We
were about to land in Mexico City; I had my digital camera pointing
out the window when over the loudspeakers a pre-recorded voice stated,
“All electronic devices must now be turned off….”
Which of course I thought did not actually include my camera. However,
as the stewardess paced the corridor inspecting if all the passengers
were following the orders just spoken from above, she let me know
that they understood “all electronic devices” as including
any digital cameras.
By some misguided notion of bureaucratic expertise someone came
to the conclusion that the pixels landing on a memory chip inside
a camera could actually derail the communications gear on an airplane
about to land. Well, they don’t.
As soon as the stewardess walked past me to buckle herself down
in her own seat, I took out my little Sony T1 digital camera to
take some more aerial images, I knew there was no chance that my
camera interfered with the communications of the plane, any more
than the digital watch did, on the wrist of the passenger sitting
next to me.
We are constantly faced with issues of perception, or shall I say
miss-perceptions in these tumultuous and complex times when so many
fundamental notions of what we believe to be “true”
are never really questioned and just taken as articles of faith.
![](images/planisferio1small.jpg)
Pedro Meyer at his desk in his studio (planisferio 1) Oscar Guzmán
© 2004
Deepak
Chopra, in his audio book, New
Physics of Healing, tells us about the Quantum mechanical body,
in order to comprehend what it really is and how the latest advances
in science determine a new way of perceiving even ourselves.
He begins by exploring issues of perception and how these have determined
and influenced how we treat nothing less than our own bodies. Upon
facing for the first time the notions that Dr. Chopra explained
in great detail, I was fascinated at the uncanny similarity to all
the those concerns that photographers have been expressing with
respect to digital photography and matters of representation.
![](images/planisferio2small.jpg)
Pedro Meyer at his desk in his studio (planisferio 2) Oscar Guzmán
© 2004
He explained how the mechanics of perception are frozen in an old
worldview that should have gone away with Newtonian Physics. How
does perception gets structured in our physiology? He asks. And
goes on to explain how commitments are structured into our body
mind by conditioned circumstances.
![](images/polar1small.jpg)
Pedro Meyer at his desk in his studio (polar 1) Oscar Guzmán
© 2004
In
India for example, a baby elephant is tied with a flimsy rope to
a green twig for a few weeks after it is born, but then when the
animal grows up to become a full grown huge animal, if he were to
be tied with an iron chain to a tree he could snap the iron chain
with one movement or better yet even walk away with the entire tree.
However, if the elephant is tied with a flimsy rope to a green twig
it won’t be able to escape, it has made a commitment in his
body mind that this is a prison and therefore will not escape as
long as that flimsy rope is tied to his foot.
At Harvard Medical School there was an experiment made some 20 years
ago that ultimately led to a Nobel Prize in Physiology (1)
. A group of kittens were brought up in an environment that had
only horizontal stripes, and another group that only had vertical
stripes. And when those kittens grew up to become “wise old
cats”, as Deepak Chopra, amusingly called them, one group
of cats could not see anything other than a horizontal world and
the other group could not see anything else but a vertical world.
They lost the sensory apparatus to see either horizontal or vertical
stimuli. The visual sensors they had been brought up with now determined
their world.
![](images/total1small.jpg)
Pedro Meyer at his desk in his studio (total 1) Oscar Guzmán
© 2004
There
are a great number of experiments with all of the data on the mechanics
of perception now pointing to one crucial fact leading to the same
conclusions; our sensory apparatus and our inter neuronal connections
develop as result of our initial sensory experiences and how we
are taught to interpret them, and subsequently we function with
a nervous system that has only one reason for it’s existence,
to reinforce what we were exposed to and was interpreted for us
in the first place.
There is a technical term for this used by psychologist, its “premature
cognitive commitment”, we commit ourselves to a certain cognitive
reality, a preconceived conceptual boundary, literally our nervous
system serves to keep reinforcing the conceptual boundaries that
we have structured in our own consciousness.
The picture of the world turns out not to be the look of it at all,
it’s just our way of looking at it, very literally, the shape,
color or texture of things are the function of our receptors that
have been programmed to be seen in a certain way.
