Double Vision
I’m amazed that we’re able to make any sense out of the world. At the most fundamental of life is the weird quantum that’s entirely probability driven, where things exist in multiple places and states at once. On the other end of the spectrum, there are weird symbols that have been shot to your computer or phone, via flashes of light and microwaves. But we can actually hope to understand each other, and real life isn’t disrupted with it’s underlying surrealness. Or it didn’t feel like that before now.
I’ve been working on a project for a while, before coronavirus, trying to show how we really perceive the world in pictures. Our vision is amazing. We’re great at looking at the world, and making sense of it. If you’ve ever tried to manually focus a camera, you know how hard it is to get a sharp image, but our eyes do it without thinking. They adjust the angle to both look at the same thing, and our brain takes these double images that we get and automatically aligns them into a three dimensional image. This process is continuous, but we’re normally not aware of it. But when you take the time to notice (and get good at doing weird things with the muscles in your eyes) everywhere you look is absolutely bizarre.
I’ve always enjoyed playing with the fact that I have two eyes. As a kid, I would entertain myself in church by looking at the person preaching ‘through’ people’s heads. Really, one eye is seeing the preacher, and the other is seeing the back of the person’s head, but in our vision they’re both overlayed on top of each other, so it looks like I can see through people. Magic Eye was the only good part of the dentist. If you look at the strange pictures and cross your eyes more than normal, you get the two hidden images to line up, and your brain processes that as a single object really close to you, which pops out of the page. I’ve always wanted to see paintings that show the world like we see it: with two eyes, but I couldn’t find any (other than a weird amount of portraits of women with four eyes). So, I had to make my own.
The first is just a coffee mug that I took two pictures of at slightly different angles. I divided the intensity in half, laterally shifted the images, and added them together in Matlab. So you can see the mug in focus and properly overlayed, while the background is out of focus and improperly overlayed so everything is doubled.
The second is the same technique but with the stained glass windows in my church. It’s like doing Magic Eye in real life. You can really do this with any repeating pattern, if you're willing to stand with really crossed eyes. You’ll get weird looks. But, I did it with my church, which is brimming with symmetry.
Even though I’d been thinking about this for a while, the images feel appropriately now. They’re surreal because they’re hyperreal. And the awareness of living in a time that will be history has that same surreal hyperreality. The pandemic breaks down our systems of interacting with the world, and dissolves them into indecipherability. And what I want to do with these images is show that everything is always bizarre. We are constantly seeing these blurry, double images, but the unconscious structures of our eyes and brain make them comprehensible. And while they’re normally automatic, with practice we can control those systems to make a new kind of sense out of the world. I want to find the beauty in the bizarre. So while some of the structures of life have collapsed, we can reconstruct others to make a new sort of sense. I’ve called more people in the last week than I ever would have before. We’ve been more conscious as a church of how we can reach out to people who need it. The pandemic is bad, and will keep getting worse for some time, but my hope is that we come out of it with a better appreciation for the things we often take for granted, and the relationships we have with each other.
