Experimental Portraits – Oculus Rift

‘Oculus Rift goggles (developer’s kit) are used to simulate virtual or augmented reality environments, and we have linked these to receive input from footage we gathered using a similar camera to that which Google use for Street View, so that the user can experience a full 360 degree view of the virtual/augmented world. The other goggles (with 2 cameras on the front) in the other pictures is stereoscopic, meaning that they are two superimposed video feeds/images fed to both eyes separately to enhance the illusion of depth. Both are pretty amazing pieces of equipment, and the reason we use them in our lab is to investigate Consciousness, and specifically the area of Interoception (awareness of bodily states), out of body experiences, and Proprioception (awareness of how our body is positioned in space).’  – Stephanie Clayton (lab assistant/psychology trainee/model)

 

 

 

 

 

Incidental Place

Incidental: Of a minor, casual, or subordinate nature.

Internal Structure

Skull 1

Skull 2

Faraday Cage – Experimental Portrait Series

‘A Faraday cage or Faraday shield is an enclosure formed by conducting material or by a mesh of such material. Such an enclosure blocks external static and non-static electric fields. Faraday cages are named after the English scientist Michael Faraday, who invented them in 1836. …These rooms are spaces that are completely enclosed by one or more layers of a fine metal mesh or perforated sheet metal. The metal layers are grounded to dissipate any electric currents generated from external or internal electromagnetic fields, and thus they block a large amount of the electromagnetic interference.’  –  Wikipedia

‘Perception (from the Latin perceptio, percipio) is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the environment. … Perception depends on complex functions of the nervous system, but subjectively seems mostly effortless because this processing happens outside conscious awareness.’  –  Wikipedia

Experimental Space: Faraday Cage =
This new series of is concerned with perception and the study of perceptual awareness. It is a new venture which utilises research spaces, in this case a Faraday Cage, to cross-link scientific ventures into neuro-biology and experimental psychology with the visual pursuit of photography. What is perception (what is consciousness) and where does the study of these brain functions and the structural and functional organisation of the brain cross over with the artistic pursuit of photography and the sense of self. It is a new venture into ‘portraiture’ – a focus upon the human subject within the experimental space.

 

 

Enclosures of The Mind

Seal Tank

Jungle 

The Deep End

Launderette

Verulamium

 

Complex Mechanics

‘The technology pictures were born from the desire to unveil places in which things of enormous influence on us are being developed while we never physically reach these places. We get in a car, we open the refrigerator’s without ever being aware of the origin of the materials processed in these objects, of the enormous amount of steel for instance that must be produced at facilities like ThyssenKrupp in Duisburg-Bruckhausen.’
– Thomas Struth: Composing Pictures

‘The new city became both micro and macrocosm: imploded yet still monumental, insistent upon its status as total ‘space’…. Nothing ordered this littered and cluttered morass of high and low technologies, this city without top, without bottom, without limits. The only constant was the view that revealed everything in a single glance; a view both panaromic and kaleidoscopic.’
– Scott Bukatman: Blade Runner – BFI Film Classics

 

‘… some precepts of chaos theory … holds that chaotic systems are not random but complex, non-linear systems produced through massively repeated, simple operations. New dimensions lie between the dimensions of traditional mathematics: fractal dimensions. The natural order is distinguished by intricate and infinite fragmentation and by similarities across different scales – fractal forms …. patterns reveal complexity at any magnification, so ‘a fractal is a way of seeing infinity’.’
– Scott Bukatman: Blade Runner – BFI Film Classics

‘By far the most complex entity known to humanity is the human brain itself. The human brain contains approximately ten billion nerve cells – called neurons – and each neuron is connected to very many other neurons. To get an idea of this amount, we quote the following figures: There are twice as many neurons in each human brain than there are humans on this planet. Every day, in each human brain, 10,000 neurons die and are not replaced – a total of 300 million in a lifetime of 90 years – but this is only three percent of the total amount of neurons in the brain.’
– Complexity and Entropy – Human Creativity vs. the Heat Death of the Universe

 

Peripheral

Peripheral / Periphary:

Relating to, or situated on the edge or periphery of something; circumferential, marginal, the outermost part or region within a precise boundary.

1. the boundary or perimeter of any surface or area.
2. the external surface of a body.
3. the outskirts of a city or urban area.
4. the minor or superficial aspects of a question

Peripheral vision is a part of vision that occurs outside the very center of gaze.

Night Vision

Night Vision – Sign

Night Vision – Steps

Night Vision – Trees

Dark and Brutal

‘Unlike fright, which is characterised by the surprise of a sudden presence of danger, and dread, which is always directed towards a specific object, the nature of fear is ‘to be non-specific and to have no object.’ … By being ‘non-specific’, fear instead accounts for both expectation and the emergent sense of anxiety.’ – Caterina Albano: ‘Fear and Art in the Contemporary World.’

‘Fear represents a certain kind of inner state amounting to expectation of, and preparation for, danger of some kind, even though the nature of the danger may well be unknown.’ – Freud (1920): ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle.’

‘Brutalist architecture is a style of architecture which flourished from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, spawned from the modernist architectural movement. Examples are typically very linear, fortresslike and blockish, often with a predominance of concrete construction. Initially the style came about for government buildings, low-rent housing and shopping centers to create functional structures at a low cost, but eventually designers adopted the look for other uses such as college buildings. Critics of the style find it unappealing due to its “cold” appearance, projecting an atmosphere of totalitarianism, as well as the association of the buildings with urban decay due to materials weathering poorly in certain climates and the surfaces being prone to vandalism by graffiti.’  –  Wikipedia

‘Warming to my theme, I spoke of the horrors of Le Corbusier’s favorite material, reinforced concrete, which does not age gracefully but instead crumbles, stains, and decays. A single one of his buildings, or one inspired by him, could ruin the harmony of an entire townscape, I insisted. A Corbusian building is incompatible with anything except itself.’ – Theodore Dalrymple: ‘The Architect as Totlitarian’

                                Le Corbusier’s design for ‘The RadiantCity’

Illuminated Space – Sublime Series

‘The disproportion between the human body and the vastness of space that traditionally evoked a sense of the gigantic …. the Sublime invokes loss, silence and absence … The tension between space and place is inherent to contemporary disorientation, is critically situated in the hyperspace of late modernity … the ‘non-places’ of today’s urbanisation.’

Caterina Albano: ‘Fear and Art in The Contemporary World’

This series of images relocates Edmund Burkes concept of the Sublime, epitomised by Casper David Friedrich’s landscape paintings, to subterranean urban spaces – where the sense of awe wrapped up in fear becomes an internal experience. Fear is evoked by disorientation and dislocation, unspecified locations – man-made functional structure replaces natural formation blurring the distinctions between place and non-place. This is a suppressed sense of the Sublime; unlike war reportage, images of natural disaster or epic landscpae. However, there is history and drama here too: the history of association. Are these cavernous spaces technological labs or war-related ruins? An overriding sense of agoraphobia and anxiety also pervades these spaces: the lure of the unknown, the lair of the beast. There is a simultaneous psychological imploding and exploding,  a vertiginous oscillation, one could say, leading to a schizoid sense of self.