A quick thought/comment on vision/seeing

Quite often I get moments where I feel removed from my immediate environment through the process of seeing, where it can also feel as “unreal” as a virtual environment. Maybe reality, and a connection with it comes from the state of mind that the viewer is in. At these moments I think of my eyes as being similar to a video camera: lense, ccd chip, recorder (memory). That is, I’m more conscious of the mechanisms of seeing, of the very human tissue, that enables this process.



Bill Viola was once given a large collection of already used audio tapes. He decided to record constantly untill the tapes ran out. Excited by the idea he fathfully started to record his life. After some days of this the futility of his quest dawned on him. He extrapolated his experiment and realised that if he made an audio recording of his entire life he would have to stop half way through just to listen to the first half. With this thought he pressed the stop button. I find this a interesting idea when applied to vision and an ideas of information in a virtual age.