Mæna 2010

90.
My brother Ryan and I are identical twins.
We’ve always been close and discuss almost
everything together.
We also both tend to pay keen attention to our own visual perception,
and in college began discussing observations about our eyes. For
example, even though from the far left of one’s vision to the far right,
the scene you see seems continuous and unblocked, in fact an image
of your own nose blocks both the right and the left sides of your field
of view. By closing each eye in alternation this visible portion of your
nose becomes even more evident, looming large in the periphery.
Small observations like these caught our attention and animated
our discussions.
Simultaneously, another series of investigations being explored
through sculpture led us towards a highly specific, almost scientific,
understanding of the physics of light. This series of sculptures grew
out of a fascination with center-point oriented systems. Because
center-points are so abundant around us and seem important we
wanted to lay artistic claim to them. One sculpture was built out of
wooden matchsticks. Its form emerged spontaneously by packing
many thousand matchsticks next to each other and gluing them
together. Because the match head is wider than the wooden stick,
the group formed into a dome shape. Interestingly this form held the
matchsticks in such a manner that each individual stick was aimed
like an arrow directly towards a floating focus point at the center of
the dome. Through building this form, through becoming extremely
familiar with the spatial formation of matchsticks all aimed towards
one focus point, we began thinking of other entities in nature that
shared this shape. For example, the gravitational pull for an entire
planet can be pictured as pulling everything towards the core. But
even more so, the matchsticks’ formation matched the formation of
light rays as they burst away from their source, in a spherical splay.
Furthermore, when looking into the world, our eye samples an
inverted spherical splay of light rays, too.
To acknowledge this idea that our eyes forever see the world as a
spherical splay of light rays we assembled a sculpture out of corrugated
cardboard. It curved to be a portion of the crust of a sphere, with all
the corrugation perpendicular to the crust. Thus all the corrugation
was aimed towards a focus point at the sphere’s center. When
viewed from this point the entire piece seemingly disintegrates and
becomes transparent, allowing you to see through it, and acknowledging
that human vision is spherical.
Meanwhile, in our discussions about seeing our nose and other aspects
of human perception, we had noticed another interesting phenomenon.
Any time you have a foreground object near you and are looking past
it to focus in the distance, the foreground object will split into a double
image of itself (two nearly identical images sitting side by side). And,
astonishingly, both images of the object will be transparent. You can
literally see the background through each image of the foreground
object. In and of itself that phenomena is interesting as it implies much
about how the sight lines from each eye work in tandem, and how
the images on each retina are overlapped in the brain. But the real
ah-ha moment came when we realized we could use the double image
phenomena to trace the world with a pen, onto paper, and capture it in
extremely accurate proportion and perspective
Imagine holding a pen before yourself, looking past it to split it into
double, then raising one of the two images up to the edge of a sheet of
paper that is also held before you on an easel. For example, hold the left
image of the pen to the right edge of a sheet of paper while allowing the
pen’s right image to float out in mid-air next to the paper’s left edge. Now,
with that floating right image of the pen, you can trace the scene next to
the paper and capture a very accurate recording of it onto the paper.
Okay. Time out.
Holy mackerel!
That’s unbelievable.
It’s
It’s too easy.
too
It’s so low
easy.
tech. All you have to do is split your vision
and you get accurate perspective for free! No plotting the horizon
line, no plotting vanishing points. You can imagine our excitement at
the realization.However, a few points still needed to be worked out.
For one, this tracing method only worked on the edge of the paper.
Only about the width between our eyes could be traced in along the
paper’s edge, so how would we reach the paper’s middle? Well we
could either fold back the edge or cut it away and then trace in the
next margin. But also, using traditional flat paper proved to be problematic
because when holding either of our heads still to draw, the
distance from our eye to the center of the paper was shorter than the
distance to the corner of the paper, and thus objects traced in the
corner would appear larger. In order to have objects appear uniform
in scale across the drawing we needed to combine the insights from
the matchstick and cardboard sculpture and execute these trace
drawings on a spherically concave surface. Then all points on the
paper would be equidistant from the eye. So we did. We built a
concave easel, fashioned concave paper to fit it, constructed a headstabilizing
device to hold either of our eyes still at the concave paper’s
center of curvature, and began perfecting splitting the pen into
double and tracing.
We soon found that holding the two images of the pen in even
balance required a lot of practice. And that marking in every detail
of a given scene could take 2 or 3 weeks. But as the drawings
became more and more steady it also became clear that the space
captured in them was captivating. Somehow the paper’s curvature
gave an accentuated feeling of depth. And we were thrilled to think
that rendering perspective on a spherical surface made the drawings
in truer harmony with the spherical splay of light rays our eyes see
than traditional flat perspective. And even though realism was never
our goal, we were thrilled to think that rendering perspective on
a spherical surface made the drawings in truer harmony with the
spherical splay of light rays our eyes see than traditional forms of
flat perspective.