Art

Lingering in the exhibition “Otherworldly: Optical Delusions and Small Realities” for a while, I gradually got used to this mind-blowing game about manipulating perceptions. I thought one photo was portraying specific street scene, but it’s actually made by shooting an artificial small world constructed in the studio. Peeping into the window of a skyscraper model, I had an illusion that I was literally seeing a real office space, even with a rotating chair. By bringing together these dioramas, small landscape and interior, playing optical wizard to challenge the audiences’ perception, the curator propose a long-lasting, ontological question to us:

“What is real?”

This is an universal question we constantly ask ourselves since media explosion. With so many channels to mediate our worldview, our scope of perception has achieved to a historical high. Digital technology significantly empowers us to track, preserve, archive the phenomena happening in the world. What comes with this evolution is a “mediated world”, where everyone perceives the reality from media. It exactly echoes what Marshall McLuhan said: the media is the message. We treat what we see from the media as the real world. But the explosion of the messages comes with the counter effect of cognition overloading and insecurities.

In this exhibition, what curator really intends is to dramatize this insecurity by telling us there is only one fine line between reality and illusion. By challenging our belief of what’s real, with a reality-TV style, behind-the-scene-comparison between virtual (photos) and real (micro landscape), the entire exhibit actually confirms the concept of “constructed reality”, which infer everything is purely subjective existence; objectivity doesn’t exit.

That is to say, we are actually our own making. We human being, the creator of digital technology, have ability to define, create, shape our reality. We are literally the God in the matrix we create for ourselves.

The implications? This exhibit may sounds like a critique about how technology manipulate our perception, but it’s totally not. It actually provides a “recipe” to ease our anxiety for longing the “real” reality. Just like watching the behind-the-scene video never makes us treat the film as a non-real one; we still enjoy emerging in the world created by the cinema. The more we’re aware or the trick behind the delusions, the more pleasure we feel. The reason is simple: the reality is entirely built upon “meaning”, and the meaning always comes with every mind activity. Just like artist Guy Laramee described his belief in the exhibit:

You cannot put feelings on a physical scale, or try to measure them. And we live in feelings more than in the “physical” — which is but another name for “feeling.”

What is the size of your feeling for life? What is the size of the word “size”?

Small worlds are not fake worlds, because: We are not in the world. The world is in us.