p. 133-134
Matters are made worse by the fact that the eyes move almost continuously. Several times a second they jitter and bounce; they also make saccades and micro-saccades-that is, sharp, ballistic movements. As a result, the projection of an object you perceive to be still in facts jumps around on your eyeball, and when you track a moving object, its image stays still on your retina while that of the stationary background races across your eyes. Again, in order to explain how we manage to experience a stable visual world, we need to suppose, it seems, that the ability is achieved at some later stage in the processing of the original retinal information.

p. 142
The world is not a construction of the brain, nor is it a product of our own conscious efforts. It is there for us; we are here in it. The conscious mind is not inside us; it is, it would be better to say, a kind of active attunement to the world, an achieved integration. It is the world itself, all around, that fixes the nature of conscious experience.

p. 143-144
The retinal image is an image in a mathematical sense; it is a projection or a mapping. The retinal image is not an image in the sense of a picture – or, if it is, this is entirely accidental. How it looks, or how it reads, plays no role in its performance of its neurophysiological job description. Once we appreciate that the retinal image isn’t something that we see, we lose a grip even on what it means to say that it is upside-down. Upside-down, one must ask relative to what? Who’s to say what counts as upside-down in the head relative to the tasks faced by the nervous system?
[...]
Again, we don’t experience the retinal image; we don’t experience any image , in that sense. We experience the world.

—

Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, Wiley-Academy 2005

p.21
The technologically expanded and strengthened eye today penetrates deep into matter and space, and enables man to cast a simultaneous look on the opposite sides of the globe. The experiences of space and time have become fused into each other by speed[...], and as a consequence we are witnessing a distinct reversal of the two dimensions -a temporalisation of space and a spatialisation of time. The only sense that is fast enough to keep pace with the astounding increase of speed in the technological world is sight. But the world of the eye is causing us to live increasingly in a perpetual present, flattened by speed and simultaneity.

p. 35
Perhaps, freed of the implicit desire of the eye for control and power, it is precisely the unfocused vision of our time that is again capable of opening up new realms of vision and thought. The loss of focus brought about by the stream of images may emancipate the eye from its patriarchal domination and give rise to a participatory and empathetic gaze. The technological extensions of the senses have until now reinforced the primacy of vision, but the new technologies may also help ‘the body[...] to dethrone the disinterested gaze of the disincarnated Cartesian spectator’.

p. 40-41
Sensory experience become integrated through the body, or rather, in the very constitution of the body and the human mode of being.[...] Our bodies and movements are in constant interaction with the environment; the world and the self inform and redefine each other constantly. The percept of the body and the image of the world turn into one single continuous existential experience; there is no body separate from its domicile in space, and there is no space unrelated to the unconscious image of the perceiving self.
[...]
A walk through a forest is invigorating and healing due to the constant interaction of all sense modalities. [...] The eye collaborates with the body and other senses. One’s sense of reality is strengthened and articulated by this constant interaction.

p.65
The forest enfolds us in its multisensory embrace. The multiplicity of peripheral stimuli effectively pull us into the reality of its space.

—

Lawrence Weschler, True to Life. Twenty-five years of conversation with David Hockney, University of California Press 2008

p. 4
“I mean, for instance, wide-angle lenses!” Hockney exclaimed as we stood that afternoon on the deck overlooking his pool. “after a while I bought a better camera and I tried using a wide-angle lens because I wanted to record a whole room or an entire standing figure. But I hated the pictures I got. They seemed extremely untrue. They depicted something you never actually saw. It wasn’t just the lines bending in ways they never do when you look at the world. Rather it was the falsification – your eye doesn’t ever see that much in one glance. It’s not true to life.”

p. 6
Hockney led me back into a the studio and picked up a magazine, thumbing randomly to an ad, a photograph of a happy family picnicking on a hillside green. “See? You can’t look at most photos for more than, say, thirty seconds. It has nothing to do with the subject matter. I first noticed this with erotic photographs, trying to find them lively: you can’t. Life is precisely what they don’t have – or rather, time, lived time. All you can do with most ordinary photographs is stare at them – they stare back, blankly – and presently your concentration begins to fade. They stare you down. I mean, photography is all right if you don’t mind looking at the world from the point of view of a paralyzed cyclops – for a split second. But that’s not what it’s like to live in the world, or to convey the experience of living in the world.

p. 10
“[...]Looking at you now, my eye doesn’t capture you in your entirety, but instead quickly, in nervous little glances. I look at your shoulder, and then to your ear, your eyes (maybe, for a moment, if I know you well enough and have come to trust you, but even then only for a moment), your cheek, your shirt button, your shoes, your hair, your eyes again, your nose and mouth. There are hundred separate looks across time from which I synthesize my living impression of you. And this is wonderful. If, instead, I caught all of you in one frozen look, the experience would be dead – it would be like…it would be like looking at an ordinary photograph.”