The eye cells of a bee, for instance, when it looks at a flower
it doesn’t see the same colors that you and I see, because
they do not have the receptor to see them. However, from a distance
a bee can sense ultraviolet and thus the honey in a flower, yet
it cannot see the flower at all.
A bat would see such a flower as the echo of ultrasound, a snake
would sense that flower as infrared radiation, a chameleon’s
eyes balls would see on two different axis something that we can’t
even remotely imagine.
So then, what does the real world look like? Asks Deepak Chopra,
What is the real texture of it? What is the real shape? And
the answer he gives, is, there isn’t such as thing. There
are only an infinite number of possibilities, all coexisting at
the same time. Yet we freeze such fields of infinite possibilities
into a certain perceptual reality, literally as a result of our
cognition derived from our “premature cognitive commitments”.
Sir John Carew Eccles (2),
who also won the Nobel Prize amongst other things for elucidating
the mechanics of perception stated: “ There are no colors
in the real world, no smells, no textures, no sense, nothing of
the sort, they are all structured in our awareness, they are all
assembled in our awareness”.
There is definitely a shift in the world of technology today, leading
to the overthrow of a superstition that existed in science for a
long time. That superstition is materialism. That the world out
there is made out of objects that are separated from each other,
and which can be separated from each other in space and time. Our
entire system of logic is embedded in this system of materialism,
which makes sensory perception the crucial test of reality.
![](images/vertical1small.jpg)
Pedro Meyer at his desk in his studio (vertical 1)
Oscar Guzmán © 2004
Yet all our technology today is built on the Quantum mechanical
perspective. Today anything that we do, such as using the telephone,
or watching TV, or using a computer or traveling on a jet plane
from here to there, or sending a missile into outer space, all of
these are based, not on the idea of the atom as a solid entity but
on the idea of the atom as a void of energy. So even though these
transformations have taken place, the superstition still remains
in place with respect to materialism.
If this then is not really what this is in reality, then what is
it? Everything that you really see is made out of atoms, these atoms
are made out of particles, that are moving at lightening speed around
huge empty spaces, and those particles themselves are not material
objects but fluctuations of energy. If you could see the human body
with the eyes of a physicist as it really is and not through the
artifact of sensory perception, because that is what has been happening,
we would come to the conclusion that we are into some major transformation
in our perception of reality.
Obviously the words spoken by Deepak Chopra struck a chord in me,
with regard to photographic representations. More so then, when
by one of those coincidences in life, I had the pleasant surprise
of a visit to my studio of a friend who wanted me to meet someone
who was doing some very interesting work that he felt I should see.
Oscar Guzmán, who has been working
over the past two decades in 3D environments, showed me his work,
that unwittingly, connected me directly with the theme of multiple
receptors commented upon by Dr. Chopra, only this time from the
perspective of photography. Our potential to view the world
in so many different ways became immediately apparent. The metaphor
of the various forms of receptors by the bee, the bat, the snake
and the chameleon, became all too eloquent.
Oscar, pulled out his camera and took a portrait of me sitting at
my desk in my studio, and then stitched those same images into so
many different polar combinations, none of which in fact related
to the optical representation that for centuries had been the sole
method of photographic points of view. Thus giving visual forms
to the words spoken by Deepak Chopra: “What is the real shape
in the world? And the answer is, there isn’t such as thing.
There are only an infinite number of possibilities, all coexisting
at the same time.”
I could perfectly well imagine myself traveling in that space made
out of the void rather than atoms, that Dr. Chopra mentioned, as
moving through those clouds as the plane was about to land, was
a very magical representation of space and time, with that fluctuating
energy all around me.
Pedro
Meyer
Coyoacan Mexico
September 6, 2004
Please also read Oscar Guzman on “Visual Cartography”
In the magazine section at ZoneZero.
http://zonezero.com/magazine/articles/cartografia/cartography.html
As always please joins us with your comments in our
forums.
![](images/polar2small.jpg)
Pedro
Meyer at his desk in his studio (polar 2) Oscar Guzmán ©
2004
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