Background

In today's society of mass production and visual seduction people are somehow forced to relate or communicate through their sense of vision. The whole lot is measured down by 'the way it looks'. The meaning of things then is related to a surface or a contour of the object and not its essence. Therefore the project addresses the relation between people and their perception of space in everyday reality. It questions the 'automatization' of people's actions in a space. It attempts to establish a new perceptive approach by making things strange. Techniques and devices used for realization of this approach are hardware and software. Their working flexibility and the freedom one has while using them are the primary selection criteria. Today's usage and development of technology is focused more on visual perception than other senses. To reconsider this is the aim of the project. In the late 1970s, Marshal McLuhan addressed the topic of visual over-usage by contrasting the different worlds of sight and hearing. "We, who lived in the world of reflected light, in visual space, may also be said to be in a state of hypnosis. Ever since the collapse of the oral tradition in early Greece, before the age of Parmenides, Western civilization has been mesmerized by a picture of the universe as a limited container in which all things are arranged according to the vanishing point, in linear geometric order." According to McLuhan, the outcome is an unusual inhibition for some individuals when hearing and touch are concerned. The name he attributed to people who show this kind of constraint was "bookworms". Finally the project tackles the emergence of 'urban zombies' or 'urban sleepwalkers'. 'Urban sleepwalkers' are people who are half aware of their existence, showing a high level of habituated behavior. In time, this habituation becomes automatized as we create certain patterns in performing actions that are frequently repeated, for example walking or eating. We do not think why we do certain acts in a way we do them, we just repeat the well-known performance. If we would try to walk in a different manner each day, we would become aware of the different movements we make while walking and so would actually start thinking about the way we walk unintentionally and what this movement is saying about us.

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