p. 66
“[...] For perspective to be fixed, time has stopped and hence space has become frozen, petrified. Perspective takes away the body of the viewer. You have a fixed point, you have no movement; in short, you are not there, really. That is the problem. Photography hankers after the condition of the neutral observer. But there can be no such thing as a neutral observer. For something to be seen, it has to be an account of the experience of that looking. In that sense it must deeply involve an observer whose body somehow has to be brought back in.”

p. 68-69
“[...] For instance, in the old Newtonian view of the world, in Newtonian physics, it’s as if the world exists outside of us. It’s over there, out there, it works mechanically, and it will do so with or without us. In short, we’re really not part of nature; it virtually comes to that. Whereas modern physics has increasingly thrown that model into question and shown it cannot be. Mr. Einstein makes things more human by making measurement at least relative to us, or anyway, to some observer; the supposedly neutral viewpoint is obliterated. There can be no measurement without a measurer. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is, of course, highly technical and specialized. It deals with a paradox in particle physics, showing how if you attempt to measure the velocity of a given particle you won’t be able to identify its exact location and vice versa. Previous to this, of course, science believed that given enough technical advancement, it would eventually be able to measure anything, but Heisenberg showed that this was not just a problem of not yet having the right measuring devices but that the problem was inherent in the nature of physical reality itself. The old conception of scientific inquiry had gone on as though we could measure the world as if we weren’t in it. Heisenberg showed that the observer, in effect, affects that which he is observing, so that some of those old borders and boundaries begin to blur, just as they do in cubism.
[...]
There’s that famous phrase of Gombrich’s about the triumph of Renaissance perspective – ‘We have conquered reality’ – which has always seemed to me such a Pyrrhic victory, again, as if reality were somehow separate from us and the world now hopelessly dull because everything was known and accounted for. These physicists, by contrast, were suggesting a much more dynamic situation, and I realized how deeply what they were saying had to do with how we depict the world, not what we depict but the way we depict it.”

—

Although I have the utmost respect for scientific research and am personally fascinated by the field of neurology, recently I find myself questioning the methods used to gather information about brain activity, namely the measuring of electrical fields or electrical activity in the brain. Not the specific methods themselves, whether one uses electrodes or mri scans to determine brain activity is of no interest to me. Rather the thinking behind the research seems odd. What can one really hope to gather from measuring a certain area of activity? If a subject is stimulated in a certain manner e.g. hit on the finger, told to think of something nice or shown evocative imagery, then specific parts of the brain light up and the more the subject’s finger is hit, the more accurately the area in the brain can be pinpointed. But what does that really tell us?

There’s no metaphor I reject more than comparing the human brain to a computer, but in this particular case I think it is a valid metaphor. Scanning the brain and drawing conclusions from these scans about the human mind or the human experience of the world, is like removing the monitor from a pc, putting electrodes on the outside of the tower and hammering away at the keyboard. Indeed, certain key stroke combinations seem to evoke very specific responses from the tower, and with a little patience we might be able to piece together an idea of the anatomy of the inside of the computer i.e. motherboard, cpu, gpu, hard drive etc. We may discover that repeatedly hitting ctrl+alt+del invokes a specific response, there might even be a sound, but without the screen we can never know if we’re playing a game, surfing the web, photoshopping or have crashed.

It is an old dilemma of neurology, that whatever else it is, it is always the brain examining the brain. But this is looking for sparks and trying to guess their meaning, this is the brain projecting unto the brain.

Both The Matrix and, more recently, Avatar feature the ability of the protagonist(s) to transfer their mind/consciousness to another (virtual) body. The premise seems to be Cartesian. The human consciousness is trapped somewhere inside our head or brain, but if we were able to ‘free’ it from its corporeal existence, there is nothing hindering it from taking possession of another body.

The modern day logic is the computer logic – we all have the same corporeal hardware and our software (mind) is therefore instantly compatible with any other body. All we need in order to transfer our software is an interface of some sort. In The Matrix this is done by connecting directly to an even bigger piece of hardware, whereas in Avatar it’s all wireless (of course, there are 10+ years between the two movies, but one can’t help notice the distinct tinker-toy PC-feel of The Matrix as opposed to the superficially smooth Apple experience of Avatar). In both cases the mind is ‘uploaded’ to another piece of hardware, and thereafter free to enter another reality where the rules and limitations of the ‘normal’ world don’t apply. IT-worker Mr. Anderson becomes an übercool, streetwise goth super hero, and the disabled soldier becomes a 3 meter tall, blue ‘warrior’ who rides an enormous dinosaur turkey and nails (or rather, ‘tails’) the daughter of the chief (I shudder at the thought, that the soldiers at bases in the US, who are remote controlling Predator drones in Afghanistan and elsewhere, might envision themselves undergoing similar ‘transformations’ when ‘going’ on missions).

