I see my sculptures as pattern machines which encourage audience involvement in my work by manipulating the way the eyes and brain process vision. By using colourful, striped, sequenced lights inside the stone tunnel this work will interfere with the viewer’s sense of spatial orientation by creating conflict between three sensory systems (visual/body position/proprioception and balance/vestibular) and transforming the space to create an optical illusion.
How it will be viewed
Viewers will first see a colourful glow coming from the entrance to the tunnel. When they walk inside their field of vision will be filled with coloured light. The moving pattern of three chasing colours in the lights will make the tunnel feel like it is gently spinning. The contrast and repetitive striped sections in this immersive light installation will create a transformative space.
Optical Illusion
Why do Op Art paintings look like they are moving? And how will this technique be applied in the tunnel?
The repetitive patterns in Op Art contain no prominent visual features on which the observer can focus their attention. When the eyes move back and forth across the pattern, there is nothing to which the brain’s motion detection mechanisms can refer and so the gaze remains unstabilized. As a result, the observer experiences “motion without displacement” – they have a vivid impression of movement with direction, which is not accompanied by a change in position.
Conceptual and Historical Connections
Since the 1960s artists have been exploring artificial light as a material to transform space and influence perception. This installation invites visitors to respond to colour and to contemplate illumination as a phenomenon and as a versatile medium.
‘Art that is meant for the sensation of the eye primarily would be called perceptual rather than conceptual. This would include most optical, kinetic, light and colour art.’ – Sol LeWitt, 1967
When Abstract Art first began in the 20th century, it started to show us the work in a completely new, non- familiar way, exploring the relationships of shapes, spaces and colours to one another. This profoundly challenged our expectations of art. When Minimalism came along in the 1950s, it marked a shift in art from object to experience. Installation (or environment) art follows on from this and is a complete unified experience. The focus is on how the viewer experiences/walks through the work and gives the feeling of a more intense experience because they are inside the work, filling their visual field. Artists use this to put the viewer in the work, so they can emphasise the experience of the viewer.
Perceptual art
When the focus in a work of art is on the perceptual experience of the viewer, they become an active part of the work. In a simple way, art can be explained as image making, but the eyes and brain are also working together making and decoding images constantly. In the brain visual scenes are processed, filtered, interpreted, compared with existing imagery and reassembled into a complete picture in about one fifth of a second.
‘The nervous system deconstructs visual information into different components, such as colour, luminance and motion’ – Anjan Chatterjee, 2002
Abstract art is good for you
Tunnel Vision is abstract and minimal. Presenting viewers with an abstract form encourages curiosity, which is a good tool for effective learning. In essence, abstract art is good for you and good for your mental health. Looking at it, understanding it and making it enhances perceptual and cognitive processes. The growing field of Neuroaesthetics looks at the effect that aesthetics have on the brain, and neural responses to beauty, harmony and pleasure. Semir Zeki coined the term Neuroaesthetics in 1991 and argued that ‘a truly comprehensive understanding of visual art must incorporate an understanding of the thing that makes it’. Within Neuroaesthetics there’s a huge amount of existing research to show that visual art can have a positive impact on our perceptual and emotive processes.