Dedicated to Kris, who helped me though many a hard time in the past year, and loyal friend and a wonderful artist!
Before I delve too deep into thought, I should say that one of the images of this shoot is being held back as it will appear next week in a limited print run that will be for sale on my website and Prizme’s. This series is a collaboration with Prizme and our aim is to highlight issues surrounding humans as test subjects. It will be a photograph of mine surrounded by one of Prizme’s drawings as a frame printed with ink.
As for these photos, Oh gosh, Where to begin.
A friend of mine said something about something that meant a big change in my perspective and it, in turn lead to this set of images and his ex girlfriend losing the ability to walk.
So as well as Kris, these are for her also, although she probably doesn’t know it, and isn’t likely to either, of course the two are not directly linked, or so conspiracy would have it.
The history of which is just as fractured as her legs.
A history beginning with experiments conducted in a ‘so called’ room named ‘The leaf room’ invented by a man named Ames in 1955, his aim was to further understand stereoscopic perception (Something I too have been concerned with since this art form was bought to my attention from Kris.)
This room, I realise, was not only an exercise in the stereoscopic but also in the action’s effects upon the mind. I am trying to be concise something I pale at, so please, bear with me.
So, within this room (heavily laden with red oak leaves; to cause confusion) the participant would be asked to sit, wear a set of goggles named ‘Aniseikonic Lenses’ (basically something that would severally confuse your eyes), take heavy doses of LSD and work a pulley system until they believed the plank of wood they were levering was at a straight horizontal. Needless to say the results were never good.
In the time I have been researching various ideas, I have noted this ‘memory’, in the leaf room, as one that has been cited many times.
I agree that it is a hefty image and one easily ‘suggested’, especially to those easily suggestible (see here for example ((http://www.thatvideosite.com/video/derren_brown_shopping_mall_control)) but to see it in flashes throughout your life and not understand the memory must be quite an imposing thought. According to a DR Colin Ross in one of his lectures he claims hundreds of people checking into mental health institutions all over the world have cited this experience and yet aside from his one video I can find online I find no visual imagery of it anywhere at all.
Naturally as a visual being this began to plague me. My brain now presents me this image as though it where an experience of my own. A false memory, something from a fiction much like the ones I might read about or hear muttered in my ear on a night bus in New Cross (in London).
So here, for the sake of visual representation and for the poor souls plagued with it in reality, here is my new nightmare and a shared one too.
Here in darker hours than I feel now, wearing those lenses and seeing that Aberrant Necropolis, I come a long way into explaining what I can see.
Don’t fall down that stair case too.