Although mind and body seem to have little if any influence on each other, in both movies you still need a ‘real’ body. If your ‘real’ body dies, you’re dead. In The Matrix you die even if your virtual body dies – at least sometimes. In Avatar this is less of a problem; the big blue avatar vehicle can survive without the mind in a vegetative, brain-dead, state – very handy. Also, if you’re lucky, you can have your mind permanently transferred to the big blue body, but that takes a lot of processing power and all the blue people have to jack in to make that work. What happens to the original body after that, is somewhat unclear, but I like to imagine, that in true totemistic style, the heart and liver are ripped out of the still warm body and ritually devoured by the tribe (normally, I’d say the brain as well, but in this particular case, it’s safe to assume that it’s empty(?)).

Now, normally, the brain takes care of regulating a lot of the body’s vital functions. These include regulating temperature, breathing, heartbeat, hormone balance etc. etc. Since the bodies, which are left behind, in the movies don’t die completely, we must assume that the part of the mind which is transferred isn’t involved in any of these tasks. Likewise, sensory input is ‘taken care of’ by the new body, which seems to imply that either all brains are built exactly alike when it comes to e.g. the visual cortex regardless of what kind of eyes you have (goodbye environmental influence – and common sense), or the mind just settles in the driver’s seat of the new brain and lets all the sensory information come to it ‘from the outside’ (hello homunculus problem). In any case, the ongoing individual neural wiring of the brain (which starts as soon as the brain begins to evolve and is more personal and complex than a fingerprint the size of the moon) seems to play little or no part at all, which is good because that would present a problem – how would you get new memories or newly learned skills with you from one body to the other if memories and newly learned skills were brain structures? In fact, it’s probably safe to say, that the only aspects of the mind, which are transferred are: personality (whatever that is when detached from the bodily experience and the individually wired neural network), memory (whatever that is when detached from the bodily experience and the individually wired neural network) and emotions (whatever that is when detached from the bodily experience and and the individually wired neural network).

Anyway, the important thing is that it works. Apparently, we are told, it’s just a matter of the right technology before we can all become the heroes in our own lives – be what we were really meant to be – simply by uploading our ‘mind’ to another body. This is fortunate, because then we don’t have to worry about being ‘what we were really meant to be’ in our everyday lives, all we have to do is wait for the right technology to appear, and then we can be transformed into freedom fighters on far away planets or on a world dominated by machines. We can finally be as brave and bold as we know we really are. We will fight oppression, liberate some people and get the girl in the end. In other words, we can finally do all the stuff we were destined to do, but you can’t do in the real world…because you’re not allowed, or there are no oppressed people anywhere, no injustice and no girls either.

But, what if the technology isn’t developed within our lifetime?!? Luckily, the movies seem to deal with that eventuality as well. It’s a bit tricky, but nonetheless. By stating that the mind (or at least, the mythological 10% we care about) is kind of a separate thing from the body, it seems plausible that it could survive after we die as well – since the body isn’t really needed after all. And then perhaps after we die, we can go to a place where we can finally be ‘what we were really meant to be’, but were unable to be in our former life (for reasons mentioned above). This may sound vaguely familiar, and I can only assume that that is the noble intention of the film makers. To let us know it’s okay if we aren’t the heroes or even protagonists of our own lives, because in the Matrix/Pandora/Afterlife we will be. So, even though the movies may appear to be showing us something new, they are in fact telling us something old. They are giving us a 17th century view of the world dressed up in 21st century effects.

In the Panorama, the brain is taken out of the perceptional equation so that the viewer gets an impaired (or, more accurate) image of how our perception works.

Peripheral vision is the part of our field of view which lies outside of our central vision. The peripheral vision is basically a colourless blur, in which only contrasts and movement are detected. The eye is not physically capable of detecting detail outside of the center. This, however, is not how we experience the surroundings outside our central focus.
Every time something changes in the peripheral vision, our focus is directed to whatever caused that change. In a sense we determine which part of our world is in focus simply by looking at it. If we don’t look, it remains a blur.

A Panorama is a contraption, not unlike a cinema, designed to trick the viewer into believing he’s somewhere else. Everything is constructed around confusing the viewer, to fool his senses. In The Panorama Mesdag you experience a representation of Scheveningen as it looked to the painter 125 years ago. From there you can walk to Scheveningen and see for yourself what it looks like today.
The word Panorama means something like ‘all encompassing view’.

In Peripheral Panorama you don’t get an ‘all encompassing view’. You get to see two representations of my peripheral vision as I retraced the periphery of Mesdag’s representation of Scheveningen 125 years ago. One gives you detail, the other tries to emulate the visual input I received.
It was never my intention to strive for any sort of objectiveness in this presentation. In fact, I hope each viewer will allow himself to be fooled by his senses and experience a reality which he is unable to communicate to his fellow man.