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.
91. 1 2 3 1. Finished drawing 2. Cardboard 3. Drawing the bean 4. Cardboard 4
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