The Conditions of Seeing

Every act of seeing establishes a relation between the world and the position from which it is encountered. A perspective grants access to something; it also sets the limits of that access. My practice begins where those limits become perceptible. Through art, I seek to make available an experience that can alter the conditions of its own understanding: an encounter in which the viewer discovers that the world extends beyond the terms through which it has become familiar.

The universe exceeds the scale of the intelligence that seeks to comprehend it. Its mathematical order makes understanding possible while continually exposing the limits of what has been understood. In this tension between intelligibility and inexhaustibility lies the sense of Mathematical Providence that animates my work. To apprehend an order is to enter a field of relations whose consequences may exceed the imagination that first approached it. The possibility of knowing and the experience of being overwhelmed arise together.

I approach mathematics as a medium of attention. It allows relationships to become available to perception and gives thought a form through which it can be encountered sensuously. The aesthetic event occurs in this passage between an intelligible structure and a felt experience. Any subject may become its point of departure. What sustains my inquiry is the capacity of a work to disclose relations that a habitual way of seeing leaves unexamined, and to give those relations a presence capable of changing how we attend to the world.

This places my practice in conversation with histories in which artistic invention transformed the conditions of visibility. The photographic experiments associated with László Moholy-Nagy's New Vision expanded the possibilities of seeing through changes in viewpoint and in the production of images.¹ Geometric abstraction and Vera Molnár's systematic investigations of form opened another field of inquiry into the relations between order, variation, and perception.² Read together, these histories allow me to formulate a central artistic question: how does the construction of a work also construct a possibility of knowledge?

Conceptual art and computer art give this question further precision. Sol LeWitt's use of instructions made the relation between a work's conception and its realization explicit; computational art developed further possibilities for organizing that relation.³ Research into growth and artificial life, including Yoichiro Kawaguchi's contribution to CG, extended the artistic investigation of how forms come into being.⁴ Within this broader history, I understand authorship as a responsibility for the conditions through which something becomes perceptible. My artistic decisions establish a relation among structure, appearance, and encounter. The work remains open to consequences that those decisions cannot fully anticipate.

Beauty matters to me because it can unsettle the scale by which experience is judged. In the aesthetic tradition of the sublime, wonder and fear meet in an encounter with what overwhelms us.⁵ I pursue the possibility that such an encounter might also change our understanding of our own position. The apparent sufficiency of the familiar gives way to a sense of immensity. What had seemed to be the measure of the world becomes recognizable as one measure within it. Awe is the felt instability of that recognition.

This instability gives aesthetic experience an affinity, in my practice, with the Buddhist release from attachment. A way of seeing can become so closely bound to a sense of self that its limits acquire the authority of reality itself. My engagement with Buddhism turns on the possibility of loosening that identification. Perception can remain committed and attentive while acknowledging the contingency of its own standpoint. Even a newly acquired perspective must remain available for revision. The freedom I seek requires this continuing capacity to relinquish the certainty with which a position is held.

The ethical consequence of this approach lies in the relation between recognition and possession. To believe that one's categories exhaust another person is to close the possibility of encountering what exceeds them. An awareness of the limits of perception can make room for other lives, other histories, and other forms of understanding. I understand the value of learning through this openness: knowledge enlarges our awareness of what remains beyond us and deepens our responsibility toward it.

Art, science, and Buddhism meet in my work through their capacity to reorganize the relation between a subject and a world. Scientific inquiry makes assumptions answerable to investigation; artistic experience can alter the terms of perception; Buddhist practice can loosen the attachment through which a particular view becomes binding. I bring these capacities into a relation of interchangeability. Within the encounter with a work, a movement of thought may acquire the force of an aesthetic experience, and an aesthetic experience may become an occasion for release from an established view. Each can assume, in that encounter, the work of opening a perspective that the others also undertake.

Material presence belongs to this inquiry. Scale, duration, and the position of a body participate in what a work allows to be perceived. As a work takes different forms, the relations through which it is experienced are also transformed. I understand this movement as a continuation of the work's thought. The encounter gives that thought an embodied situation, making the viewer's own presence part of the question of how a world becomes visible.

I want the first encounter to carry the force of astonishment. Understanding can unfold from that experience, at a pace made possible by curiosity. The work offers a reason to remain with what has not yet been understood. Its invitation is to discover how much more can be perceived, learned, and imagined once an established frame of reference begins to loosen.

My practice holds together the rigor of intelligible relations and the freedom to reconsider the position from which they are apprehended. Through their encounter, I seek to make the limits of a perspective felt as the beginning of further possibility. A work reaches beyond its own form when it changes what a person is prepared to see.