Reflect
Sight is a gift which we are born with, like walking we never question our sight, why would we? It’s as natural as breathing. In the first page of “To See And Not To see’’, Oliver Sacks asses that one must learn to see, like one learns to walk. As a visual artist I agreed with that assessment, but as a rationale thinker I could not grasp how seeing, an ability as effortless and thoughtless as breathing, needed training or any kind of learning. If so, could that mean that the act of seeing was really a man-made construct!?An illusion?
When Virgil finally removed the bandage from his eyes exposing his lens to light, colors and movement for the first time, he could not recognize what he was seeing. He’s sight was primitive, almost like a newborn babe. This made me think well maybe sight develops in different stages of our life.
The journal expresses that “we make our world through experience, categorization, memory, and reconnection”, meaning that our experience of seeing has been filtered and organized. Virgil sight was that of an infant’s, unfiltered raw, and unbiased, seeing at its purest. He was able to see, but not identity what he was seeing. As a visual artist I almost wish that I could experience such psychedelic sight. To truly see the world for what it is, without any context of space, distance or movement. To be reintroduced to the color red. Reintroduced to shadows, and reflections. However, the job of an artist is to constantly stride to reimagine these constructs by creating processes that do so. As I read the journal, I thought to myself, what if I bind folded myself for maybe 3 days? What if?
Virgil reminded the doctor of another patient by the name of Gregory, who “did not find faces easy, and did not look at a speaker’s face and made nothing of facial expressions’. I found that remarkable because I thought human gestures and expressions were a universal language. We all know the look of a scared man, or the sight of a happy expression. But the patient Gregory reinforced the fact that these expressions on our faces are not universal and that a lot of them are taught to us. We are trained to recognize them.
After reading this case study, I have made it my mission to constantly find ways to reimagine and reintroduce the world to myself. Find new ways of seeing. By doing so maybe I can expand the way I think about art, maybe I can simply expand the way I think in general. Artist in the past have experimented with drugs, such as LSD, heroine, and other hallucinogens to achieve the visual experience Virgil had, but I hope to find natural methods and processes to produce such results.
