with your left hand, focus your left eye on the right point, but remain aware of the left dot in your peripheral vision. Keeping the left eye focussed on the right point, move the card to and fro, adjusting the viewing distance, until the left dot... disappears. The blind-spot experiment is well-known, however, beyond the physiological truism that a section of the retina is insensitive to visual information, what's less well understood is that the images the mind places over blind-spots are illusions that we experience not only as experimental anomalies or visual novelties, but as part of everyday visual reality. It's not so much a question of the mind passively failing to perceive a point, as the mind actively creating an image to replace it with.”

The Wysing publication served as a testing ground for an idea that was subsequently explored in the “Rorschach Audio” book (pages 170 and 173), and in an article in Shoppinghour magazine (issue 10, Spring 2013), and ultimately condensed into the assertion (published in May 2016 on the website of the AXNS Collective) that, on the basis of visual phenomena such as retinal inversion, blind-spots, and kinetic depth effect and Necker cube illusions etc, that “visual reality is in itself a carefully constructed optical illusion”.

The evolution of this idea is also documented here -

www.flickr.com/photos/disinfo/31076959064/

“The Starry Rubric Set” features contributions from Aaron Angell, Ed Atkins, Joe Banks, Ruth Beale, Chris Chippendale, Kaavous Clayton, Tom Cobbe, Patrick Coyle, Lucy Conochie, The Constitution of the Damned, Arnaud Desjardin, Harriet Loffler, Grizedale Arts, Kit Hammonds, Jonathan Harris, Lizzie Hughes, Karin Kihlberg & Reuben Henry, Hilary Koob-Sassen, Lawrence Leaman, Gil Leung, Fay Nicholson & Oliver Smith, Am Nuden Da, Uriel Orlow, Kate Owens, EP Park, Francesco Pedraglio, Paul Pieroni, Nigel Pennick, Philomene Pirecki, Laure Prouvost, David Raymond Conroy, Paul Richards, Damien Roach, Phil Root, Giles Round, Emma Smith, Cally Spooner, Adam Thomas, Nick Thurston, Mark Titchner, Unrealised Projects, Lawrence Upton, Mark Aerial Waller & Jesse Wine. The image above features page 16 of “The Starry Rubric Set” publication, with the publisher's colophon copied-and-pasted over the previously blank section at the bottom of the image.

rorschachaudio.com/2012/12/17/wysing-arts-centre/

Taken on: January 1, 2017

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Visual reality is in itself a carefully constructed optical illusion

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