For this assignment I sat on a bench in Washington Square Park with a friend and began the experiment by sitting down with my eyes closed, trying to absorb the atmosphere of my surroundings. I found it hard to concentrate at first, but slowly realized a heightening of my awareness for the sounds that surrounded me. At first I would hear one noise at a time, the ambient whistle of the wind hitting the sides of my ears, the distant chatter of other people, the footsteps of passerby’s. These sounds gradually became easier to isolate and focus on, as I found myself suddenly able to study them in great detail. Once I realized that I could direct this focus, the next challenge was to broaden it to encompass the entire environment at once. This wasn’t an easy task. The more I tried to focus on multiple sounds at once, the more my focus would run away from me, leaving me back into my thoughts. It was during this attempt to not break focus in hearing the entirety of my surroundings that I noticed myself beginning to become hyper-aware of physical sensations as well. I felt the weight of my lower body gripping the bench, the areas of contact between my foot and shoe, and the feeling of the wind on my skin. It was then that I realized that these sensations happen constantly, but are almost always ignored. I obsessed with the thought that trillions of sensory inputs are wasted on billions of people every day, and what it must be like if one was able to clearly process and give thought to every individual sensory input one received.
The green color cone in the retina is the most sensitive and plentiful cone in the eye. I took this thought with me on a trip to the High Line where I tried to focus on the color green, trying to minimize the loss of any observation or feeling. I found that this way of thinking and experiencing is difficult to condense and explain in a meaningful way, but the variety of green in even a manufactured ecological display such as the plants on the High Line, is astounding. I took a particular interest in the fact that the undersides of leaves are brighter than the top under sunlight. This is why when looking at a tree or bush, though all the leaves can be the same color, under the right lighting conditions they can appear to be a cacophony of greens and yellows.
I took the overall feeling of the experience and tried to encapsulate it in a small digital painting.
