Bennett, A 2015, ‘Hyperphantasia: remaking our image of the world’, in MuseumLab Floor talk: Julie Rrap Remaking the World, with Anne Marsh & Tamsin Green, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne.
SPEAKING NOTES
_ Julie Rrap was one of my tutors @ City Art Institute in the late 80s
_ ten years ago were so both students at Monash Uni when I was undertaking MFA and Julie PhD
_ Now I am in the final stages of completing a creative practice as research PhD as a member of the Deakin Motion Lab
_At this moment I am struggling with writing about ‘methodology’ – the meta of method – contextualising creative practice as a means of creating new knowledge
_and here we are in a room full of artists at work. Thank you Julie
This is what working looks like – the work of getting deep inside and creating new work.
Makes me feel better about the amount of time I spend in bed with the blanket over my head!
What I want to say is more of a response to this exhibition rather than an authoritative explanation.
I have been reflecting on the title of this work:
REMAKING THE WORLD
It put me in mind – superficially – of German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s 1938 proposition of a ‘world picture’.
“… world picture […] does not mean a picture of the world but the world conceived and grasped as a picture”
-Heidegger 1938/52, ‘The Age of the World Picture’ in The Question Concerning Technology & Other Essays
Do you get the picture?
Are you in the picture?
sidebar: ocularcentricism vs academic bias towards demonstrating knowledge by expressing as writing
APHANTASIA & HYPERPHANTASIA
On the day that I first came to see this exhibition,
I also stumbled upon a report from the BBC on a neurological condition called ‘A-PHANTASIA’
It turns out that my son has aphantasia – he cannot hold images in his minds eye. He cannot recall my face.
Another friend also experiences the world this way and gets a wonderful surprise every time he sees his partner: ‘she is SO BEAUTIFUL!’
I find it bizarre to consider as my inner world is teaming with images and shapes – I am a visual thinker.
The other end of the phantasia spectrum also has a name: Hyperphantasia.
The ability to visualize, the fantasize
images can be intrusive like PTSD!
Living in a swirling point cloud of multiple 3d movies running simultaneously.
like the second room of this exhibition.
In 1933 Tesla made a proposition for a ‘THOUGHT CAMERA’
reported in the Deseret Newspaper:
UC Berkley brain imaging: movies of the mind
http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/
Mary Lou Jepson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Lou_Jepsen
- was Head of the Display Division at Google X
- an executive at Facebook / Oculus VR.
- mary lou as cyborg – brain surgery, comments on technology of hormones as mediating experience (as discussed in her TED Talk)
Solve for X talk:
Mary Lou – points to research that suggests it could be possible to make neurons run in reverse
that the retina could become a screen for the mind’s eye
something like Tesla’s thought camera
_ sight as intromission and emission
ALHAZEN
1st century Arabic polymath
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alhazen
Alhazen’s most famous work[39] is his seven-volume treatise on optics Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics), written from 1011 to 1021.
Optics was translated into Latin by an unknown scholar at the end of the 12th century or the beginning of the 13th century.[40]
DO NOT misinterpret what I am saying
as advocating a form of celebratory trans-humanist singularity utopia
I don’t want you inside my head! I like my privacy!
_ I am more interested in post-humanism and cyborg theory
_ I am interested in the interplay between embodied subjective experience and how technology frames paradigms.
_ artists have always engaged with the high technology of their day,
explored the implications and possibilities
_ the technologies with which we co-create have a profound impact on our subjective embodied experience.
technology literally colours of our dreams
- Murzyn, E., 2008. Do we only dream in colour? A comparison of reported dream colour in younger and older adults with different experiences of black and white media. Conscious. Cogn. 17, 1228–1237.
- Schwitzgebel, E., Huang, C., Zhou, Y., 2006. Do we dream in color? Cultural variations and skepticism. Dreaming 16, 36–42. doi:10.1037/1053-0797.16.1.36
Rather than understanding the world as a picture, let’s remake the world by dreaming as a form of being / becoming
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SEE ALSO
INVERTO:
whilst media has focused on gender and pregnancy, what interests us about inverto is the process of negotiating embodiment
also a fan of body as art performance artist Heather Cassils http://heathercassils.com/
MESH:
Alison Bennett 