VIDEO

DISORIENTATION MULTIPLE

An exhibition by students of Video in the Expanded Field (VISA 3057).

Access to the phenomenal world is not as transparent as one might intuitively think. Our brains perform incalculable operations on sensory inputs before they even reach consciousness. Clearly, we don't know the half of what's on the outside of our hermetically sealed black boxes. Meanwhile, we have become trained by an array of perceptual habits that have us firmly in their grip, that run on autopilot without drawing much, if any attention to themselves. Even more insidiously, these habits are formed by the myriad technologies through which we experience images, sounds, worldly phenomena, the modulations and morphing they perform inseparable from the act of perception itself. Your phone camera is powered by predictive algorithms that execute a variety of analyses as your images are being composed, already anticipating what you’re going to take, well before the picture is taken. The gambit at the core of this exhibition therefore relies on warping the operations that promise to deliver the world to your eyes and ears, opening the door to multiple reorientations. You may see these wondrous experiments in spatial and temporal disorientation as the inceptive salvo in a quest to see and hear differently, to trip up the mechanisms of normalization and compression so that they reveal what slips away from sedimented habits, while making the contingent nature of perceptual decisions available for increased scrutiny. To experience the world through an alien sensorium, to see and hear like a machine, may well be impossible considering our all-too-human limitations. But foregrounding the fragility and malleability of our sensory capacities effectively opens them up to a process of change and transformation, the end point of which cannot even be dimly grasped. The lively minds at work across these videos provide so many spanners geared towards ungrounding their relationship with the world, keenly aware that the nature of this disorientational labor offers ways of inhabiting the world well beyond the aesthetic realm.