"Technologies are not mere exterior aids, but also interior
transformations of consciousness, and never more than when they affect
the word."(Ong)
æther is an experiment in how new technologies of representation affect
human perception. It acts as a haptic surface for computer mediated visual
information to enable tangible experiences common to painting and sculpture,
but rare in digital media. The painter sees with tactile vision and translates that
experience into a physical movement, after which it exists as a three-dimensional
surface, becoming a union sensory of experience. By physically navigating a
textured visual space, æther allows for a physical experience of textual
information analogous to the visual experience of white-space in a poem. By
immersing the experience of reading into a haptic visual space, different ways of
seeing are allowed to dynamically combine and separate, giving rise to new
forms of visual expression and reception.
The philosopher Marx Wartofsky has argued for a radically culturalist
reading of all visual experience. He concludes that "human vision is in itself an
artifact, produced by other artifacts, namely pictures." All perception, he
contends, is the result of historical changes in representation. (Jay, 5) The visual
experience offered by the computer is based on older methodologies (analytic
perspective, photography) that have been tacitly learned and internalized with
repeated exposure. As Western culture embraces the representational
conventions of digital media, one must account for the virtues of traditional
media, lest they be lost.
The vision of the painter is described by the words of Cezanne: "Art is a
personal apperception, which I embody in sensations and which I ask the
understanding to organize into a painting." (Merleau-Ponty, 238) For Cezanne,
to paint was to have "... the need to no longer see ... to be too close ... to lose
oneself without landmarks in smooth space." (Deleuze, 493) In order to do this,
he had to first forget all that he had learned about vision both from science and
through science. Visual experience is composed of more than mere
perception-cognition plays an integral part. Visually communicating experience
requires conscious control over the mixing of what one sees with what one
knows. In order to recapture the scene, "all the partial views one catches sight of
must be welded together; all that the eye�s versatility disperses must be united;"
one must, "join the wandering hands of nature." (Merleau-Ponty, 242)
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© Erik Conrad 1998-2006