JAMES CARNEY AND MARÍA ANGÉLICA MADERO

About 

Few concepts are as semantically rich as the concept of seeing. We see things with our minds no less than our eyes; reflection occurs in relation to concepts no less than light. When we have a vision, we transition from seeing what's there to seeing what is not. And we see in time as much as we do in space. Looking into the past, there's the deep biology of vision, its discovery and rediscovery by evolution. Equally, the history of culture is a history of vision, of revision, of seeing things differently; speculation is vision turned to the future, the envisioning of the potential latent in the present.

Our ambition in this project is to explore vision and seeing in the most general sense. On the one hand, this is a descriptive exercise. We want to chart all the histories of vision that are open to us––all the natural and unnatural articulations of what it's like to see and to reflect. At the same time, we want to create alternative timelines of seeing, to identify parallel universes of vision where natural and cultural histories have taken different paths. But it is also a creative exercise. There are new agents amongst us that see things differently. We want to leverage the power of these agents to create inhuman and parahuman spectacles. We want to see through the eyes of the future, even if that future is only ten minutes from now.

Our work is an attempt to take historical, conceptual, and aesthetic cross-sections of what it means to see. What have we found? Come take a look.