Not by sight alone

There is something to be said about our perception. Sometimes things aren’t what they appear to be; the very thing we are looking at can play a trick on us. When I was kid I could make a monster’s face out of looking at the textures and patterns of the wooden door in the bathroom. Not that this was my habit, but such experiences leave you with questions on the way we see things. Experiences like that are purely imaginative and may or may not have anything to do with optical illusions.

The Gestalt effect is a good example of those visual tricks. What seems like two silhouetted individual profiles looking at each other could be seen as a wine glass, or cake stand. A young woman in some fancy Victorian dress looking away from the viewer could also be seen as a profile of an old woman.

The art of optical illusion is not new. M.C. Escher and Dali have both done series of brain-teasing art. Recently a Japanese graphic designer, Shigeo Fukuda, did an art installation piece which had a similar flare. I saw an assembled silverware-object hung in the air with white flooring underneath. The surroundings were pitch dark. The trick was if the light hit the surface of this object on certain angle, the shadow of this object at the bottom reflected the profile view of a motorcycle. What appeared to be nothing more than a assembly of objects could well be looked as a sculpture with more surprises. I’m interested in the variations in our perception. Today we have the technology to mimic reality. We look at what appears to be female model on the screen; it turns out to be virtual reality. It’s important to be vigilant and discerning, especially in this postmodern age when anything and everything is up for grabs whether literally or virtually.

Recently I was particularly intrigued by the movie, At First Sight, which came out in 1999. A man once blind, Virgil, received radical eye surgery and was now able to see. The trouble came after the operation. He now had to adjust to the world he can see. Unable to distinguish a real apple from a picture of an apple in a magazine, he had to learn how to see things without relying on his tactile senses.

I’m not here to critique art or the movie. My points are that not everything is ‘what you see is what you get’ and if you can’t see something, it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. Simply because one can’t see things as others do doesn’t mean that there isn‘t another valid perspective.