Cognize Normal-Like Pleez: Video Installation

I believe the human mind is not an accurate reproducer of objects and events, but a tool that constructs their qualities. Philosophers Bowman Clarke, James John, and Amy Kind have argued for and against similar points, while Daniel Hoffman and Jay Dowling have debated cases from a psychological perspective. My understanding of their discourse surfaces in Cognize Normal-Like Pleez, a video installation designed to capture the enigmatic connection between perceivers and the things they perceive. The composition encapsulates this theme through a series of five videos that disseminate confusing imagery paired with mangled sounds. The miniatures operate in sequence on computer monitors set inside a haphazardously ornamented tower. Though the original sources for each video communicate clear, familiar subjects, the final product deliberately obscures them. Sometimes sounds and images flicker for only brief moments, perhaps too fast for the human mind to fully process. Though some information comes through, important data supplied by the surrounding context is absent.

I invite the audience to rationalize this complexing conglomerate and reflect on how their established biases inform their opinion of the work. Each person likely draws from his or her experiences, cultural conditioning, knowledge, and other personal factors in order to create an individual conceptualization of the installation. Their subjective conclusions reflect my belief concerning a neurological basis for the origin of qualities. One’s connection to Cognize’s images and sounds, to me, is not derived solely from characteristics inherent to it, but also endowed by one’s mind, which not only constructs the attributes one normally associates with the images and sounds (as opposed to the physics and biology that lead to their construction), but also seamlessly incorporates the aforementioned biases. I realize my ideas by focusing the topics of the videos and their setting around the transmission of information and its obfuscation. Just as one cannot see or hear past the perceptual barriers in Cognize, I believe one cannot escape his or her mind to “sense” qualities in an objective, disembodied manner, because the mind is necessary for perception.