Insight/out, from Being Embodied series. Video projection on sculpture, 10″ high on 40″ stand

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Inspired by an illustration by Descartes of visual perception, Insight Out is a meditation on inner and outer vision. Wire forms of hands and a glass globe depict a diagram of the optics of vision. One hand, coated with fabric and beeswax, stands outside the glass “eye.” It is mirrored by a smaller, upside-down wire hand inside the eye. A small projector (the “brain”) casts a video image onto the frosted back of the eye. In the video someone is covering a blackboard with vertical marks, as if counting but only by ones. As the enumerator covers the board with rows of ones, the marks already drawn slowly transform into numbers from other cultures and times. Eventually historic formulae surface and disappear from the board. This quietly transforming scene is reflected small and upside down via a lens onto the surface of the hand outside the glass eye. Thus realities are both projected and reflected between the inside and the outside of the eye. The history of mathematics is referenced as it seems the science most born of inner vision and driven by its own internal logic, though it nonetheless bears and generates an uncanny correspondence to the world outside. Or is all knowledge simply born of the marriage of internal proclivity with activity in the world? Such as counting on one’s fingers.