Tactile Vision

Vision works well when we have an overview of the total system, but the way we search in digital media is through little steps, from link to link — a tactile experience as we feel the landscape. We can never see it as a whole because it’s not a continuous space. Instead, we look through a pinhole and build up everything without an overview. This searching function enables us to reduce the amount of chance and encounters, so we can just directly search for something in an extremely focused way and filter out everything else. This machine is the extreme version of we possessing only one sense for one thing. With a pneumatic system made of silicon that reacts to the sensing of light in front of both eyes, the wearer gains stereovision to distinguish directions for navigating in space. Depriving all other sensory experiences and leaving only one signal channel, this hyper-narrow, focused, and filtered vision is an analog version of the searching behavior on the Internet.

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Like a dating App for cave animals.

The anglerfish lives in what is easily Earth's most inhospitable habitat: the lonely, lightless bottom of the sea. They have a piece of dorsal spine tipped with a lure of luminous flesh that protrudes above their mouths like a fishing pole, which lures the prey close enough for the anglerfish to devour them whole.

Similar to the predation behavior of the anglerfish, the high intensity light sprouting from the middle of the mask is a cue, or a lure, for others to find them in total darkness. The position of the photodiodes characterizes the wearers’ roles: they are predators when the sensors are close to the center as they adapt to stereovision; they are preys when the sensors are more separated as they attain peripheral vision.

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Light, the single signal here, is a communication channel and a trap. Only responding to a single stimuli may be an efficient way to look at things, but may also be a very easy way to get trapped or fooled. Similar to searching, when you are only interested in one thing and only looking for this thing, you loose the capacity to see things in context to make more informed decisions. Like moth into flame, this hyper specialized vision, with light as the only stimuli, is very efficient for what it does, but also very easy to be tricked.