“Visual Space Has No Owner” by Nicole Ottiger

Title:

Visual Space Has No Owner

Artist(s) and People Involved:

Creation Year:

2015

Medium:

Video

Duration:

14:24

Artist Statement:

The artwork depicts the picture as a model of reality. The picture as a fact. The camera becomes part of the body. The natural eye sees only what the artificial eye looks at. A poetic portrayal in 5 sequences of an artist drawing a self portrait, pixelated within the virtual space. The mind begins to question everything and breaks down it’s confidence in seeing as a truth. The visible space becomes mental space.

Seeing is a tricky, dangerously-seeming-easy act of constructing a mental image. We interpret what we see. But what do we understand of what we see? My current artwork addresses the issue of ‘seeing things’ and is grounded in a practice-driven examination of methodology and subjective experience within art on issues of perception, embodiment and representation. Normal perception is a kind of blindness. We perceive what we attend to.

Perception is an act we hardly think about -it is a complex experiencing of spatial relations of subject-object within the environment- using on faces, on background objects, depth, colour, shadow, light-dark contrast and sound cues for example, all happening within the bottom-up processing of sensory information and topdown effects of learning, memory, expectation and attention. We interpret what we see. But what do we understand of what we see? Interested volunteers will have the opportunity to put their own perception skills to the test in the art experiment – to sample a selected art image being flashed at the edge of eyesight, to the right or left visual field only and paint/ draw what they perceived after a single visual exposure (up to 4 exposures allowed). The technique used is adapted from neuroscience. It is intended to demonstrate our relationship to the world.