I get little flashes occasionally of other things going on around me. Typically at first I’ll wonder if it was just a light flashing far off somewhere on the periphery of my vision. Maybe a bug whizzed by me as I was peering off into the distance. Maybe I’m just experiencing some sudden burst of squiggly lines in my view, indicative of either floating collagen or a retinal tear. Or, maybe… it could be some other plane of existence that I just can’t pick up on. Maybe my reality is just a small part of some larger, more objective reality… some other parallel dimension. Jakob von Uexküll and Thomas A. Sebeok came up with a nice word for this idea: umwelt,defined as the subjective interpreted environmental reality of a living creature. My umwelt is certainly different from yours. Although we might agree on things like the color of the sky, the temperature of the room, or any other basic fact, our interpretations form our opinions, which then warp and wobble our interpretations. Each person’s world becomes truly their world the longer they are alive to mull it over and let their thoughts reverberate down the longer tunnel of subjective experience. When people talk about parallel universes and other world, I try to keep in mind that they are real, and they are right in front of us in the form of other people. Now would you kindly exit my umwelt, I’m quite busy at the moment.
ARTIST | Liu Dao 六岛 | |||
MEDIA | LCD screen, IR sensor, 8-bit microcontroller, media player | |||
EDITION | Unique | |||
DATE | Made in island6, Shanghai 2015 | |||
SIZE | 100(W)×142(H)×43(D) cm |
To see the artwork in motion, visit our website at
http://www.island6.org/SomeParticularDimensions.html