Change Blind, Visually Unaware
Posted on April 1, 2008
Filed Under What's New |
EJ Carr, New York fashion photographer who is coming into the gallery soon sent me a clip from this mornings New York Times. It’s about change blindness, particularly or inability to be able to see things changing, a kind of visual inadequacy that is widespread.
After a year as a gallery owner I can attest to people’s curious relationship to the visual. I wouldn’t dare call customers or potential customers blind but I would question whether we talk enough about what we see, how we see, what we are looking for. Anyway here is the clip:
At a meeting “held at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University, the audience failed to notice entire stories disappearing from buildings, or the fact that one poor chicken in a field of dancing cartoon hens had suddenly exploded. In an interview, Dr. Wolfe also recalled a series of experiments in which pedestrians giving directions to a Cornell researcher posing as a lost tourist didn’t notice when, midway through the exchange, the sham tourist was replaced by another person altogether.”
It’s a complicated issue but this sentence or part sentence seems to sum it up: “you glance outside at the same old streetscape and nothing registers.” Hopefull our new show coming up in Ten Cubed on the 24th of this month will provide a cure.
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