Proception (2005)
2005
Various Media | 6’x7’
In these pictures a deliberate attempt was made to renegotiate the basic laws governing what i am calling “proception.” Perception refers to the general rules through which sense impressions are built into more complex formations in the brain and become part of memory and contemplation. Proception is the way that those impressions become projected upon the natural world and sometimes when they become part of the language of art produce an archive of the changing conditions of the mind and brain. Proception is the reversed perception and incorporates the projection of changing internal states. This projection is dependent on the history of apparati like those of photography, cinema and recently new media. Those apparati can be entirely reflective like a mirror and as such simply reconstitute the rules by which percepts are made, or they can be reflexive and comment on that system of sensorial organization that is made manifest as rules in the making of art. Perspective would be one such example. Proception on the other hand builds images with other rules that uncover the optic unconscious of the image or make actual the virtual possibilities which remain latent waiting to be freed from the bondage of those institutionalized conditions. The Natural History Museum is a place where the institutional understanding attempts to display the rules and regulations of perception and attention so that we may all know and understand them. As pedagogical display devices these museum installations unveil the apparati that we all share and through which we build our sense of reality – a reality which is to a certain degree manipulated by sovereignty. Who sees, feels, hears and experiences what is socially and economically determined. This work is a reflexion on these rules and through an alternative proception creates a series of photographs that make the viewer aware of another kind of image building. Using photographic practices, what better way to document these methods, and by the subtle manipulation of the field of focus, the notion of the edge, and the foregrounding shadow all in the context of an enlarged and engaged architectural field, which is subject to the same rules but which for other reasons looks quite different, i comment on the perceptual habits of the institutional understanding through a displacement and shocks of the normal formats and rules.