Malperception

Soumis par Benoit Bordeleau le lun, 06/30/2008 - 15:26

Auteur·e·s:

«Malperception» combine le savoir-faire d'un scientifique cognitiviste et d'un artiste visuel afin de mettre en lumière différentes anomalies oculaires réelles. Comme il est impossible de recréer exactement chaque anomalie, une part de fiction est insérée dans l'oeuvre, mais celle-ci est toujours appuyée par des observations et des concepts. Les auteurs de cette oeuvre veulent non seulement faire découvrir la perception visuelle grâce aux moyens technologiques aujourd'hui disponibles, mais aussi repenser toute l'activité perceptive oculaire en montrant que les yeux ne sont pas simplement des caméras, mais un enchevêtrement de signaux qui se brouillent parfois. Les défauts de perception deviennent ici une façon de penser l'activité perceptive.

Infos

Site d'hébergement:

Vectors (University of Southern California)

URL du site d'hébergement:

http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php

Date de dernière consultation de l'oeuvre:

30 Juin 2008

Coordonnées de l'artiste:
phoberman@cinema.usc.edu dhoffman@orion.oac.uci.edu
Groupe de recherche:
NT2

Taxonomies

Citation(s)

Most of us think of vision as like a camera: When we open our eyes we take a picture of the state of the world as it really is. The world is out there with its objects, colors, textures, shapes and motions whether anyone looks at it or not. The world is, in this sense, independent of us. When we look, vision simply gives us an objective report about this preexisting world. Malperceptions give us a hint that this pretheoretic idea about how vision works might be very wrong. Half of your brain's cortex is engaged in vision, in simply opening your eyes and looking at the world. Tens of billions of neurons, trillions of synapes, are employed in your every glance. This is surely overkill for a system that merely take pictures like a camera. What's going on? Why should half of your most intelligent processing power be engaged in simply looking? Vision isn't simply objective reporting. Instead it is an active process of construction. Your visual system is a reality engine, creating all the objects, colors, motions, textures, and shading that you see. The computational demands of this reality engine are enormous, which is why half of your most intelligent processing power is so engaged. This also explains the prevalence and variety of malperceptions. With so much cortex engaged in vision, there's a good chance that randomly occurring damage to the brain will have visual consequences, and that these consequences will vary widely depending on the region of the visual system that is impaired. Malperceptions are thus failures of our visual reality engine to construct useful visual worlds.

Discours (notes)

« In Malperception, the two of us - a cognitive science and an artist - joined forces in an attempt to visualize breakdowns in visual perception - a task that is inherently self-contradictory. Thus, it is probably inevitable that this project would be a mix of fact, speculation, and fiction. We chose a baker's dozen of visual disorders, and present each - through graphics, text and sound - to encourage users to enter into the specific altered world experienced by a sufferer of this neurological condition. We hope that the experience of these worlds - in which nothing can be taken for granted - may ultimately cause users to question their own perceptions. » (http://vectors.usc.edu/index.php?page=8|2&projectId=71&pageContinue=698)

Biographie(s)

Recherche*

Répertoire

Malperception

Hoberman, Perry

Hoffman, Donald