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| Everybody I
talk to has them, but most people I talk to don't at first know what
I'm talking about. Walk outside or look out a window and look
at clear blue sky, and 9 times out of 10 you not only see the sky,
but a world of lightly defined apparitions
that "float" across your eye, slowly rolling off, down,
down, down, until up you dart your eyes, and they zoom across your
field of vision, only to drop down again, never remaining in one
spot, always darting this way and that following the movement of your
eyes. Your eye doctor will tell you that these are "floaters," though they've been given names by science, like Muscae Volitantes (meaning flying flies). They are generally harmless, worsening with age to the point of them being bright white or blinding. However, what interests me, is that they are a visual stimulus that is only yours to experience. Different people see them differently, and some people ignore them entirely, but they are part of your visual experience. I created the video below as an example of personal perception. I like the idea of creating a Gesamtkunstwerk, the German word for the total work of art, an idea attributed to Richard Wagner referring to the way that an operatic experience combines, music, theater, and the visual arts. But I envision a Gesamtkunstwerk in the form of a cinematic experience, where not only are all of the senses accounted for, but it would appear that the film IS reality, accounting for the stereo nature of our eyes, in an imax kind of setting where the film shows the batting of eyelashings, the floaters on our eyes, the crossing and uncrossing of the eyes as they focus, the sun behind closed eyelids, the sound of your own voice as it reverberates in your head, the pops and the high pitched sounds that occasionally our ears pick up which slowly fade back into ambiance. Creating something like that is near impossible, but that's certainly part of the allure. For now, here's a step in that direction, a video the way that I see the bubbles. The video is a compressed divx avi, which means that you should be able to open it in windows media player. However, if you have trouble with it, I recommend this program for both Macs and PC's: download videolan. |
